It’s been some time since Apple delivered something really revolutionary. Every product in its stores looks just like it did last year… and the year before that… and the year before that.
Fans will pin most of the blame on chief design officer Jony Ive. After more than two decades of spectacular and unparalleled ideas, it seems Steve Jobs’s best friend is running on empty. Is it time for him to go to make room for fresh blood and new ideas?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we battle it out over whether Apple’s design team needs significant change.
Luke Dormehl: I realize that this is going to be one of the more controversial arguments we’ve had in a while. Right at the start, I’ll point out that I’m making an argument from a fan’s perspective. You can make a business case for the things I’m going to suggest being positive, but the market hates uncertainty, and getting rid of probably its biggest asset (yes, bigger than Tim Cook) is pretty much the definition of uncertainty.
I’m a Jony Ive fan. Creatively, the decade that followed the iMac G3 is probably the most exciting one in Apple’s history. Over a ten year period, Ive — working closely with Steve Jobs — forever changed how we thought of personal computers with the iMac. It morphed from a fun, colorful, translucent “blobject” with the first-gen iMac to the equally fun, sunflower-inspired iMac G4, to the giant iPod look of the iMac G5 and through to the minimalist aluminum Intel iMac, whose design language we still have today. Alongside this, he brought us the iconic iPod with its white earbuds, the iPhone, the iBook, and any other number of beautiful designs that look like they belong in a museum.
But since Jobs died in 2011, it seems something has changed. Your current MacBook or iMac may be technically the best computer you’ve ever owned, but is it your favorite? And does it have a design that stands out in a sea of similar-looking products? I’d suggest not.
Very few artists can keep reinventing themselves over and over throughout their career. By now, we’ve got a pretty good idea of what Jony’s platonic ideal for a tech product is: and it’s an austere sheet of super-thin aluminum. Yes, there’s a bit of experimentation with new materials, but there hasn’t been an Apple product for quite a while that’s dropped jaws in the same way those earlier products I described did. In fact, most of the experimentation seems to have been about shearing off parts that users actually want, all in the name of simplicity.
Other aspects of Jony’s work, particularly the software, have gotten actively worse since he took them over.
Yes, I appreciate what he has done for computing. Along with Jobs, he created products that made design fans of us all. A whole generation of designers have been inspired by the great work he’s done. Wouldn’t you like to see what a few of them could do? Ive was around 30 when he designed the iMac. Imagine giving a young up-and-coming designer the opportunity to create their dream computer today. At least at one point, Apple was the company that was all about thinking different.
After a quarter-century working at Apple, Jony deserves a well-earned break. I’m sure you agree…
Killian Bell: I do agree that Apple design has become somewhat boring, but the company is still creating products that are unlike anything else on the market. The most recent Mac Pro may not be the machine many professionals wanted, but there isn’t a desktop like it on the market with that much power. The 12-inch MacBook is also a thing of beauty, and while there are other ultra-portable notebooks out there, few are quite as slim and pretty.
I get your point, though. It does feel like Ive has lost his passion since Jobs passed away, and we’re certainly not seeing the unique, market-changing designs we are used to from Apple. I also agree that there is room for fresh ideas, and that Apple should definitely be looking at recruiting new blood into its design team who can look at technology in new ways. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Ive should go.
Why can’t we have the best of both worlds? Why can’t we combine new ideas from young talent with Ive’s experience and expertise? He’s been at Apple for so long now that his knowledge alone makes him a worthy member of the executive team. Getting rid of him won’t achieve much, and I think in the long run, it would be a tremendous loss for Apple.
Luke: So surprised that you’re not taking a totally different side on this to me. I thought for sure that you’d point out that Apple is still making some beautiful devices, even if companies like (shock horror) Microsoft and Samsung are also producing some pretty stunning computers and smartphones of their own. Look, I certainly don’t think Apple has anything to gain from firing Jony Ive. As I noted, it would be terrible for Apple share prices, for one thing. Even if it means paying Jony Ive a salary for life to keep him away from other companies, I think that would be a good thing. But in terms of overseeing the design lab, and having everything produced in it feel like it’s part of Jony Ive’s vision for computing — yeah, I’d definitely be interested in a change.
Killian: I don’t think the problem is Ive or a lack of fresh ideas, though. In some cases, it’s simply that Apple refuses to develop certain types of products. You mentioned Microsoft earlier, which gets a lot of praise for its terrific Surface Pro tablet/laptop 2-in-1. But as much as many fans would like one of those powered by a hybrid of macOS and iOS — as we’ve discussed before — Apple just won’t do it. It’s not that it can’t; it just won’t. The same goes for a touchscreen Mac like the Surface Studio.
I think you’re forgetting that every other company has a similar problem. If you take away the products Apple won’t make and focus on those it is making, the entire industry has been stuck in a rut for years. No one is making a laptop or desktop or tablet with a revolutionary design that Apple missed out on. Smartphones are changing again, but that has only just started happening with the advent of new display technologies — and they’re essentially the same as they were before, only prettier.
It’s the same thing we return to again and again: Apple is just too big to be experimental now. The issue doesn’t lie with Jony Ive; it’s that Apple as a whole is too scared to make substantial changes to insanely successful products that could backfire. It is terrified to radically redesign the iPhone in case it loses millions of customers to Samsung or Google or LG — which would not go do well with investors. It doesn’t have the freedom it did when it was fighting to become a major player and it didn’t have so much at stake.
Luke: You’re massively underestimating how much power Ive has at Apple. He’s got as much sway, if not more, than Tim Cook when it comes to Apple’s overall direction. A lot of what you say is quite right, but let’s not pretend that Apple hasn’t been a market leader before and then come out with some extraordinary new technology that’s changed the game. But it’s an interesting point to ask: has Apple simply become too big to create a world-changing product in the way it did with all those great Jony Ive designs I alluded to earlier. Let’s turn it over to readers. Have you been impressed by Jony Ive’s recent work? Would you be interested to see what a fresh pair of eyes could do in terms of releasing the next great product? Or are Jony’s best days still ahead of him? Leave your comments below. And have a great weekend.
Friday Night Fights is a series of weekly death matches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?
Killian Bell is a freelance writer based in the U.K. He has an interest in all things tech and also covers Android over at CultofAndroid.com. You can follow him on Twitter via @killianbell.
27 responses to “Is it time for Apple to say goodbye to Jony Ive? [Friday Night Fights]”
as a long time apple fan since the first imac, it seems nothing interesting or exciting has happened since steve jobs died. maybe the 2012 mac pro in an exception – but as we know it turned out to fail and they’re working on a completely new and upgradable one. the apple watch is, in my view, useless piece of not-that-pretty gadget, people do not really want one or don’t feel like needing one (bulky, square, no sim tray) it’s just another gadget to charge. the apple tv is boring. the gui was not appealing, now it’s nice but isn’t fresh.
Ive will be a huge loss for apple since he is the most important brain (and soul) in apple in terms of design. there is no one that could make us believe that the sacrifice of loosing stuff people want (headphone jack, magsafe, only tb3 i/o in macbooks) is indeed worth it.
i think most of apple fans that were excited to see the keynotes with steve, now need to see hair force 1 and other execs that maybe make feel a bit of solidarity with what apple was in the past but we don’t care much about them. its not more then a tech company now, for me, and if or when ive’s absence it will get worst.
maybe he had lost his passion and maybe he is getting tired or bored by apple. maybe he’s just “running empty” on great revolutionary ideas. but let’s don’t forget that our passion for apple, it’s products and what it stands for was never only based on tech and design. it was based on love.
“Nothing interesting or exciting since Steve Jobs died” !!!
Let’s see…
iPad Mini,
Apple Watch,
iPad Pro,
Apple Pencil,
iOS redesign,
IPhone +,
Dual cameras, and the
12″ MacBook.
Each is innovative, intriguing, and amazing in its own way.
The Watch may not appeal to you, but it does to millions and it’s an intriguing, very different product from Apple! I don’t own one, nor am I likely to, but it’s hard not to consider it a post-Jobs innovation and success
.
I own an Apple watch and it is amazing! Not only that… I see plenty of people a day that wear one of different varieties including model and band choice. So Avj assumption of Apple Watch is completely wrong.
That’s not an argument from a fan’s perspective. Because it’s reality challenged to say the least. It sounds more like an argument from Rob Enderle, Samsung, or Xiaomi. No new ideas? Are you blind?
Perhaps a great designer needs a foil or control and Steve Jobs was that. Certainly something has gone a little flat since 2011. I particularly hate what happened to the iOS UI since then. There was some good energy (if possibly destructive) when Scott Forstall was still at Apple. It was a mistake to sack him; Jony got too big for his boots.
Oh totally agree with this. Ive needed Jobs for grounding. It is better to have an engineer that takes design seriously than a designer who takes himself seriously.
I have also come to conclude that Forstall was a terrible loss. He had a bit of Jobs in him. I reckon it was more Cook eliminating a future corporate threat than paying the price for Apple Maps.
Ivey’s minimalism is what I an sick of now. One example of form trumping function. The headphone jack being on the back of my iMac. No I dont want bluetooth headphones so dont bring it up.
I will also say that apple does an abhorent job at producing software that “just works” for the last few years.
It is usually full of bugs.
One example id the alarm clock bug where no-ones alarm clock went off, and if I recall this happened twice. That is pathetic.
Finally, as a iPhone lover since 07 last year was the first year I did not buy a new iPhone. If this years iPhone requires me to use or buy a dongle to charge and listen to wires headphones it will be the second year im not buying a new iPhone.
To the good.
iOS is so far ahead of Android. As frustrated as I am with iOS Android is a shacky, slow, unreliable and bloated piece if freeware junk.
Fully agree. Hardware is released apparently untested, software is the same. Dumbing down is prevalent and everything is way more expensive than it should be. I do not buy Apple any more, not anything, though Macos (minus the SIP crapware) is far and away my weapon of choice.
I was recently banned from one of the more vociferous Apple fanboi mags for saying much the same as you have (oddly enough it has ‘Mac’ in it’s name though I haven’t seen anything substantial about Macs on its pages for weeks. It’s only about watches, TV’s and headphones these days.
Apple has defined it’s market. Dumbed-down fanbois who don’t know how to press more than 6 buttons.This market will make more billions. Then one day it won’t. Where’s the next market for Apple to fail in after India? And that’s before the world’s governments cotton on to how much tax has been avoided and how much a manipulative bully Apple is in the marketplace – ask Qualcomm, they know.
Jobs was a terriblle human being imho, an archetypal asshole, but (also imho) Tim Cook will grind Apple into the dust because he doesn’t know what innovation is and Jobs did. He only knows what supply chain is, and imho Jony began arranging his exit because of that change. Anyone who thinks Jobs appointed Cook because Cook could rival Jobs in what Jobs cared about just isn’t paying attention. Jobs hired Cook precisely because Cook couldn’t. The best days for buying Apple shares are over imho, because as the hype runs out of puff, Apple’s value will become much closer to Apple’s worth.
Sad, but, in my opinion, strip out the hype and thew trendy, and what you’ve got is an apple core, and that’s all.
I couldn’t disagree more with everything you said, and I’m a technology buff and computer science educated engineer. Many people like me still think Apple’s stuff is the best compared to what the rest of the industry offers, it’s not just dumb fanboys who can only press 6 buttons. Sounds like you’re just pissed off about the stupid headphone jack and letting that affect your entire opinion of Apple’s tech. Evolution can be hard and someday no phone will have the ancient headphone jack and our kids will all be like “you guys actually had to use tangled wires to listen to music on the go??” It’s too bad you didn’t try the AirPods, they are amazing. They sound as good or better than the wired versions and last a very long time and are seamless to use. And they are so in sync and almost never skip a single beat. It’s a fantastic product, just have to be a little open to change and move forward with the times. Remember my words, in a few years no high end phone will have a headphone jack. The only reason Samsung still does is because they are behind and don’t have their own seamless and great Bluetooth headphones. As soon as they do, that jack be gone in the same or next generation Galaxy.
Thanks for the reply friend.
Cutting away the assumptions leaves only that you are a technology buff, which kind of says it all really, and a çomputer-science-educated engineer, which says absolutely nothing at all.
I hope you have a really nice day though… and if you have any substantive comments in refutation of what I actually said, please do feel free…
“Remember my words, in a few years no high end phone will have a headphone jack.” This sentiment, and the people at Apple who push it, really get my goat.
There are tens of millions of devices on the planet that use the headphone jack to play music from an iphone. Do you think everyone on the planet with one of these devices is going to *replace* their devices just because Apple thinks it knows better than their consumer? First only to putting the headphone jack on the *bottom* of my iphone (so I can’t plug it in and stand it on end) is doing completely away with the headphone jack. Here’s a list of devices I own or work with that *need* a headphone jack on the phone so I can play music from it:
My car (seriously, I’m supposed to buy a new car to suit Apple?)
My home stereo which is twenty years old and still sounds great.
The stereo at the yoga studio where I teach.
The other stereo I have in the back room.
The stereo at the second yoga studio where I teach.
The stereo at the third yoga studio where I teach.
Get a grip. You can have your headphoneless iphone. I’ll choose my car over an Apple product without a headphone jack.
I’d be happy just to have a word processing program that works. Pages has *lost* features; many just plain old don’t work; some work some times, other times, not so well. And my MacBook still flags “MacBook” as misspelled since at least 2006.
And do we really need new design every year? I don’t. Look at many vendors, they look entirely different every year without any long-term continuity. What I like about Apple is, that new generation is usually better than the last one in specs and design as well (except last gen of Mac Mini). We are getting to the design that will stay with us many years without big changes…
Waaay past.
I don’t think it’s so much that Apple’s (and Jony’s) designs are getting stale but rather that the rest of the industry has caught up and makes laptop devices that look similar to identical. So if you have plenty of copycats in the industry, how can your designs stand out of the crowd? It’s the chicken and the egg, it isn’t that Apple is boring, it’s that everyone else is copying Apple, so every ultrabook now looks the same for instance. Let’s face it, since the MacBook Air invented the ultrabook category, so many other companies started making their laptops to look nearly identical to the MacBook Air design language. And phones are simply designed to death, meaning, there’s no where left to go but a single pane of glass like something out of scifi movies. Displays are nearly edge to edge in 2017, super thin slabs of glass and metal. There’s very little left to be original in the smartphone space. When I saw and handled the new Galaxy S8 I was honestly like “meh”, it’s just an S7 with a larger screen and fingerprint sensor in a terrible spot. It’s just nothing new really, just tweaks of years old designs, and that’s true for all the manufacturers. There’s nothin that can be radically changed until there is some new leap in the underlying technology. Until then, design will be minor tweaks to the existing concept.
Yes, good point and I make a similar point about how design just can’t go much further without a breakthrough in the underlying technology. It’s all just tweaks to existing concepts because there’s no new technological breakthroughs in the industry, it’s not Jony’s fault. What do people want him to do, make a round phone or triangular MacBook? I believe, like in CPU transistor size, there is a universal limit to design given existing technology. Humans aren’t changing, we don’t have 3 arms or fingers on our feet, so the way we interact with these devices can only be tweaked so much from a design perspective.
“Is it time for Apple to say goodbye to Jony Ive?”
Simple, one-word answer: Yes!
He couldn’t have done it without Jobs — and Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs on the design front, He is not the counter-balance, the design critic Ive needs to do his best work.
Ive’s videos, once delightful and thought-provoking, are now self-parodies. They are laughable, even pathetic, and undermine, not enhance, the products being introduced,
Weird! We’re still using iPhone 4s and their batteries are going strong. We sold an iPad 1 only about a year ago and it, too, was doing well.
Not sure why the standard is for a single battery to outlast the rest of the hardware! They have limited life, but do last many years, and you can have Apple or others put in a new one.
Excellent hardware designer.
I regret he adventured into software design though. To me the last real iOS version is 6, before he got involved in making it look like a cheaper version of Android.
Lose Jony Ive? Oh my Gaaawwd! what will we do without Jony? Everything will be soooo plain. Maybe princess Timmie knows some other really creative kinda guy (wink wink) that can cum to our rescue.
I think its way past time that Jony goes back to his roots. Bring in a Geek with a penchant for powerful, god awful ugly computers that are upgradeable forever and supported by Apple. Send the princess back down to the supply line offices and let him do what he does best, and cancel all plans for windmills in China and solar farms to supply power to Los Angeles!! Build top notch fast as hell computers that are the envy of the industry and make them all upgradeable with off the shelf products.
A fair bit of hyperbole laced with truth amongst the meanness.
Mean-ness? Yes, I suppose so. But being beastly to Apple seems only right somehow given what they do to other people and companies. Remember Sapphire? Qualcomm? Lots of others?
Seems to me like they need a serious kicking, not just some grumbly mean-ness… especially the guy my friend refers to as ‘the princess’ above. Much to my personal amusement…
Don’t mistake meanness. Its more like anger, The kind of anger one that bought Apple many many years ago, and sees this man and the team he has surrounded himself with as a threat to his family”s future.
After almost 20 years of buying only Apple products (a tangerine iMac was my first Apple), I’m now thinking of ordering a Microsoft Platinum Laptop Surface.
One of the few reasons I haven’t bailed on Macs is that once I have the software on my computer, it’s mine.
IMO all this “cloud” software nonsense is a way to keep digging into consumers’ pockets. I paid something like $49 for my billing program over ten years ago and it still works great – that’s less than $5/year. Now that same company wants $10/month for basically the same program because “the cloud”. Same with MS Office products. Although Pages doesn’t always work, it’s on my computer and paid for, as opposed to $20/month for Word in perpetuity.
How can Apple distinguish itself going forward? Low cost, productive and useful software that works right out of the box (sound familiar?), a vision that brought many to Apple in the first place.
Really, Jony Ive has run out of his mojo? Exactly how can you make Apple’s current design language more ‘interesting’ without resorting to gimmicky, non-functional, gee-whiz ornamentation? Look more closely, changes in Apple product design have always been driven by changes in the underlying technology, especially hardware tech, leading to new design problems that require new design solutions. The fact is, smartphone, tablet, and laptop tech isn’t changing as fast as it used to. (And I’m talking of the whole industry, not just Apple.) That’s not Jony Ive’s fault. When people complain about design at Apple, they’re concerns are really more about fashion not design. The two are not the same.