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Jony Ive Returns To Apple Design Management Role After Two Years (9to5mac.com)
Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac: Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer, is returning to his management role within Apple's design group after handing off managerial duties in 2015. 9to5Mac noted that Ive's design deputies Dye and Haywarth were no longer listed on Apple's leadership page earlier today.
I'm getting worried about Apple. I'm feeling more and more of the moz://a vibe from it.
By that I mean we're seeing Apple do more and more things that they want to do, rather than giving customers what the customers desire.
We've seen moz://a do this with Firefox. While Firefox was initially developed in a way that benefited users, and provided them with a superior browser, over time we've seen the opposite happen. Changes have been made to Firefox not based on any demand or desire from users, but rather just because moz://a wants to force through their own ideas an initiatives. The end result has been disastrous: users have fled Firefox, moving to browsers that actually prioritize giving a good user experience. Firefox's share of the market has dropped from 35% down to 5%, and this has effectively made moz://a irrelevant. Worse, we've seen one failure after another (Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Persona, Hello, Pocket, etc.) when it comes to moz://a's attempts at creating new products and offerings.
I fear that the same thing is starting to happen to Apple. I think they may have lost focus on the user, and are now going down the same path that moz://a did, of doing what they (Apple or moz://a) want to do, instead of what the customers/users want to be done.
Please, Apple, learn from moz://a's mistakes! Don't become what they become! Put the focus back on the customers and what the customers actually want, rather than trying to force agendas or initiatives on the customers!
I hope that this development helps put an end to the moz://a-fication that I think we've seen start to happen. Apple needs to return to its early 2000s roots, where the seeds of its most recent success were planted. The needs and wants of the users need to be the primary focus again.
Ah yes. The man responsible for Macbooks with non-replaceable storage (nice if the motherboard fails), soldered RAM, irremovable (glued!) batteries. And iMacs with screens stuck with strong sticky tape over the vital parts (needs a pizza roller to remove).
Oh wait! And Apple's Time Capsule. Nice little router with storage built in. Should be easy enough to remove the hard drive when it fails, right? Wrong.
You can get to the drive by popping off the bottom cover, but Apple routed wires under the drive. Disconnecting some of the wires is virtually guaranteed to break their connectors. Apple saved 50 cents and made the thing extremely hard to fix.
All hail Jony Ive, the king of user-hostile design.
Or, I could have hardware that's not crippled by design. Being able to swap drives also had other advantages to some people -- like being able to insert a "clean" drive when traveling internationally (ever heard of US border data searches?)
Why sell crippled hardware for want of a connector that costs a buck or two?