Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
About 20 minutes in to the conversation, one student asked him: "Why are so many of Apple's products white?" I think all of us expected some long explication of the clean and unassuming quality of white as a color.
Instead, Johnny closed his eyes, took a breath, and said (as best as I can recall), "Imagine something that doesn't exist. Imagine something completely new. A new shape. A new device..." After a beat he continued, "Can you imagine something like that?" At this point he was obviously doing the very thing he was suggesting we all try. Then he opened his eyes and plainly said, "Well...when I do they're always white!" Then he laughed like a little kid and said, "I guess that sounds pretty ridiculous, huh?" and moved on to the next question...
Apple makes two products in the same category and they're both white, and they're white not because marketing, esperiences, focus groups or demographics but becuase Johny thinks it feels right for new things to be that way. Every 3-5 years or so they produce them in 5 different vivid primary colours, just for fun.
Conversely Apple absolutely obsesses at the executive level over and exhaustively iterates on seemingly trivial details like optimising the exact minimum necessary number of buttons in a UI screen, the precision and fluidity of a scrolling action and bounce animation, even just exactly the correct shade of yellow in an icon (real example). Things most companies would assign to a random intern and then forget about.
This is a myth. The iOS maps debacle is just one example.
And it might be just one example, but for some reason when speaking of "Apple f..k ups" it's often the only one that comes up in discussions (at least in recent times)... I would say that it's a pretty impressive record.
For your particular example, look at the outcome: Apple Maps is now arguably on par with the Google data set and has several unique refinements. It's a much more successful product than when it was released.
[1] Icon Ambulance: https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/gcSStkKxXTw
At the same time, while reducing certain parts to a paradoxical simplicity, Apple knows where the effort should be directed: at building systems. Getting to the root of problems and optimizing them away. Asking the question, what is the core from which all of this grows? What is its form? And working diligently on that, trusting that the output will be pure because of it. That's how quality is done; it's why the Japanese so readily accepted the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, and it's fundamentally how Jobs turned Apple around.
Lots of lessons here, the most important of which are not technological in the slightest.
Recommended reading:
Zen in the Art of Archery: http://rum1.aarch.dk/uploads/media/Eugen_Herrigel-Zen_in_the...
The Zen of Steve Jobs: http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2012/the-zen-of-steve-j...
A Short intro to the teachings of W. Edwards Deming: https://shrikale.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/a-short-introducti...
Never thought of it that way. I like this
I'd submit that in the West, and in particular Britain, white has a long history of being a color of privilege. It's hard to make things white, and even harder to keep them white. Even a little bit of soiling, grease, or hard use is noticeable on white fabric, white paint, or white paper. This is why white tie is more formal than black tie, for instance.
Even today, when it seems we should be able to paint, bleach, or mold consumer items as white as we want, it can be more difficult than we think to get a true bright white. Look at how late the white iPhone 4 was, for instance, because of difficulties with the white faceplate.
But it's most likely a false image.Most likely Apple 's products design is due to the talent of many designers within it's halls,the unique culture within, and their intense attention to detail.
Someone has to lead otherwise you'll get design by committee no matter how talented.
The problem is, does it work? I got a few impressions from the article, beyond "Jony Ive is a really nice guy" which everyone seems to agree on.
One: all his experience is in hardware. All of it. He wasn't given any responsibility over software design when Jobs was in charge at all. This leads to the question of why, given their closeness .... I suspect it's because Jobs knew that Ive is really an industrial hardware designer and the skills needed to do great software design are different.
Two: he comes across as kind of burned out. He's spent years designing a relatively small number of products, most of which are (as the article points out) basically just variants on the same "slab of glass with a button" idea. Can he really feel like he's fully exercising his design muscles in such an environment? The article says several times he's sort of wanted to leave and go off and do other things like luxury products several times, but feels he can't go now because so many Apple employees depend on him.
Another thing is that the Apple (hardware) design team seems to be a lot smaller than I expected. They have three recruiters and hire one designer per year? Seriously? I've seen picky hiring before at Google but one hire per year given three full time recruiters is crazy. This is meant to impress upon us how incredibly elite and discerning Ive is. I read something else in it: they are all friends who trust each other, and quite simply don't like hiring. They are expected to do it by the company but would much prefer not to.
It also leads me to think they are having problems. The iPod and iPhone were huge successes, partly because none of the competitors in those spaces cared much about industrial design. In some areas (in-car systems?) that's still the case. But increasingly Apple has been competing with Google and the big Asian firms for consumer electronics, and there they have been losing their edge.
They started talking about the Apple watch in 2011. In 2015 it's still not on the market. Meanwhile the Android team and their hardware partners have launched several watches, of which the round Moto 360 has been attracting the most attention (disclosure: I got one for Christmas, it's neat). But despite a 50+ page article, the journalist lets Jony Ive dismiss round watches in the span of a single sentence. Apparently they just "don't make sense" because smart watches are using "for lists". Except that they do make sense and the one I have works pretty well.
I got the strong impression from reading this that the design team at Apple is small, insular, ignores their competition completely, doesn't want to scale up and doesn't feel any real sense of urgency. For example, they work long hours but many of those hours were spent making dozens of slightly different sized models so they could rediscover the insight that people wanted larger smartphone screens. Something that all the other smartphone makers had already realised ages ago, designed and shipped. Surely they could have reduced their time to market by simply spending some time with their competitors products instead?
Their competitors have released more products that cater to a wider range of people, and dominate the market elsewhere. In most European markets for example iPhone sits at around 10% market share. It spikes when they release a new version of the iPhone once a year then quickly settles back down again.
So it depends how you define success. Apple could be successful for a long time in the same way Microsoft were successful for the last 15 years - by being highly profitable and cranking out new versions of their flagship products, whilst releasing very few new notable hits.
those burned out designers have been able to sell more smartphones than ever before, at a HIGHER APR.
reality will not bend just because of your feelings.
Yes, Apple sells tons of smartphones to people who could get one just as good for much less money. Neat trick, if you can pull it off. Ecosystem lockin helps, I suspect.
Ive may have had the opportunity to work on a far greater range of products within Apple, and I'm left with the impression that he'd relish the opportunity to work on a car, for example, should that particular rumour bear truth.
Based on those historical examples, here's a likely outcome: Apple takes its time getting all the branding ducks in a row, so that a bunch of people with disposable income do buy the product; after which, the fandom of that product will rewrite history to say that nothing comparable existed before because none of the competitors cared enough about design and user experience.
Or some other euphemism for the fact that like everyone else, they bought it because of the feelings it gave them to entertain buying it. Apple is the master of the unboxing video, the implication of what buying their products means about you. Jony Ive doesn't have to do anything except be Jony Ive (why do I know his name again? Not because of design)
The documents that came out during their trial with Samsung showed that they had analyzed their competitors in excruciating detail.
> And Ive once sat next to J. J. Abrams at a boozy dinner party in New York, and made what Abrams recalled as “very specific” suggestions about the design of lightsabres. Abrams told me that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” would reflect those thoughts, but he wouldn’t say how. After the release of the film’s first trailer—which featured a fiery new lightsabre, with a cross guard, and a resemblance to a burning crucifix—I asked Ive about his contribution. “It was just a conversation,” he said, then explained that, although he’d said nothing about cross guards, he had made a case for unevenness: “I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty.” A redesigned weapon could be “more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.”
Kinda cool, though no doubt this will be result in some more pointless controversy. I thought this was also revealing:
> He [Abrams] later told me that Ive had shared some of the company’s news in advance, and that they had discussed “the fact that we were both working on things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was preposterous.”
Ive is uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making-his taste-and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders.
The Apple Watch-the first Apple device with a design history older than its founder, or its designer-was conceived "Close to Steve's death," Ive said.
John Gruber, an influential Apple blogger, has written that the prices may be "Shockingly high ... from the perspective of the tech industry," but perhaps "Disruptively low from the perspective of the traditional watch and jewelry world." Sebastian Vivas, the director of a watch museum maintained by Audemars Piguet, the Swiss manufacturer, recently described his industry as unperturbed by Apple's plans: "We're not afraid; we're just a little bit smiling." It would be a greater threat, he told me, if men widely accepted that they could wear gemstones without a time-keeping pretext.
Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign-as yet unannounced-of the Apple Stores.
Long form narrative requires long form attention and a decent chunk of time. This piece is competing against 29 others on the front page of HN (and another 10-15 which hit the front page and subsequently fell off since I last logged on), and I prefer a concise summary to see if there's information I want or need from this article.
As someone who finds all the airport-mall-style silk, perfume and diamond brands completely baffling, Apple's move in that direction - from design to designer - is a little concerning.
That presumably means the Watch is going to be the last Apple product Steve had any significant influence on. Where they go from here will be interesting to watch (no pun intended).
> Ive acknowledged that he and Marc Newson, who recently joined Apple as a London-based employee, could “incite ourselves to a sort of fever pitch” of design distress; they’ll complain about things “developed to a schedule, to a cost,” or “developed to be different, not better.” He and Newson are car guys, and they feel disappointed with most modern cars; each summer, they attend the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where vintage sports cars are exhibited and raced in the South of England. “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive said. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, “For example.” As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: “It is baffling, isn’t it? It’s just nothing, isn’t it? It’s just insipid.” He declined to name the model, muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t want to offend.” (Toyota Echo.)
Well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gy53vVRNs , the binary watch is a silvery-metal colour and not as big as the Nixie watch, so it's probably the Nixie watch http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/ . (But of course you knew that. ;) )
Sociopathy in a nutshell.
I've seen this line of thought in a few places in popular culture. It's toxic. Caring about other people's feelings can be authentic.
Am I the only one that thought that sounds a lot like you just gave away material, non-public info to someone who could have easily acted on it? Probably nothing beyond what was in the rumor bin, but still.
Also no technical innovation: iMac, iPod, etc.
That's not how Apple became the most profitable company in the world. The first thing Jobs did when he returned to Apple was cut out all of the excess product lines.
And even then, Apple typically left the previous iPhone model around at a discount so price-sensitive consumers could buy a discounted 4S instead of a cutting-edge 5, for example.
Interestingly, the iPhone 5c may not be designed to sell like hotcakes itself, but to frame the higher models as better deals. That's what I meant by market segmentation. I also suspect it was harder to keep their margins on the newer CNC'd metal iPhones as they dropped to the entry-level tier. The iPhone, even more so with the 6/6+, currently seems to be the only line that bucks the trend.
This is certainly true for the Apple keyboard. It is totally an-organic. Give me a cheap standard Logitec keyboard over an Apple keyboard anytime.
When it comes to desktop keyboards, they're better than the typical cheapo rubber-domes but it's still not terribly ergonomic.
But their full size corded keyboard is brilliant. Haven't used anything that feels half as good. Haven't seen anything that looks half as good.
Oh, and their trackpads are brilliant too.
For the looks - it is a matter of personal taste, but I agree Apple keyboards are elegant.
But given the form factor limitation, the Apple ones are pretty good (better than the previous notebook keyboards, I don't know the name of the keyboard types)
Has anyone made a mechanical keyboard with short travel distance?
To celebrate, I fired up Borderlands to see how well it worked in a game. Started out great. Accurate and responsive, effortless to use.
Then I tried zooming in with a telescopic sight (right-click and hold), then shooting with a left-click at the same time. You can't. Because the top surface is a roicker, you can either right-click or left-click but not both at the same time. Fail!
But they were sooo close this time....
You can actually recover from this with a full power down and restart, OS X tries to detect this condition and turn Bluetooth back on. But sometimes it doesn't work and requires a PRAM reset.
* Friction of movement was higher and "stickier" regardless of surface. * Grip was less comfortable because I had to push my fingers against the top edge. * Cursor motion was noticeably lagged and jerky. Admittedly this is going from a corded gaming mouse to a bluetooth mouse, but I don't care. I didn't want cordless anyway.
My only problem with the DeathAdder is that the Mac drivers are horrifically bad and the third party alternatives (SteerMouse etc) aren't much better. I've found that I can configure some settings on a Windows box which configure firmware in the mouse itself (mostly DPI modes and disabling the lights). Get these settings right and it works pretty well plugged into a Mac with no third party mouse software.
Though I am building an adaptor for my IBM Type F as my first Ardunio project and am activly looking at getting a proper mech keyboard at work - I havde just replaced the wirless moouse with an old ps2 Microsft one.
Personally, I always found "ergonomic" keyboarsd to be unusable and uncomfortable, especially the Microsoft split style. But lots of people swear by those.
He was surprised and their seemingly lack of durability as most of Apple's products are fairly robust. After switching back to an an old Dell keyboard, he hasn't gone through any more keyboards, and that was 3 years ago.
The problem is that there is no such thing as "better" when it comes to stuff like keyboards.
I used to prefer mechanical keyboards -- I grew up with electric typewriters and the Mac extended keyboard -- but I found that the aluminum Apple keyboard was actually fine for me. I recently switched to Windows, so the keyboard layout of the Apple keyboard didn't work for me.
I tried out a bunch of mechanical keyboards with Cherry switches, and just found that I now hated the mechanical feel (and yes, I tried all the Cherry colors), which totally surprised me, given what I thought my preferences were. I ended up getting a dome keyboard (a Steelseries Apex), because I preferred the feel.
Instead of taking advice from "keyboard experts", people should just try a bunch of keyboards and buy the one that feels "right" for them, whether it's an Apple keyboard, a cheap standard Logitech keyboard, or something else.
It's not just about subjective feel, though.
I typed on mechanical-switch keyboards for 15 years straight, and in July last year switched over to a laptop dome-membrane keyboard.
This week I had to plug a mechanical board back into the laptop because my fingers began to ache after just six months.
Mechanical keyboards cushion the impact on the fingers, other types transmit it into the joints.
> Mechanical keyboards cushion the impact on the fingers, other types transmit it into the joints.
That sounds to me like you're typing too hard. Short-travel keys definitely take a lighter touch than mechanical keyboards, and 15 years of finger-pounding on cushioned keys is probably a hard habit to break.
People sing the praises of mechanical keyboards, and I guess it's satisfying for them, but I don't want to have to punch the keys like I'm using an old typewriter. I just want my fingertips to dance across them. I think the preference for mechanical keyboards is half nostalgia and half machismo.
The cover: http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray-cover.p...
The article - "101 Ways to Save Apple" : http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html
The list is pretty interesting we can look back and see which ones were spot on and the others were way, way off.
I love that it's much longer than most articles shared on HN, and that reading the whole thing took me a long time, but was totally rewarding. A whole day of coffee breaks, in fact.
And now I'm too late to join in the discussion!
More high quality articles like this, please internets!
This mechanism is what you then have to internalize and have out with yourself (and perhaps the very few people you have to work insanely hard on to keep out of acolyte mode) because it is now the only thing in the world that even can keep you on your toes.
This sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel.
Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe?
A lot of people, I think. I'd guess less than 1% of those who would read it for free.
Part of my job is to stay informed about lots of things that I don't have direct experience with, there is simply too much out there for any individual to experience directly.
So I use HN as a time-saving device, the collective wisdom and time invested vastly exceeds my own and it's not rare at all to find that HN comment threads are more informative and correct than the articles themselves. FWIW if a subject does interest me I'll read the article too (obviously...), and plenty of times the HN comment threads make me change my mind about what I should be interested in.
The effect of this is that I can state with some certainty why apple does not interest me without investing a chunk of cash and a large amount of time first.
Of course that wasn't what you were after, you'd like me to admit that I'm secretly interested in apple after all. But there isn't a single apple product that I'd like to own or use (I have an ancient Imac here that's been off for more than a year now), I don't want to buy an 'experience', I only believe in being able to run whatever software I want on the hardware that I own. As soon as I need to jailbreak a device in order to be able to really use it you can safely count me out and OS/X is not such a large step up from Ubuntu that it makes me want to run a different OS on my desktop than on my servers.
So as far as I'm concerned Apple is not (currently) interesting to me.
The charitable interpretation of his question would be "who, of the people who find this topic interesting, would not be willing to pay $3 for it?".
The question you are presumably structurally answering is "why wouldn't absolutely everybody in the whole world pay $3 for this?". In answering that, you were either being insulting to GGGP, or looking for a pretext to wedge in an "I don't care about this" comment. I suspect the latter.
and
> I suspect the latter.
Interesting to see how selective you are when using that charitable interpretation technique.
I'm not sure I'd pay anything to read this type of content in this format. As a collection of stories in a PDF, maybe, but not on a screen.
I say this as a lukewarm Apple fan that believes Apple is losing its way in the post-Jobs era.
There were plenty of Apple weird/"failed" products during Jobs time: iPod HiFi, Newton, 20th Anniversary Mac, exceptionally buggy versions of OSX until Snow Leopard etc. etc.
EDIT: Apparently the Newton and the TAM weren't during Job's time! My mistake! Sorry! Time to go read Wikipedia.
I have no qualms with the current product lineup, but I think that Apple, under Cook, has traded vision for certainty. I think that having more of Ive outside of cheeky launch videos would serve them well.
Would you not see the Apple Watch as a risk? Or a risk in the wrong sort of way?
Watch is like to trying to sell a gold-plated Mac Pro. Suddenly the gold becomes more important than the computing.
All previous Jobs products majored in being useful. If you put an iPod inside a cardboard case with clunky switches instead of a click wheel, you'd still have a very practical music player. The clever design enhances usefulness that's already there.
Same with the iPhone. It was the first phone to pull together the phone, map, browser, email, calendar, and other features with maximum user benefit. You could make a case for competing products doing one or two items on the list better, but not for any competitor making everything work together so well as a package.
Usefulness again.
The point of Watch Edition seems to be conspicuous display of expense, with useful computing thrown in as a free extra.
That's a completely different product direction.
If Watch has limited basic usability - if the battery life is too short, if it doesn't do something insanely wonderful and useful out of the box - I think success is not guaranteed.
The watch, in my eyes, is a huge disappointment. With as much time as they took to prep for the launch, I expected they would have done more thinking about how to innovate in a landscape that has failed to become anything more than mediocre.
I think it is the epitome of Apple's failure to innovate post-Jobs, and is the first of more 'meh' to come.
Only kidding. I found the Watch video to be dull and Ives' voiceover to be disappointing and desperately attempting to find highlights in a featureless item. A bit like trying to describe how wonderful a piece of blank A4 piece of paper was. I will wait to see how it fares! No doubt we'll all be shocked if it sells by the billion.
Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 hasn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."
And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.
Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr. That the 5c hasn't done well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.
Of late Apple has done phenomenally well, financially. But this isn't because of Jony Ive's design. It is because of the ecosystem created by Steve Jobs. The larger phone size met an important demand, and is not an innovation, and this is not repeatable innovation.
References: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button-shapes http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann-ios-7/ http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event
Of course iOS 6 was more obvious to Verge writers, they'd been using it for 3/4 years.
Meant in good humour.
It's a bit of a turnoff TBH. I'd read the distilled bullet points for takeaways if there were any. But in this long of form? I have trouble committing!
Speaking of, does their iOS app still crash five minutes into reading an article? I had to give up on reading the magazine altogether, when their digital app couldn't even be bothered to remember my reading position in their longform articles after each crash.
I mean, this is how journalism was fifty years ago. Go read an old issue of Harper's or The Atlantic from the fifties or sixties. They're better, because in addition to being informative they're a joy to read. They're written by people who understand and respect English and want you to enjoy the prose of their work as well as the content.
https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his-white-...
The new calendar app is like looking at a big white piece of paper that a spider has crawled across. I can't see anything on it.
The carpet thing will be interesting - impossible to keep clean.