Apple Design Guru Jony Ive Named Chief Design Officer

An anonymous reader writes: Jony Ive, Apple's senior VP of design has been promoted to the role of Chief Design Officer. Ive became Apple's chief of industrial design in 1997. Under Ive's direction, Apple's put out an impressive list of products including the iMac, iPod, and iPad. "In this new role, he will focus entirely on current design projects, new ideas and future initiatives," said chief executive Tim Cook in a memo. "Jony is one of the most talented and accomplished designers of his generation, with an astonishing 5,000 design and utility patents to his name."

Comments

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[garyisabusyguy]

C-level, it's all the rage

Design patents. Oh my.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here at Slashdot we have great respect for you Jony. Go design patents, go!

Re:Design patents. Oh my.

[Anonymous Coward]

Phew! I'm glad I'm not the only one to have respect for him. Slashdot can be very intimidating so much so that I have been forced to post as AC because I'm afraid of being teased. I mean why can't we just appreciate Apple design without being called Apple fanbois?
Anyway, I reckon that Apple needs some fins and chrome.

Re:Design patents. Oh my.

[Plumpaquatsch]

Here at Slashdot we have great respect for you Samsung. Go design patents, go!

Fixed the company with the most design patents for you.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[rodrigoandrade]

A pay raise. You don't want Johnathan Ive working for a competitor.

The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't stand the guy, he acts almost in love with the stuff he designs? Apple to me has gone from building eloquent well designed hardware. To fluffy impractical hardware for the wealthy geek 1%. Does anyone remember how a Power Mac used to be a power house of computing? Now it resembles something like a vase for flowers. With no potential to ever upgrade graphics or CPU. Or how about the new Macbook with one USB C port?? How functional is that? Apple has become the technology boutique for the wealthy and Jony Ive has help turn Apple from a technology future paver to a fluff tech maker. Only concerned about profits and looks.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Dog-Cow]

Perhaps Jony can write coherent English sentences. That alone would put him well above some anonymous shit-pile posting to slashdot.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, maybe it's your grasp of the English language which needs to be improved. Though the sentences were a bit rambling, I found no issue trying to understand what the poster was trying to convey.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[leenks]

Does anyone remember how a Power Mac used to be a power house of computing? Now it resembles something like a vase for flowers.

The PowerMac line ended in 2006, almost a decade ago. The fact you could use one as a flower vase proves the superior design - there aren't many computers that can be reused in such a way once they become obsolete!

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone remember how a Power Mac used to be a power house of computing? Now it resembles something like a vase for flowers.

The PowerMac line ended in 2006, almost a decade ago. The fact you could use one as a flower vase proves the superior design - there aren't many computers that can be reused in such a way once they become obsolete!

"Resembles" is the key word here. If you think it could be used for flowers them it's obvious you know very little about maintaining a vase let alone a flower.

I guess the emphasis was on how fruity and gay the design is... to the point of being a good match for flowers.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, the butthurt grumblings of a Mac fanboi! Love it!

Re:The guy is full of himself

[retchdog]

Does anyone remember how a Power Mac used to be a power house of computing?

uh. no?

hasn't Apple been a 1%-ish company for decades? it's just that raw compute power is kind of meaningless now (if i need cycles, i'll ssh into something), so the innovations are almost exclusively on hardware aesthetics and user interface. what's wrong with that?

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Joe_Dragon]

also going from 4 HDD bays + 2 OOD's slots with 2 open sata ports that just needed an esata bracket to 1 SSD slot and no esata even when the chip set has sata built in.

Feeding a 4 ram channel cpu with 3 sticks in the base system, under powered PSU / cooling that can't do fully maxed cpu + GPU's.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

If you remove Windows OS, they become a 90% market share company. What does that tell you about the market?

Re:The guy is full of himself

[UnknowingFool]

I'm going to take it that you don't actually use a workstation much less a recent computer.

Let's start with OOD which I assume you mean optical drive. When was the last time you used one? Most people haven't used one in years. So removing it is like when computer manufacturers removed the floppy drive. Apple was one the first; others took years to do so even when it was apparent no one used them anymore.

Now let's talk about the HDDs. Yes they removed them. If you are using a workstation, you need speed. With most professionals using networked drives for collaboration, the need to have personal drives only comes from a small percentage of pros. Since the Mac Pro is for pros and not consumers, this was an understandable choice.

Now let's talk about eSATA. It isn't a standard that Apple has ever supported. Their standards has always been FireWire or Thunderbolt.

As for "underpowerd PSU", you do understand that a workstation is not a gaming machine, right?

Re:The guy is full of himself

[azav]

I agree. His fascination on cramming everything into the smallest space has left us with Macs that are not worth upgrading. It blows.

His touches on the UI are like cancer since he applies principles from designing hardware shapes (Industrial Design) to UI design and THEY DO NOT FUCKING APPLY THERE. Minimalist UI is bullshit. Context matters. You wan to eyebell the UI and understand what each part can do without having to interact with it.

If text looks just like a button, then you can't tell the difference between an item you can interact with and a static design element that you can't click or tap on. This confuses the user. This creates crappy and confusing UI.

I remember looking in Xcode for the longest time for an option in the far right panel. It just wasn't there. Well, his dumbass design principles replaced the arrow that shows the items can expand next to the text with NOTHING. I had no idea that the item was expandable because the visual cue that it was expandable was removed. I wasted 1/2 a hour on this and I'm not the only one who has.

I could go on, but there are so many cases of this now in the UI. It sucks.

And all the motion in the UI? We are wired to divert our attention to things that move or dart. It happens before we think. Every time an item darts or jumps or bumps, it's a distraction that pulls out attention to that item and away from the task we wanted to accomplish. The UI becomes an ADD machine. It's terrible.

All this thanks to Jony Ive. I say no thanks. When not in the office, I use Snow Leopard (10.6.8) because it's simply so much more usable a UI.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[retchdog]

not much i didn't already know. care to elaborate a bit?

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

those two statements are quite contradictory:

If you are using a workstation, you need speed.

vs

As for "underpowerd PSU", you do understand that a workstation is not a gaming machine, right?

Re:The guy is full of himself

[BasilBrush]

I agree that context matters, and they have gone too far in some things. For example the hiding of scroll bars isn't useful. But generally the more to remove unnecessary chrome is good. Whilst the move to blurry translucency is pointless and bad.

XCode: Did you miss the word SHOW? Like in source browsers.

On the animation front, I note that in Snow Leopard, the menu bar time machine icon animates when active, but in Yosemite it has an unanimated state to show it's active. I'm not sure what these superfluous animations you object to are.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Voyager529]

I'm going to take it that you don't actually use a workstation much less a recent computer.

I'm not the author of the GP post, but I *do* use a workstation.

Let's start with OOD which I assume you mean optical drive. When was the last time you used one?

Yesterday actually, when I burnt a DVD for a friend. See kids, I know that 'streaming' is all the rage and that all the cool kids are doing it, but there's still no substitute for handing someone a physical product. Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link. Moreover, if you're using a copyrighted song in the video, and you've got the proper licensing to do it, an upload to Youtube will still be flagged, and you'll spend plenty of time sorting that out and providing paperwork. Even if we put that aside, Youtube quality varies based on any number of things, but they *do* compress video in order to stream it. Their HD streaming looks pretty good now, but it's still got much heavier compression than a Blu-Ray disc. Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.

So removing it is like when computer manufacturers removed the floppy drive. Apple was one the first; others took years to do so even when it was apparent no one used them anymore.

...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.

Now let's talk about the HDDs. Yes they removed them. If you are using a workstation, you need speed.

You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.

With most professionals using networked drives for collaboration

That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.

the need to have personal drives only comes from a small percentage of pros.

That number is so small that there's an insignificant market for storage devices that can connect to them, right? And it makes more sense for Apple to make them an online-only product rather than waste shelf space on them in the store, right? This logic is better illustrated with your optical drive notions earlier - Apple actually doesn't sell them in the store (or, in some stores, only has one or two slimline ones on the shelf, frequently with a thin layer of dust).

Since the Mac Pro is for pros and not consumers, this was an understandable choice.

Yes...Pros let everything live on iSCSI volumes or in Teh Cloud (tm) and never have a reason to store things locally. (/sarcasm)

Now let's talk about eSATA. It isn't a standard that Apple has ever supported. Their standards has always been FireWire or Thunderbolt.

This is a fair point. I wish they would have better eSATA support, but I will certainly concede that eSATA has never been their thing.

As for "underpowerd PSU", you do understand that a workstation is not a gaming machine, right?

Quadro/Firepro cards aren't exactly miserly with their power usage, especially when tied with a high end Core i7. Now, what Apple did in the redesigned Mac Pro units w

Re:The guy is full of himself

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, because being able to plug in dual 16Gb fiber channel absolutely doesn't take care of your storage concerns.

Why do I want a bunch of big dumb rotating disks on my desktop where they can die and lose my data, when I can have hundreds of terabytes (redundant) in an environmentally maintained datacenter, with faster connections than SATA can even dream of?

And really, you're going to complain that the base system doesn't have a fully optimized performance configuration? It's a BASE configuration. You said so yourself.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that AC, but I can:

1. People, in general, don't want overpriced underpowered machines.
2. People, in general, don't want a design hipster telling them where they shouldn't click.
3. Regardless, this industry is huge enough that even the hipster leavings at the single digit bottom of the market can make a company the wealthiest in the world.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[MachineShedFred]

Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.

And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.

You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.

Use the local SSD as a buffer for high speed work. Copy from network to local, work, upload back. Clear space, move to next job. If you require high speed links to large disk, use thunderbolt to add dual 10GbE for iSCSI or dual 16Gb fiber channel.

That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.

False. See links above. Thunderbolt IS PCI Express. It's on a cable instead of a slot. Whoop de do.

I'll agree that the GPU situation in the current Mac Pro is rather underwhelming, and a product of a design decision rather than making available options to the "Pro" customer. However, the GPUs are mounted with BGA connectors, and it would be feasible for someone to use a logic analyzer to figure out which pins on the connector are PCI express, which are DisplayPort, and which are power allowing for someone to make a 3rd party GPU upgrade card (if they could make it work with the thermals), but the market would be so small that nobody would ever turn a profit at it.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I want a bunch of big dumb rotating disks on my desktop where they can die and lose my data, when I can have hundreds of terabytes (redundant) in an environmentally maintained datacenter, with faster connections than SATA can even dream of?

Umm you do know the bottleneck is going to be those SATA disks in that environmentally maintained datacente that you're probably *sharing* with some other umpty-thrillion users.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[UnknowingFool]

Power supply != speed. Underpowered PSU means you have lots of peripherals that drain power and the current PSU is inadequate. The Mac Pro does not have lots of expansion so there is less need for power. It does have adequate power for the CPU and GPU which are the most important things. Speed comes from the GPU, CPU, bus choice, etc. PCIe SSDs are selected for this purpose instead of SATA HDDs.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Snow Leopard (10.6.8) because it's simply so much more usable a UI.

Well, Ive was one of the most outstanding executive officers this company's ever produced. He was brave, outstanding in every way. And he was a good man, too, humanitarian man, a man of wit and humor. He joined the Software Engineering Group. After that, his... uh... ideas... methods... became... unsound... unsound.

Now he's crossed into California with this anti-skeuomorphic army of fanatics that... worship... the man... like a god, and follow every order, however ridiculous...

...very obviously, he has gone insane.

interactive multimedia

Your mission is to proceed down the San Francisco Bay in a Blue Navy petrol boat, pick up Sir Ive's path at Cupertino, follow it, learn what you can along the way. When you find the officer, infiltrate his team by (ahem-hem) whatever means available, and terminate the executive's position.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[UnknowingFool]

Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.

And a bride can't use a USB drive (which hold much more than a DVD and can be copies far easier)? If the requirement is that they must have a DVD, a Pro can get a USB/Firewire/TB one.

Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.

I never said that there was absolutely ZERO need to use discs. I said most people don't use them these days including pros. So why include it? I saw MBs with printer ports more than a decade after you could buy a printer than needed that port. Also lots of them have PS/2 connectors still.

For Pros that do need a burner tend to use more professional ones than you can get in a computer. Dedicated duplicators are more common with pros than a computer burner.

...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.

I don't know when you were around computers but Apple removed the floppy with the first iMac. And it had a CD-ROM as most other computers. It was years before CD-RWs much less blank discs were affordable. USB sticks were then becoming the standard for replacing floppies. Maybe on PC they lagged behind for years as it took PC manufacturers a while to embrace USB.

You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.

And what stops you from using an expandable RAID network drive from a Mac Pro? Nothing. The problem with using the computer as the storage space is that you will constantly run out of physical space quickly.. And it does not lend itself for collaboration well.

That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.

That's why you don't run the files from the network. You bring them to your machine and use the PCIe SSDs as your workspace which is many times faster. Then you check them back into the network. Just like code. As for PCIe slot, Thunderbolt encompasses PCIe and USB and video.

That number is so small that there's an insignificant market for storage devices that can connect to them, right?

I assume by this statement you missed the point completely. I never said that no Pro ever needs storage. I said that for Pros (like a Pixar animator), they don't archive their work files on their personal workstations. They check out a file, bring onto their machines, then check it back in when they are done.

And it makes more sense for Apple to make them an online-only product rather than waste shelf space on them in the store, right?

I also never said that online was the only option. That is your lack of understanding. I said "network" meaning corporate or local network. Many companies invest in things like RAID servers. And individuals can buy smaller versions of these.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[future assassin]

I'm going to take it that you don't actually use a workstation much less a recent computer.

This was typed on one of those computers.

Let's start with OOD which I assume you mean optical drive. When was the last time you used one? Most people haven't used one in years. So removing it is like when computer manufacturers removed the floppy drive. Apple was one the first; others took years to do so even when it was apparent no one used them anymore.

Majority of people I know still use CD'r for their in car music. Sure everyone has a phone but most don't won't more wires all over the place charging the phone while the music is playing through their phone. There are no more good mp3' players out there and not everyone buys a new car every year just to keep up with the latest media devices.

Only reason people might not use a technology is because the manufacturer has removed it trying to force the next new upgrade.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[UnknowingFool]

Majority of people I know still use CD'r for their in car music. Sure everyone has a phone but most don't won't more wires all over the place charging the phone while the music is playing through their phone.

If wires are the problem, that's why Bluetooth was invented. Most people I know ditched the CD long ago. Also if people really, really need a CD, they can get an external burner. For pros that will be using a Mac Pro, I don't seem them needing an internal burner. For me as a consumer, my last 3 computers didn't have an internal one and I haven't really missed it.

There are no more good mp3' players out there and not everyone buys a new car every year just to keep up with the latest media devices.

My car is over 5 years old. You can connect to a MP3 device 3 different ways. Bluetooth, stereo jack, or direct USB. And it was a factory stereo. Newer cars have more integration than that as I observed renting one recently.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[adolf]

And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.

A DVD is universal, and not going anywhere. It has well-established standards for dealing with audio, video, and just works.

If I hand someone a cheap USB2 key, I'm out a few dollars and the result -might- be that they get to view the thing I just handed them.

If I hand someone a DVD-R, I'm out a few pennies and the result -will- be that they get to view the thing I just handed them.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

I get what you mean, but seriously, for security concerns, at minimum upgrade to 10.8.

Here are some tips to make it work more like 10.6:

Get Save As back on your menu.
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/29...

Disable Auto Save (versions):
System Preferences, General, "Ask to keep changes when closing documents"

Stop killing my inactive apps: Disable auto termination.
defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes

Re:The guy is full of himself

[heteromonomer]

This. Oh my god this. I'm a Windows/Linux gut for the last fifteen years. And after all the hype I finally bought a Mac to try it out as well as learn swift development. I struggle with everything. I am struggling to follow the Stanford YouTube lessons on iOS development. The coding is the easy part. The UI operations are such a learning curve for me. Every context is non intuitive. I mean I had no trouble switching between so many UIs in my life on Linux. The only great part about the osx is the menu thing on top. So I finally decided you simply use xcode in playground mode.

Re: The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

His Altivec unit aches!

Re: The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

...But not on their laptop (no optical drive, remember?), tablet, or smart tv (where they watch netflix or streams from other devices).

Re:The guy is full of himself

[OutOnARock]

....with extreme prejudice....

Re:The guy is full of himself

[ceoyoyo]

Interesting I like the hidden scroll bars. They free up some extra screen space and it's been years since I actually wanted to click on one. Using a trackpad or a mouse that has any sort of two axis scrolling interface makes them superfluous.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[BasilBrush]

Oh, I certainly don't want to click on them. They're just useful for context. The very thin ones are fine.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Voyager529]

Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.

And cheap USB2 keys that hold a couple hundred times as much data as a DVD don't exist. Nope, they do, and are far more convenient and resilient to damage than optical media.

You're right, they do. And let's even assume that I found somewhere on the internet that had some sort of packaging that resembled a DVD case, enabling this particular flash drive to be artfully labeled as the wedding video. What format do you suggest I provide the video in? .mp4? It's a fairly common format, generally well supported, but am I certain that the drive itself will be able to handle the throughput of a high bitrate video? Will the TV (or device connected thereto)? Or will there just be a whole lot of stuttering throughout? If she plugs it into her computer, will that play it back? Windows 8 might support .mp4 natively, but Windows 7/Vista/XP do not. Should I include a VLC installer for her? I don't know what OSX supports out of the box, but I think Quicktime plays it? Should she update Quicktime? What if she wants to bring it to her parent's house to see it - are her parents likely to have a Smart TV, or some other device with a USB input that reads .mp4? .MP4 may be the closest thing for compatibility, but no menus and awkward chapter authoring become a problem. .MKV solves those problems, but now we're playing compatibility roulette all over again. With a 64GB flash drive, I certainly could provide multiple formats, one with menus, one high-bitrate .mp4, one for the iPod, a Quicktime version, and even an MPEG-1 to be absolutely certain it'll play on something. Well, now I've spent $20 on a single flash drive for this bride, and increased my render time by a factor of five.

Or, I can, y'know, give her a DVD. I've yet to know someone who doesn't have the means by which to play back a DVD. If I'm feeling adventurous, I can ask her if she has a Blu-Ray player, and give her one of those. Still cheaper, still simpler, and still more reliable than gambling on a particular video format.

You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.

Use the local SSD as a buffer for high speed work. Copy from network to local, work, upload back. Clear space, move to next job. If you require high speed links to large disk, use thunderbolt to add dual 10GbE for iSCSI or dual 16Gb fiber channel.

And how is that a better workflow than having one's data locally available on an internal hard drive? It's sure as hell more expensive, and the copy in/copy out plan is what one would generally have to do in that case, but it shouldn't be necessary. It's easily a half-hour each way - a half hour spent working around a technological shortcoming that is only there for design reasons.

That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.

False. See links above. Thunderbolt IS PCI Express. It's on a cable instead of a slot. Whoop de do.

That's indeed a fair point. It's entirely possible to go down that road, but now we're talking a storage array that costs more than the Mac Pro itself. Even the Thunderbolt RAID bays I've seen have cost several hundred dollars, and that's without drives...but I will indeed concede that it's possible. That's a large part of my point though - the standard

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Voyager529]

Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.

And a bride can't use a USB drive (which hold much more than a DVD and can be copies far easier)? If the requirement is that they must have a DVD, a Pro can get a USB/Firewire/TB one.

I comprehensively covered this earlier in the thread, but it's not just the drive - it's that video format support isn't exactly a guarantee, and that USB flash drives are signficantly more expensive than a single DVD (and most 32GB flash drives are, at best, at cost parity with a single Blu-Ray disc). Yes, external burners are basically the answer here, but the problem here is that the newer Mac Pro units seem to have quite the laundry list of requirements of external hardware as opposed to even the previous design.

Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.

I never said that there was absolutely ZERO need to use discs. I said most people don't use them these days including pros. So why include it? I saw MBs with printer ports more than a decade after you could buy a printer than needed that port. Also lots of them have PS/2 connectors still.

For Pros that do need a burner tend to use more professional ones than you can get in a computer. Dedicated duplicators are more common with pros than a computer burner.

In context, MB = MacBook? I'm not sure, but I'd argue this point regardless. I worked at Staples in 2002, and that is when printers tended to be hybrid, having both parallel and USB ports. So, let's assume that 2002 was the last year that retail printers used parallel ports, and 2003 was the year of USB exclusivity on the printer. Your 'decade after' mark means that Macbooks should have had parallel ports in 2012, but my research indicates that no Macbook (i.e Intel-based Mac) has ever had a parallel port; even my HP dv9000 series laptop from 2006 was all USB. As for dedicated duplicators, they're great, but they still need an initial burn somewhere. While I know that there are models out there will allow one or more drives to be used directly from the PC, many pros I know did the initial burn from the computer, and then a one-to-many duplication on a standalone unit. I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it, but I am saying that there's still a good reason to have just the bay available.

...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.

I don't know when you were around computers but Apple removed the floppy with the first iMac. And it had a CD-ROM as most other computers. It was years before CD-RWs much less blank discs were affordable. USB sticks were then becoming the standard for replacing floppies. Maybe on PC they lagged behind for years as it took PC manufacturers a while to embrace USB.

I was most certainly around during that time, and like I said - many people who bought the early iMacs were unhappy with that design decision. CD-RW drives were expensive around the very-first-gen models, but PCs started shipping with them as standard fare around that time, making the price of external drives go down pretty quickly. Blank CDs were $2-$4 each, but 4MB flash drives and CompactFlash cards were $40-$60 each; it was a long time before cost-per-megabyte of USB flash drives were favorable to optical media at the 650MB mark.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[ceoyoyo]

They appear as soon as you scroll. Unless you've discovered completely hidden ones, in which case I'm glad I haven't stumbled upon those.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[BasilBrush]

That's what I mean when I say "The hiding of scrollbars". It's not an issue for now because you can turn that off. It's just not a good direction IMHO.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[UnknowingFool]

I comprehensively covered this earlier in the thread, but it's not just the drive - it's that video format support isn't exactly a guarantee,

What world do you live in that .mp4 and .mpg is not supported. Sure formats may not be supported by all computers: Divx, Windows Media, but this is

and that USB flash drives are signficantly more expensive than a single DVD (and most 32GB flash drives are, at best, at cost parity with a single Blu-Ray disc).

And a bride paying $1500 shouldn't expect a pro to spend a few bucks on a USB drives. Especially when you can buy them in bulk and have them customized? It's whatever the customer wants and like I said before if you absolutely have to have a drive, anyone can get an external one.

Yes, external burners are basically the answer here, but the problem here is that the newer Mac Pro units seem to have quite the laundry list of requirements of external hardware as opposed to even the previous design.

My point again is that laundry list that you speak of is your list. It is not what the trend that Pros are using.

In context, MB = MacBook? I'm not sure, but I'd argue this point regardless. I worked at Staples in 2002, and that is when printers tended to be hybrid, having both parallel and USB ports. So, let's assume that 2002 was the last year that retail printers used parallel ports, and 2003 was the year of USB exclusivity on the printer.

MB = motherboards. As in many MB manufacturers still had printer ports up until the last few years. When was the last time printers were sold with printer ports. I would say a decade ago. Yet they didn't remove the port. And many of them have PS/2 connectors still even though I haven't seen one of those in about a decade.

As for dedicated duplicators, they're great, but they still need an initial burn somewhere. While I know that there are models out there will allow one or more drives to be used directly from the PC, many pros I know did the initial burn from the computer, and then a one-to-many duplication on a standalone unit. I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it, but I am saying that there's still a good reason to have just the bay available.

There is no bay in the new Mac Pro. The design has 0 bays even for a HDD drive. But again if someone needs one, they can get external like they did with floppies.

Blank CDs were $2-$4 each, but 4MB flash drives and CompactFlash cards were $40-$60 each; it was a long time before cost-per-megabyte of USB flash drives were favorable to optical media at the 650MB mark.

I think you are confusing two things here: the original iMac removed the floppy and the USB drive was the replacment for them not CD-RWs. CD-RWs were expensive and the iMac eventually had them but my point was the floppy was removed in favor of the USB drive which was way cheaper than the $40-60 that you are quoting here.

That problem isn't nearly as much of a consideration when a trio of 4TB hard disks can be used as a RAID5 internally.

And how many pros do you know will build and setup a RAID 5 machine as opposed to buying a RAID enclosure that requires little configuration. We are talking creative pros that use a Mac Pro not IT pros.

Yes, archiving will need to be done in some form on a somewhat regular basis, but not on a per-project schedule. You're right that it doesn't lend itself to collaboration well, but collaboration isn't always an endgame, either.

For a Pixar animator that will use a Mac Pro, projects are the normal. For independent pros, moving files around is quite normal.

External hard drives are a bit better of a bargain in those cases, but I'll be honest that I have no idea as to how well Apple supports RAID5 on a set of USB 3.0 or Thun

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Plumpaquatsch]

Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link.

And a bride can't use a USB drive (which hold much more than a DVD and can be copies far easier)? If the requirement is that they must have a DVD, a Pro can get a USB/Firewire/TB one.

I comprehensively covered this earlier in the thread, but it's not just the drive - it's that video format support isn't exactly a guarantee,

Bwahahaha - and you suggest DVD instead, where there's not even a standard way to do HD video. You crack me up.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[Joe_Dragon]

to bad that TB 2.0 is only less then PCI-E 2.0 X4 and the dual 16Gb fiber channel cards are like PCI Express 3.0 x8

Re:The guy is full of himself

[MachineShedFred]

Well, if someone were to use a logic analyzer to determine which pins of a Thunderbolt cable were PCI Express, so that they can solder up an off-board, wall-powered GPU, that would only run at PCI x4 speeds (ironically, I'd argue that the thermal portion of the equation would be the easiest to solve)...well, someone smart enough to do that is smart enough to use Windows competently :-).

I was referring to a hardware manufacturer that wanted to make an upgrade line for Mac Pro. I'm not sure of many people that are laying and soldering their own PCBs for GPUs at home.

As far as an external Thunderbolt GPU, you can do that.

Have they gotten him out of the white room?

[strredwolf]

We definitely need to see him out and about.

Re:Have they gotten him out of the white room?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is imprisoned there.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[mccalli]

There's some speculation here regarding the difference. True it's speculation so worth what you paid for it, but it is at least reasonably informed speculation. Seems it may well be about accomodating his desire to move back to the UK, or at least spend more time there.

How to promote without really promoting

[CSHARP123]

This is the classic example of how to promote without really promoting.
Take this line from the article. It should say it all

"The promotion will leave Ive with more time to travel around Apple's vast retail empire and bring his touch to the company's stores around the globe, while leading the design of Apple's new campus which has capacity for 13,000 Apple employees."

He might have been a disaster as a manager. Now they want to replace him.

Re:How to promote without really promoting

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, LOL, "Director of Special Projects". That happened to a manager where I used to work. He asked me if I wanted to come work with him in his new department, and I said, "OH HELL NO." Two months later he was out of the company.

Re:How to promote without really promoting

[harperska]

He might have been a disaster as a manager. Now they want to replace him.

That's a good thing. He's a creative genius, but probably sucks as a manager. And it sucks that in the corporate business world, often the only way to advance in your career is to manage people who now do for you what you used to love doing yourself but can't because now you're too busy managing. It looks like Apple recognized all of that, and so to keep their most valuable employee happy and of most use to the company they created a position to promote him to that would allow him to just be the head creative director of design and let the people-managing responsibilities fall to someone else who actually wanted that role.

Re:How to promote without really promoting

[tlhIngan]

He might have been a disaster as a manager. Now they want to replace him.

I doubt it. As a VP, he's not really having a direct hand in managing his subordinates, more like general guidelines who his direct reports then interpret and control. And in his new title, I doubt he even has many direct reports at all.

If anything, it's likely in his new position he's given more creative freedom to test out and experiment without having traditional business issues get in the way. He's free to travel, seek input, explore and examine materials.

Maybe he was a terrible manager, so they moved him in a spot where he doesn't have to manage people and is more free to do as his creative wishes desire. He's a designer after all, so he does need space in order to be creative.

Re:How to promote without really promoting

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of Bill Joy in glory years of Sun Microsystems. In one engineering management meeting, Scott McNealy showed the organization chart with Joy's box off to the side with a dotted line going straight up and not connected to anyone. As McNealy was explaining the hierarchy, he said, "And over here is Bill Joy, he reports to God."

Isn't the phrase "kicked upstairs"?

[swb]

A nominal promotion in terms of title, but actually reduced responsibilities in terms of work.

Re:Isn't the phrase "kicked upstairs"?

[cdrudge]

It's the Dilbert Principal at work. Companies tend to promote their least-competent employees to management in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.

Re:Isn't the phrase "kicked upstairs"?

[swb]

I think it's more the Peter Principle -- people get promoted for success in their current position and stop getting promoted once they become ineffective.

I think the last "kick upstairs" is done for employees who are too ineffective but too loyal/valuable to have working elsewhere.

Re:Isn't the phrase "kicked upstairs"?

[Plumpaquatsch]

It's the Dilbert Principal at work. Companies tend to promote their least-competent employees to management in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.

Errm, apart from TFA mentioning he will do less management (and more designing) in order to do less damage.

Ive became ?

[brucellin0]

Anybody else feel compelled to "correct" that to I've become ?

Re:Ive became ?

[squiggleslash]

Ive become death, destroyer of Beige.

Re:Ive became ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Purveyor of white bread.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple feels they need a leader with "vision" to replace Jobs.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[SJ]

Ive is in a supreme position of one of the most powerful/richest companies on the planet.

There is no cash offer big enough that could tempt him away from that.

What would get him there is the chance to do something that he couldn't do at Apple...

Now re-read my first sentence.

Jonny isn't going anywhere.

The depatentizer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive patented a mechanism for depatentizing competitors patents using expensive litigation which is
incessantly discussed on websites on a computer.

"Now when someone claims that our patent is bullshit in court, we can sue them again for violating the patents pertaining to our depatentizermatic"

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[OzPeter]

When I was taking a look at that article, this jumped out at me. It's a quote from a Times article:

He still visits the institution in the north-east to give masterclasses, giving up part of his three weeks’ annual leave.

Really? Probably the most influential person in the the biggest company in the US, and you only give him 3 weeks annual leave? What does he have to do to get 4 weeks?

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[MichaelSmith]

Unless something comes along which he couldn't do at Apple.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[mwvdlee]

Indeed, for Jony Ive is the God of rounded corners.
Nobody can make corners quite as rounded as Him.
He is the Angle and the Radius of corner roundation.
Fear ye square and bevelled, for thou art condemned to the outer corners of the un-Apple.
Praise the Omniroundcornerand's name.

True innovation

[markdavis]

Sounds like a suitable time to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

>There is no cash offer big enough that could tempt him away from that.

But perhaps growing ethics and sense of right and wrong could? Apple are no saints.

the power of wealth

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad more people don't have fair access to capital thanks to all the evil greedy people at the top

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[OzPeter]

Ive is in a supreme position of one of the most powerful/richest companies on the planet.

There is no cash offer big enough that could tempt him away from that.

What would get him there is the chance to do something that he couldn't do at Apple...

Speculation being that he wants to bring his family up in the UK and not in the USA. There is no amount of money that Apple can pay him that could keep Ive in the USA and provide his family with an upbringing in the UK. Thus it is a question of life and not money.

article correction

[ihtoit]

Ive didn't design the iMac, that was the same guy who designed the DeLorean DMC-12.

Re:article correction

[drinkypoo]

Ive didn't design the iMac, that was the same guy who designed the DeLorean DMC-12.

Astonishing. One of the best-loved, most cute and cuddly designs around, versus one of the most-hipsterized, ugliest fucking cars ever made. The DeLorean is fractally ugly. The closer you get to it, and the more details you check out, the uglier it gets.

Re:article correction

[UnknowingFool]

What is the source of your information? Every source I have says it was Ive's team that did it.

Re:article correction

[ihtoit]

well your source desn't agree with Ital Design, or Wikipedia, or the DeLorean Museum, or Petrolicious, or Studio 434... Nice try, though.

Re:article correction

[UnknowingFool]

Oh really? Wikipedia says Ive designed the case. A search on Ital Design does not show any link to an iMac. A search on DeLorean Museum shows no link to an iMac either. A search on Petrolocious says nothing about the iMac. A search on Studio 34 also yield no results. All my research indicates that Giorgetto Giugiaro designed some prototypes for Apple back in the 80s. What are your sources again? Care to retract your statement?

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[weilawei]

The Time Cube would like to have a word with you.

5000 patents

[Anonymous Coward]

5000 patents. Each one is a potential lawsuit and barrier to innovation. America needs patent reform. I am sure Ive has hundreds of lawyers working for him. In the end, he invents rounded rectangles.

Re:5000 patents

[Anonymous Coward]

He's been at Apple for about 20 years. Assuming most of those patents are during his Apple years, that's about 1 patent per day. And some people actually think the US patent system is working.

Re: 5000 patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, we got rounded rectangles on Jan 24, 1984.

Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[ArcadeMan]

Ive: "Hey, I don't like outlines on buttons, they clash with my finely crafted hardware."
Me: "We need outlines on buttons otherwise we don't know what's a button and what's an icon indicator."

If you need to try to interact with the GUI before knowing that you can actually interact with it, you failed.

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[Anonymous Coward]

This is because while Ive is the designer and all that. He wasn't in charge of what went forward to the public, that was Steve. Ive took a number of designs to Steve and it was Steve that had the eye for what went forward. All you have to do is look at the latest coming out of apple starting with iOS 6.

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[Anonymous Coward]

Ergo one of Steve's famous quotes: "Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."

The problem now is that there is no one left who is capable of saying "no" to Ive. He's not a bad designer but, like Slashdot, he desperately needs a good Editor.

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[BasilBrush]

And yet most of the things you click on a web page are not "buttons". But you didn't notice.

* "buttons": icons and/or text in a box, often with pseudo 3D "shadows" to skeuomorphically represent mechanical buttons.

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[ArcadeMan]

Links are underlined, buttons are in a box.

The latest UI craze is to put icons everywhere, with no indication that they are buttons.

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[BasilBrush]

Keep looking. Slashdot is an old design, most links you click on are not underlined.

And there's no real difference between a "link" and a "button" or an "icon". They are all just clickable targets that do something.

That "latest craze" you refer to has been with us a long time. The underlined links and button web you are imagining was the web in it's infancy in the 1990s. Thank god those days are gone.
http://www.computerhistory.org...
And note in that picture, even then only some links were underlined. And some functions have both buttons and links to them.
But the worst sin is how ugly it was.
Only one site, but an important one of the time, and most were far worse!

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, he's not a bad designer, he's a terrible designer!

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[Anonymous Coward]

Most links on slashdot are underlined to me.

The link you have, the BLUE TEXT is the indication of clickable. And there was an option to set them underlined too.

Re:Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[IamTheRealMike]

Yeah, I agree with the growing sentiment that whilst Ive is a talented hardware designer, he is also seriously overhyped (by Apple, not himself).

Case in point: how long did it take for Apple to make a larger iPhone? A long time. I read a story about Ive in a magazine. It described the process of them deciding to make a bigger screened iPhone. The design team milled dummies of a bazillion different sizes and carried them around to try and figure out the perfect larger size. They spent ages on it. They tried literally every size. Eventually they produced something ..... just like their competitors. You know what? Apple ignored the trend for years. Then they procrastinated because their holy design team can't do anything fast. They could just have looked at what was selling well - it's not always a good idea but it's not always a bad idea either. But they made a mountain out of it.

Why do Apple's products have almost no customisability? Why did it take YEARS for them to even support setting a wallpaper image in iOS? Well, probably because:

Ive’s decision to offer choice was a challenge to Apple’s recurring theme of design inevitability. In one of our conversations, Ive was scathing about a rival’s product, after asking me not to name it: “Their value proposition was ‘Make it whatever you want. You can choose whatever color you want.’ And I believe that’s abdicating your responsibility as a designer.”

He was probably talking about a Motorola phone. But I guess that's why everything Apple makes is white. You wouldn't want to "abdicate your responsibility" by letting people choose colours! Well, unless it's a watch, of course.

If you read the whole New Yorker article you'll get an overwhelming sense that the design team there live in a bubble where they feel it's OK to spend months on a trivial detail and then produce something almost exactly the same as what their competitors did in a week. Apple has been consistently behind the Android market for years now when it comes to features and even new design ideas, and reading the article will reveal why.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard on the grapevine that he has always wanted to design sex toys?

Design patents

[mark_reh]

"Jony is one of the most talented and accomplished designers of his generation, with an astonishing 5,000 design and utility patents to his name."

How many of those did he actually do any work on and how many were done by his team at Apple and assigned to him (and Apple, of course)?

This is why people still think that big, important things still get invented by a single guy working in his garage. Pfft!

Re:Design patents

[Anonymous Coward]

"Pfft!" .... said the programmer, with a good idea but either too lazy or too scared to implement it, release it, and possibly fail.

Big, important things have been invented for the last 15 years right under your nose! Invented by nothing more than a couple of guys messing around with some website code! Working on something they thought was cool and useful.

Then they released it, and due to some elusive quality you can't comprehend (otherwise you would duplicate it), they succeeded somehow:

Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon, Yelp, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Snapchat....the list goes on and on...

Jesus Christ.

[azav]

Ever since he's gotten his "design direction" on the Mac OS and iOS, their design have gone to shit.

Everything's animated whether it needs to be or not and you can't turn it off. Everything is ultra skinny and harsh blue on glaring white. Common standards of "don't make the user guess what's functional in the UI and what's not" have been thrown away and the UI of the Mac OS has become a distraction machine that gets in the way of the user. Too much darty motion is ADD fodder as it innately draws your attention to the little darty thing as opposed to keeping your attention on the task at hand that you are trying to accomplish.

I don't want animations that get in the way of me doing my task, or ones that pull for my attention. I want a goo d looking, non distracting UI that lets me do my job, not one with crap sliding all over the place and with hideous colors.

Ugh. This is crappy crappy news for the Mac. But then, we already have too much animated crap in the UI.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the crap emoticon on the AppleWatch animated?

Re:Jesus Christ.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right and as much as people don't like the Steve Jobs RDF it is true that Jony just delivered his designs and Steve picked the ones that went forward. Steve kept things clean and consitent (for the most part).

Re:Jesus Christ.

[BasilBrush]

Animation can provide feedback, confirmation, notification and/or delight. All of which are worthwhile in their place.

Talk of too much animation is pointless unless you are specific. You don't improve a UI by simply making it less animated any more than you improve a UI by simply removing elements. Every detail needs consideration. As does the question of whether UI should be added in order to make another UI item optional.

Re:Jesus Christ.

[HornWumpus]

Telling the users it's time to crap is the Apple watches killer app.

Apple users rectums being somewhat desensitized by all the pounding they take.

Bad UI Designer

[Anonymous Coward]

If he was responsible for the stupid "spinner" data entry UI elements in iOS, used for example for datetime entry in the calendar, then getting him away from doing any more UI design is a good thing.
Plus as noted above, making it inscrutible what the UI does. Force Touch is only going to make that worse (and never work right for most people, anyway).

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Paradise Pete]

What does he have to do to get 4 weeks?

Become Chief Design Officer.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

If he gets annual leave separate from his paid sick leave he's already ahead of the game.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[ArcadeMan]

Apple has enough money to bring the UK to the USA. It's already an island*, after all.

* islands just float on the ocean, right? There's only one cable to cut?

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[OzPeter]

If he gets annual leave separate from his paid sick leave he's already ahead of the game.

Civilized countries already do that.

With an astonishing number of patent LAWYERS

[Anonymous Coward]

People invent useful things all the time; the mechanics of the system to get them patented is beyond the reach of most people's pockets.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[OzPeter]

Apple has enough money to bring the UK to the USA. It's already an island, after all.

Some other Brits already did that back in early 70's

Radio Goodies

Graeme wishes to start a pirate bank, a pirate bus service, and a pirate Church of England, all outside Britain's 5 mile (9.3 km) limit, as well as having also planned a fiendish scheme to tow the whole of Britain outside the 5 mile limit and become leader of a pirate state ..

.. and when the Statue of Liberty can be seen moving past the window behind them, it soon becomes apparent that Britain has been towed much further than Graeme had ever envisaged.

Re:Two relevant questions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pronounced Yani.

DeLorean is not hipsterized

[Anonymous Coward]

This http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48 is a hipsterized car -- super-hyped before introduction *and* only a tiny handful were actually made. All it's missing is the Lyft logo...

Love him or hate him...

[organgtool]

Love him or hate him, this guy's designs helped Apple to create an entirely new market that is the envy of all other hardware companies: premium disposable electronic devices.

oh good

[slashmydots]

Maybe now they can put cooling fans and power buttons on their products. You know, join the 20th century.

(Steve Jobs refused to put fans or power buttons in basically anything and it ruined a ton of their early products)

Re:oh good

[berj]

You mean like the power button on my iMac?

Or the power button on my Mac Pro?

Or the power button on my Mac Mini?

Or the power button on my iPad?

Or the power button on my iPhone?

Or maybe the power button on my Macbook Pro?

Maybe you were talking about the fan in my iMac...

Or the fan in my Macbook pro..

Or my Mac Mini

Or my Mac Pro.

Now.. admittedly there's no fan in my Apple TV or my iPad or my iphone.. so if you want a phone with a cooling fan in it you're going to have to look elsewhere. I'm sure someone has a product that lines up with your wants and needs.

Re:oh good

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a watch with a fan. That would be cool for my arm.

Nice... even smaller batteries.

[jbssm]

We must find space to get an even thinner iPhone, perhaps we can ship one without a battery next time. We already use the iPhone plugged to the wall most of the time anyway and I'm quite sure the marketing geniuses at Apple will find a way to advertise that as a "feature".

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Grizzley9]

Really? Probably the most influential person in the the biggest company in the US, and you only give him 3 weeks annual leave? What does he have to do to get 4 weeks?

This stuck out to me too. I work for a large int'l company in the US. What makes it somewhat difficult to look for another job is that I've had 5 weeks of vacation (27days) for over a decade and I'm not very old. It would be very tough to start over somewhere with only 2-3 weeks leave.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Grizzley9]

If he gets annual leave separate from his paid sick leave he's already ahead of the game.

Civilized countries already do that.

True. Most US companies, if you are salaried, you have as much sick leave as you need. Though with a government position you build up the number of sick leave hours you have with each payday.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[jellomizer]

Not necessarily.
Pay may be part of it. However there are other motivations. The degree of artistic control, Sometime a fancier title means you get more say on your ideas. Creative types are known to take positions for less pay where they have more control of their work.
Inclusions at the C level meetings. Sure meeting are boring, and most of us really don't want to be there. But it is sometimes nicer to get the information before it becomes a surprise, and have the power to shoot down stupid ideas earlier.
Sure Apple is a huge player. But Google may want Ives, or Samsung, or Sony. Perhaps some little known startup company will get him.

Exhibit A: Itunes

[Anonymous Coward]

Just spent a weekend with the clunky pile of crap that is itunes. Not just not user-friendly. Possibly anti-user. Software that hates you.

Want to know where and when you can scroll? Just throw the mouse around the screen and see what happens, maybe it'll popup. Great news, we've made it really fucking hard to see too.
We've added x's at the end of rows of your purchased music. Want to know what they do? Click and find out, that's the only way you'll ever know. Maybe you'll get to buy your music over again. What fun it is to guess what a button does!
Wondering where your cursor is when filling in payment/contact info? Great news, you'll never know which field you're on, who needs cursors, instead we've got shit that animates that shouldn't.
Like logging in? Holy shit are you in the right place, we'll have you entering your username and password for every goddamned thing possible and never remember that you've already entered it elsewhere in the program.
Want to remove duplicates? Awesome, we've added a view duplicates button but if you want to remove the duplicates, you get to either remove all versions of the song and start over or get that carpal tunnel wristguard on and start manually selecting every other one like its your job. Really settle in and enjoy removing the duplicates because you'll be doing it long enough to wonder whats become of your life and seriously consider wearing a turtleneck again.
Want to see what you've purchased but isn't on your pc? We'll default to Most Recent view every time. Don't like it? Too bad. Useless differentiation? Totally.
Likewise we'll default to album view every time because we really like looking at pretty album art and would rather you deal with the impact of that shitty functionality every time you open the program.
Don't have any interest in radio, and have no movies or tv shows in your library? We'll be prominently including those in your interface anyways.
We're avant garde as all fuck with removing cursors, pointless animations, disappearing scrollbars but when you're putting your playlists together, enjoy drag and drop like its 1995 all over again allllll day long.

Its just bad. Just bad. Awful. So bad. Loathsome. Hate-inspiring.

More Ugly?

[dbialac]

While he's a brilliant industrial designer, he doesn't know crap about UI design and the UI's he's produced more than show it. I've used OS X since 10.0. I used Next in the 90's. I used classic Apple. I've been in the Apple camp for decades. I frankly can't stand to look at them, so the new UIs have chased me off of the platform.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Plumpaquatsch]

Apple is where CEOs from other companies go to become VPs (non-senior) - and fucking like that they got the job.

Didn't he do the round iMac mouse?

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I always knew those keen design chops would take him far. Good on him.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Then ask for more. When I first hit 3 weeks, I asked for that at my next position. Did the same thing when I reached 4 weeks. Companies who want you will often give you that extra week, since they know going back in any part of the compensation package can be a killer.

Eased out?

[russotto]

Sounds like he's been promoted into a position where he'll have more prestige but less say in what's going on. Is he being eased out?

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[frnic]

Some people enjoy their work, and I expect he gets as much time off as he wants, regardless of the "3 weeks" guaranteed.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Designing spaceships at NASA, Roscosmos or CNSA. That would the logical next step for him lol...

equality

[schlachter]

equality with the other C level executives...that's what this is about...giving him a C-level position.

work in europe?

[schlachter]

then he can get 6 wks leave...

but seriously...the 3 wks is probably just notional anyhow...i doubt people in his position ever stop working.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[schlachter]

totally. i have 4 wks vacation also. i've walked from offers when they couldn't match that.

everything being equal, i'd take less pay before i'd take less vacation time.

SteveJobs would've appointed Jon Ivie

[ElitistWhiner]

But he didn't.

'Nuf said.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[spire3661]

Apple is a saint compared to Microsoft's misdeeds.

Mac Pros are for select use cases

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of them. I'm setup to do video editing/video compression. I have a kind of small to medium(?) RAID of ~48TB that I'm connected to via a Thunderbolt fiberchannel adapter. Most of the 1TB of local SSD storage is basically scratch space. I do use a lot of external drives... most for sneakernet. It's still kind of slow to transfer TBs of footage via a gigabit ethernet connection. The last DVD I burned was 2-3 years ago??? Now days it's just uploaded to YouTube for review or delivery, or in rare cases by hard drive. Compression on the thing is awesome... had the thing cranking on hundreds of video for a few days using Handbrake. The thing was flying and never made any crazy fan noise... but the top doubled as a hand warmer ;)

Re: What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you trying to change the subject?

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I think they can just saw through where the land sticks like a giant model sprue and turn it into a giant floatilla They can float the entire nation outside of the bay area by sailing the whole thing past the Cape of Good Hope. Going around South America would be faster but that would mean floating all of Britain near the Faulkland Islands and well...

Re: What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ives probably finds himself surrounded by worshipping sycophants. If he's as smart as they say, he'd probably like to break out of that bubble. People try to leave the Church of Scientology from time to time. Being able to work off the Apple Campus, in an entirely separate country is a close equivalent.

No they aren't

[SuperKendall]

Most links on slashdot are underlined to me.

Poke around with a mouse sometime over many of the two lines of text above each post... many things are clickable, and are not underlined until you hover over them.

In IOS the indicator that something could be interacted with was meant to be similar to an underline, in that buttons took on the tint color for the app - so when you saw that color you would know you could press.

I personally prefer outlines either, but it's not Ive's fault if some designers did not follow those guidelines in UI designs with textual buttons.

Peters? @ a 'fruit' company (Apple)??

[Anonymous Coward]

There it's whose Peter ya suck & y'all know Tim Cook likes that from men (So "Jony Boy" must be able to pull a golfball thru a garden hose).

allow for a new position to open

[mehtars]

I believe this to allow for a new position at the company to open up. This way they nurture a new head vp of design while retaining ive to do what he does best

who previously had the position?

[globaljustin]

It would help to know who was the previous Chief Design Officer.

It's possible they created a new 'C' position specifically to suit the role Ive plays and part of that includes a more flexible schedule.

It's equally as possible Ive didn't want a C-level position because internal red tape would keep him from being with the engineers and designers.

Really all kinds of explanations, but I want to know. It's really interesting to observe how large companies like Apple make personnel decisions.

Re: What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

American politics at its best. But they are the better of two evils right? When companies like Tesla exist this argument does not pass litmus.

Re: What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Civilized being the ace of subjective words

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, 4 weeks is still not enough. I work for a company with unlimited PTO. I normally take 6-8 weeks and I have only worked here for 2 years.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[strikethree]

Hm...

Low user ID...

Initials of SJ...

Speaking knowledgeably about Apple insider stuff...

Hey guys! Steve Jobs is not dead! He is here posting on Slashdot. I guess pretending to be dead is boring eh? ;)
 

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[schlachter]

I would hate to have unlimited time off. For me that turns into a guessing game of what's appropriate with a race to the bottom in all but the best corporate cultures. I bet if you look at the research, you would find that on average, people at jobs with unlimited time off take less than 4 wks vacation a year.

Keep in mind though, I do get unlimited PTO for illness. The 4 wks is specifically for vacation. And there's also additional time off for national holidays.

The End of Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

The end of Apple. Ive cannot design GUI. I can barely read parts of my iPhone and Mac now since Ive changed the font. I guess he assumes everyone has 20/20.