Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Jony Ive Returns To Apple Design Management Role After Two Years (9to5mac.com)

Posted by msmash on from the dispatch dept.

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.

14 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Design mis-management... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Well that's just terrific by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 2

    Did Apple ever stop doing that? The current product line is pretty terrible as far as repairability, Ive or not.

  3. Have I been blaming the wrong guy? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    During the past couple years when Apple has come out with laptops without the ports I need, or phones without headphone jacks - I figured it was Jony Ive's fault. So was it actually these other guys making those decisions?

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:Have I been blaming the wrong guy? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Jony Ive has only been out for 1-2 years -- you can blame him for Apple's watered-down hardware.

    2. Re:Have I been blaming the wrong guy? by cfalcon · · Score: 2

      No clue. I've had a pet theory that when Apple is doing well technically or fashionably, they "invest" in bad design and user hostile decisions, and when they need to look good, they revert back to sane industry standard stuff. I think it's just one extra currency they can bank and cash out of, repeatedly.

      The last several years have been a progressively funnier joke as regards user servicability and user access. The funniest part was probably the trashcan Mac- a server, and priced as such, in a laughably small package that ends up needing a nest of dust collecting wires everywhere to talk with anything in the modern world, with almost no upgradability- unlike their other products, this one was priced to compete with real servers, and to compete in a market with people who would value some function over form. Lesser jokes include needless cost-shaving risks, such as the decision to drop a headphone jack and replace it with a piece of plastic that does literally nothing (for the purpose of getting everyone talking about their phone, and no other thing), versions of ios that use a flat design that doesn't distinguish between layers of control on purpose, etc.

      At some point, Apple will probably choose to revert any of these that they can make people talk about, probably with some Apple-slanted angle when they revert them.

      Meanwhile they've been making legitimate strides in stuff like mobile CPUs, but those don't make the press print story. Controversy sells, attention is brought about by conflict, etc.

  4. Re:Well that's just terrific by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here's the thing. I've had laptop (both Mac and PC) motherboards fail more than oncde. If I didn't have a very current backup, I could still pop the hard drive or SSD out and retrieve my data with a $5 USB to SATA cable. With Apple, I'd have to beg an Apple store to retrieve my data, pay them if I was out of AppleDontCare, and have no guarantee that they even could. All for a savings of, what, $5? on a connector.

  5. Re:Well that's just terrific by stevez67 · · Score: 2

    Or, you could take ownership and responsibility for your data by doing backups to an external hard drive or could service.

  6. Re: Well that's just terrific by Brockmire · · Score: 2

    A phone is in your hands on many different surfaces. Think dropping a very expensive remote control, not on carpet. How many beige PC'S have you dropped? I dropped my last phone at least 20 times over 3+ years. The last time on concrete and slid 20ft, the power button broke off and got lost. I bought a new body for it for like $22 from eBay and about 15 minutes of time after watching a YouTube video, it was good as new.

  7. But QA... by s1d3track3D · · Score: 2

    Given their recent passwordless root entry debacle, maybe they should be focusing on hiring high profile QA engineers... ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

  8. Re:Well that's just terrific by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  9. Nooo....not Mr. Flatter is better... by Proudrooster · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well, I guess everything is going to get even flatter and less serviceable and upgradable.

    The new 2018 MacBook Pro will have only one port called the USB-C-Flat and the case will be made of two-ply aluminum foil because everyone needs to keep their Mac in a manilla envelope. The entire machine will be made with a new revolutionary lamination process because pentalobe screws are ugly. The keyboard won't have actual keys of instead be a silkscreen over a giant touch pad. Yes, the keyboard and the touch pad will merge into one gloriously flat surface. The CPU, GPU, and RAM will be laminated into the aluminum and the whole case will become a giant glorious heatsink eliminating the needs for any fans. The battery will be a next generation ultra flat non-liquid electrolyte design. The entire $2000 compute can be recycled after two years by running it through a shredder and you can purchase another one.

    Then Lenovo, HP, ASUS, and Acer will all copy this stupid new design,

    I would so much like to be the head of design at Apple. I would make cool, modular stuff and there would be a Phat-Book Pro!

    Johnny your ruining the laptop design world, please retire. It's time.

  10. Jony I've *Returned* by dohzer · · Score: 3, Funny

    Missing apostrophe and it should be 'ed', not 's'. Such slack editing.

  11. Ugh, Jony Ive... by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm greatly looking forward to a future full of function-follows-form from the good ol' days!

    Unless you're being sarcastic... I don't know why you would think that's in the cards; Jony Ive is the villain that took away the beautiful icons iOS and OS X / MacOS used to have and replaced them with dull, flat, information-culled pastels reminiscent of an interior decorator's shart, not to mention being the conceptual guy who was in authority when the clueless process that brought us the abortion that is the "trashcan" Mac Pro went down.

    Unless he's been off recovering from a head injury, this appears to bode very poorly for the future of everything Apple.

    It's looking more and more like a big windows tower lurks in my future. Damn it.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Ugh, Jony Ive... by lokedhs · · Score: 2

      The software stated going down the drain before the hardware did. The height of OSX was around 10.5 or maybe 10.6. The height of hardware was around 2011.