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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."
A pay raise. You don't want Johnathan Ive working for a competitor.
A nominal promotion in terms of title, but actually reduced responsibilities in terms of work.
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.
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?
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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.
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Ive become death, destroyer of Beige.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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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.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.
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?
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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.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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".
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.
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