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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."
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.
A nominal promotion in terms of title, but actually reduced responsibilities in terms of work.
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?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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