Stefan Mileschin

Design over substance has always been Apple’s thing

The inventor of the rounded rectangle, Jony Ive’s shock departure from Apple last week was due to Tim Cook no longer believing that pretty tech was the way forward.

The Wall Street Journal’s Tripp Mickle has found out that all is not well in the Steve Jobs memorial spaceship were people walk into invisible walls, as Cook wants to take the company from making pointless, pretty expensive hardware to making useless expensive services which don’t need to look as nice.

The WSJ thinks that this has created a winter of discontent inside Apple, that’s responsible for “eroding the product magic” created by the True and Holy Steve Jobs.

Ive was “dispirited” by Tim Cook who “showed little interest in the product development process”, according to sources speaking to the WSJ. This helps explain why Cook, who comes from operations, sometimes appears to be seeing products for the first time in the hands-on area after Apple events.

He was also miffed that Apple’s board was populated by directors with backgrounds unrelated to the company’s core business.

Ive disagreed with “some Apple leaders” on how to position the Apple Watch. Ive wanted the Apple Watch to be sold as a fashion accessory, not as an extension of the iPhone. The product that went on sale was a compromise. Apple only sold a quarter of what the company forecasted in the first year, according to the WSJ, with “thousands” of the $17,000 gold Apple Watch Edition left unsold.

The Apple design team, led by Jony Ive, found themselves increasingly frustrated by his absence after the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015. Ive’s absence was “straining" the cohesion central to product development using crucial several design team members to leave Apple over the last few years.

Amusingly the article mentions how engineers found that the doomed AirPower charging pad “behaved more like a hot plate, heating loose change and failing to recharge devices evenly”. Yeah, Cook is right, the hardware is tricky, better to get out of it altogether.

https://fudzilla.com/news/48973-ive-...sted-in-design