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