Can’t Apple’s design guru catch a break? After Jony Ive received a well-deserved promotion to become Apple’s chief design officer, some pundits misinterpreted the happy news as a bad omen.
Our own Leander Kahney reads the tea leaves completely differently: Ive’s promotion is nothing but good news for Apple.
This week: Jony Ive’s big promotion has him handing over the keys to Apple’s legendary industral design lab, so we have to wonder… is this step one in an Ive succession plan? Plus: the surprising suitability of Ive’s replacement, Richard Howarth; Apple VP Jeff Williams lets some curious Apple car comments slip; why Apple Watch will get a lot faster come fall; Leander reveals his fetish for the weird whispering women of Youtube; and stay tuned till the end for a very romantic Get To Know Ur Cultist!
Our thanks to CultCloth for supporting this episode. If you’re obsessive about keeping your iPhone, iPad, Mac, DSLR, glasses, and other gadgets in sparkling clean condition, you’ll love ‘em. Use code “CultCast” at checkout to score a free 8×8 CleanCloth.
Why is Jony Ive’s big promotion so great for Apple? Find out what Leander thinks in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. In addition, meet the men filling the design guru’s shoes, see how Apple Watch apps will get a speed boost, learn how to beat the Unicode of Death and a ton more iPhone and Apple Watch tips, and see just how Google is challenging Apple on its own turf.
All this, and much more, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.
This is Richard Howarth, Apple’s newly appointed vice president of industrial design, and the man who has to fill Jony Ive’s (calf-leather) shoes.
Ive has been promoted to chief design officer to do more “blue sky thinking,” leaving Howarth to run the legendary Industrial Design studio that has been Apple’s ideas factory and product foundry for more than two decades.
Howarth is no stranger to the studio. He’s worked there for 20 years, heading up the design of the iPod, iPhone and a string of MacBooks, among many other products. He’s African-born, London-educated and has been Ive’s second-in-command for some time, earning a reputation among colleagues as a “badass.”
Jony Ive received a nice gift for the Memorial Day weekend: a promotion to the role of Chief Design Officer at Apple, which will broaden his design duties at Apple while handing day-to-day running of the design team to long-time Apple employees Alan Dye and Richard Howarth.
Congrats, Jony!
Apple’s influence on the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens extends far beyond Kylo Ren’s ugly crossguard lightsaber.
The Force Awakens costume designer Michael Kaplan has designed costumes on movies like Blade Runner and Fight Club, but when it came time to redesign the new stormtrooper armor for director J.J. Abrams, Kaplan said he looked to Apple as his biggest inspiration on how to perfect the stormtrooper’s white, plastic-y armor.
Apple Watch is hands down the most beautiful smart watch you can buy, but it doesn’t have a gorgeous round face like the original Apple Watches did. Jony Ive never even considered using a round design because “a circle doesn’t make any sense” for a list-based interface, but the crazy tech pranksters at Peripatetic Pandas are ready to show him how wrong he was.
Using a metal grinder to round out the Apple Watch’s corners, the guys who also solved the iPhone 6’s protruding lens problem have also devised an ingenious way to get a custom round Apple Watch. Sure, their method will void your warranty, but it’s pretty amazing that the watch still works after the beating it receives.
Watch the gory video below:
With its small screen and 0.46-inch thickness, the original iPhone from 2007 looks like an antique these days. Put it next to the Apple Watch, however, and it’s remarkable how similar the two devices look in terms of their design language.
At 0.45 inches, the Apple Watch is ever so slightly thinner, but its rounded edges, color and overall aesthetic certainly appear reminiscent of the first-generation Apple handset, don’t you think?
Apple and Star Wars are forces to be reckoned with. These two cultural powerhouses deliver endless entertainment and inspire extreme fandom.
Mash the two of them together and you’ve got the technocultural equivalent of an atom smasher. Or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Or something.
With its roly-poly looks and infectious personality, new droid BB-8 looks primed to be a real scene-stealer when Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters at the end of the year.
And now we know what the ballsy little bot would look like if Jony Ive replaced its orange-and-white color scheme with something a little more subtle.
Jony Ive and his BFF Marc Newson launched Apple into the luxury market this week with the Apple Watch, which expertly straddles the line between gadget and fashion accessory.
Apple’s dynamic designing duo sat down with Vogue’s Suzy Meeks this week to talk about their first foray into the fashion world — as well as what inspired them to create the Apple Watch. We rounded up the top 8 revelations from the pair’s appearance earlier this week, but Vogue just made the full interview available online, and it’s full of juicy insights into Jony and Marc’s thought processes.
Watch the full interview below:
One magical piece of wearable technology, two radically different parody videos.
The first takes a jab at the seemingly never-ending supply of superlatives Jony Ive uses to describe the Apple Watch. The other reminds us just how precious watches are to people determined to pass them along as keepsakes at all costs. See them both below.
Apple Watch might be the most controversial product Cupertino’s ever launched, but according to Jony Ive, Apple’s been on this path since the Jobs and Woz founded the company.
The Apple design boss and Marc Newson opened the inaugural Condé Nast International Luxury Conference today in Florence, Italy, to talk about their smartwatch that’s part fashion item, part tech gadget. Ive and Newson sat down with conference host Suzy Menkes and explained how they approached the development of Apple WAtch.
“We don’t look at the world through predetermined market opportunities,” said Ive. “What we’ve done fairly consistently is try to invest tremendous care in the development of our products.”
Here are the eight most important bits we learned about the Apple Watch’s development:
As part of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, Jony Ive penned a short essay praising Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky for creating a “remarkable startup.”
“The service that Brian and his partners imagined is soaringly ambitious and utterly practical,” said Ive, who didn’t make Time’s list himself this year.
Being pals with Jony Ive definitely has its benefits. Just ask J.J. Abrams, the director of the upcoming Star Wars movie.
Apple is starting to toss Apple Watches at celebrities like the wearables are Viagra at the Playboy Mansion. Fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld just flashed his custom gold link bracelet on Instagram, and now Sam Smith is showing off his new timepiece — which was hand-delivered by Jony Ive himself.
The Apple Watch was created under crazy, sleep-deprived conditions, with its first working prototype being an iPhone strapped to the wrist with a Velcro strap, and the Digital Crown represented by a custom dongle plugged into the bottom of the phone via the headphone jack.
Those are a couple of the revelations from a new in-depth article, reporting on the creation of Apple’s eagerly anticipated wearable device.
With an innovative architectural style that brought elegant living to the masses, real estate developer Joseph Eichler left an indelible mark on California in the 1960s.
His beautifully simple blueprints also had an undeniable impact on Apple’s co-founders — although Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs took very different lessons from his work. Remarkably, Eichler’s design philosophy continues to shape Apple’s products, inside and out, to this day.
“I was very lucky to grow up in an Eichler,” Wozniak told Cult of Mac, referring to his family’s four-bedroom home in Sunnyvale, California. “It greatly influenced my liking of simplicity and open style. I like it whenever I see those attributes in any architecture.”
One of Steve Jobs’ favorite recordings was The Beatles working on version after version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
The new Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, is like that recording: It serves up fresh takes on oft-told stories from Apple’s history, this time with more sugarcoating.
Steve Jobs planned to boot Jony Ive out of Apple the very first time he met him, according to an explosive new revelation from the forthcoming biography Becoming Steve Jobs.
“He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me,” Ive told the book’s authors, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, in an interview.
We have Apple products atop our desks, in our pockets and, soon, on our wrists. As if there aren’t enough Apples in our airspace, one man is nudging his favorite company to design a quadrocopter. He’s even taken a stab at designing his dream Apple drone — and was careful to remain faithful to the Jony Ive aesthetic.
Eric Huisman presents his Apple drone concept like a classic Apple ad, with the product photographed on a seamless white background, perfectly lit, with a subtle shadow.
No Apple fan is oblivious to the huge amount of science, technique, expertise and care that Apple puts into every product. Apple doesn’t design its products the way it does because it has to, but because it is compelled on a profoundly spiritual level to do so.
For the Apple Watch, Apple has taken that care to the next level. And if you want to see just how much artistry, skill, craft and passion has gone into creating the latest revolutionary Apple product, there’s no better way to spend the weekend than reading about the behind-the-scenes manufacturing process of the Apple Watch.
All week, it’s been reported that Apple is using a “new gold” in the gold Apple Watch Edition. According to Bloomberg, Slate, Gizmodo and many others, Apple has patented a new process to create a “metal matrix composite” by mixing gold with ceramic particles.
The composite supposedly allows Apple to save on the amount of gold it uses, while making the substance super-hard and adding other amazing properties.
But according to Atakan Peker, a materials scientist and one of the co-inventors of Liquidmetal, which Apple holds an exclusive license on, it’s extremely unlikely Apple is using any kind of “new gold” for its watches.
He knows this because Jony Ive says so.
It’s taken all week, but I finally think I have a pretty good idea why Apple is selling a crazy-expensive, super-exclusive gold watch.
Initially, the very idea that Apple would make something for the one percent seemed abhorrent. What makes Apple great is that it sells affordable luxury to the masses.
Apple’s well-designed and well-made products should really only be for the rich, but they are generally affordable to the middle classes. Apple pulls off the miraculous, selling us BMWs at Kia prices.
This is what makes the gold Apple Watch Edition stand out. At first glance, it’s obviously not a product for us. But even though you and I will probably never own one, the $10,000 timepiece is actually kinda democratic, because it’s all about selling $350 watches to the masses.
I can’t wait to read Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. The upcoming biography, by veteran reporters Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, promises to be the definitive telling of Steve Jobs’ life.
The writers scored interviews with major players including Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. The result is a book loaded with interesting anecdotes and insights about the former Apple CEO.
I haven’t yet read the whole thing (it comes out March 24), but while pre-ordering my copy on Amazon, I could initially access a significant portion of the biography through the site’s “Look Inside the Book” feature. (Amazon later blocked out far more of the book’s contents.)
From what I’ve seen, some of the stories are pretty sensational — providing new details into the close relationship between Jobs and Cook, revealing Jobs’ secret plan to buy Yahoo!, and much more.
Want a few of the highlights? Check them out below.
