Jony Ive Leaving Apple (but not really)

[yolosnail]

1 hour ago, D13H4RD said:

And people didn't really mind. The Galaxy phones also got quite a bit thicker over time and people didn't really care too much. 

 

A bonus with the XR is that the increased thickness also allowed them to cram in a reasonably large battery, which resulted in very strong battery performance alongside other things. I know battery wasn't a complaint for my brother in law's XR 

I remember getting my S4 and thinking it was far too thin, I ended up getting an extended battery and making it 3x as thick! Now I come to think of it, it looked quite similar to the iPhone battery case

[Video Beagle]

I still use a 5s...but watching youtubers like iJustine and her iphones..it looks like a brick, and she likes it....so, I really don't know what people want in phones

 

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Ive's designs in hardware can't be beat, but I haven't been thrilled with the direction the GUI's style has gone since he took that over. I mean, I guess it's moving it forward but it looses some of the scifi of the old looks.

 

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For the people who've chimed in with "who"....does that make you feel clever?  You're in theory a tech enthusiast, posting here. There are names you should be aware of and the impacts they've had on the computer industry for good or ill.

[Drak3]

5 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

A bonus with the XR is that the increased thickness also allowed them to cram in a reasonably large battery, which resulted in very strong battery performance alongside other things. I know battery wasn't a complaint for my brother in law's XR 

Reviews peg the XR's battery life as being in the same range as the Note 9. It's fairly good.

 

Hell, I get 2 days out of my XR. My friend didn't get a full day out of his iP7 new, and he doesn't use it as much as I use my phones.

[BuckGup]

11 hours ago, floofer said:

Honestly if they made it thicker it would feel like going back in technology, I wouldn’t buy one.

So you’d rather pay more for less because of the way it looks when the point of buying it is functionality 

[BuckGup]

10 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

Consumers don’t want that though. 

Right did Ive tell you that

[abazigal]

13 hours ago, TempestCatto said:

I don't know who this is. Is he a high up person that's partially responsible for Apple sucking?

He is one of the few people (the other being Steve Jobs) who showed that design can matter in the mass market, and that there are people willing to pay for outstanding design and integration. For the longest time, the conventional wisdom in many tech industries was that design wasn’t important. The end result was shitty software and shitty hardware. Apple’s success has upended the industry’s value system, and today, almost all of Apple’s competitors value design more today than they did a decade ago.

 

Ive's legacy lives on, not just at Apple, but the entire tech industry. 

[abazigal]

1 minute ago, BuckGup said:

So you’d rather pay more for less because of the way it looks when the point of buying it is functionality 

In a sense, yes, if you actually understood what it is that makes Apple tick, and what it is that Apple product users love about apple products. In the eyes of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, perfect products are made by cutting out everything not absolutely required in the design. To them, it's about creating products that are cut down to their absolute most basic form, with nothing standing between the user and the device. The products aren't about having the most features, or being the "most useful", they're about distilling out the purest mixture of form and function possible.

 

That's why so many techies continue to be baffled by Apple's success. People with an engineering mindset don't understand design, and so when they see Apple's incredible success, they just can't wrap their brains around the fact that it's good design that leads to this success. So instead, they convince themselves that Apple only makes money because they're a cult that brainwashes millions of people through product marketing. That's the only way that people who don't understand design are able to make sense of things.

[Drak3]

18 minutes ago, abazigal said:

He is one of the few people (the other being Steve Jobs) who showed that design can matter in the mass market, and that there are people willing to pay for outstanding design and integration. For the longest time, the conventional wisdom in many tech industries was that design wasn’t important. The end result was shitty software and shitty hardware. Apple’s success has upended the industry’s value system, and today, almost all of Apple’s competitors value design more today than they did a decade ago.

 

Ive's legacy lives on, not just at Apple, but the entire tech industry. 

That's some serious revisionalist history.

 

Jobs and Ive sacrificed functionality for form. That's all.

[Commodus]

1 hour ago, VegetableStu said:

*spit take*

To be fair, the ideal for an autonomous car is to avoid the need for any direct control in the first place.  GM is working on cars that don't have steering wheels, and I'm sure it's not the only one.

[Commodus]

Just now, VegetableStu said:

still feels pretty scary for some reason o_o like there'd be no agency to correct for out-of-case incidents/accidents

I mean if it's a city that has 80% of the vehicles running fully autonomously I'd feel better...

I suspect that kind of car won't hit public roads for a while, if simply because it needs to handle virtually every driving situation flawlessly.  Even when self-driving cars are genuinely road-ready they'll likely have steering columns as backups, although they may be tucked away most of the time.

[bcredeur97]

Jony Ive's last stand

[yolosnail]

14 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

Jony Ive's last stand

You could say he made a grand exit... I'll see myself out

[descendency]

3 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

still feels pretty scary for some reason o_o like there'd be no agency to correct for out-of-case incidents/accidents

I mean if it's a city that has 80% of the vehicles running fully autonomously I'd feel better...

The goal of autonomous cars can't be to avoid accidents but to reduce them below current human levels. Obviously 0% is the best percentage, but unrealistic. 

 

There are still a lot of things to do before this will ever happen and problems to solve, but that's the goal. 

[abazigal]

9 hours ago, Drak3 said:

That's some serious revisionalist history.

 

Jobs and Ive sacrificed functionality for form. That's all.

Not all functionality matters equally to all users. 

 

Remember the MacBook Air and what Apple was willing to take away to achieve that slim form factor? Well, it made users realise that they didn’t really need a cd drive or that many ports, or were perfectly willing to use an adaptor where necessary. 

 

That in turn inspired the next wave of ultrabooks. Before that, windows laptops were these thick and bulky devices with short battery life. It’s not about seeing how many features you can cram into a product. Design is about accurately assessing what your customers really want in a product. 

 

For many users, a thinner and lighter device is a more functional device, because it’s easier to carry around. On the flip side, having so many ports proved redundant when most users didn’t really need the majority of them, and it just meant needless bulk. 

 

So what Apple really did (for users like myself at least) is strip away functionality that I didn’t need, in exchange for functionality that I could benefit from. 

[Drak3]

2 minutes ago, abazigal said:

Not all functionality matters equally to all users. 

 

Remember the MacBook Air and what Apple was willing to take away to achieve that slim form factor? Well, it made users realise that they didn’t really need a cd drive or that many ports, or were perfectly willing to use an adaptor where necessary. 

 

That in turn inspired the next wave of ultrabooks. Before that, windows laptops were these thick and bulky devices with short battery life. It’s not about seeing how many features you can cram into a product. Design is about accurately assessing what your customers really want in a product. 

 

For many users, a thinner and lighter device is a more functional device, because it’s easier to carry around. On the flip side, having so many ports proved redundant when most users didn’t really need the majority of them, and it just meant needless bulk. 

 

So what Apple really did (for users like myself at least) is strip away functionality that I didn’t need, in exchange for functionality that I could benefit from. 

Again, that's revisionalist history.

 

Apple is far from the first to do just about anything. They just yell the loudest when they do do something.

 

And many of the things aren't uncommon before Apple does them.

[mr moose]

17 hours ago, abazigal said:

He is one of the few people (the other being Steve Jobs) who showed that design can matter in the mass market, and that there are people willing to pay for outstanding design and integration. For the longest time, the conventional wisdom in many tech industries was that design wasn’t important. The end result was shitty software and shitty hardware. Apple’s success has upended the industry’s value system, and today, almost all of Apple’s competitors value design more today than they did a decade ago.

 

Ive's legacy lives on, not just at Apple, but the entire tech industry. 

Yeah, I have to disagree with that.  Having been in and around the industry since the 80's I can assure you that all tech has slowly been evolving to include integrated standards like USB, document formats, print formats, etc.  And contrary to what you might think of apple,  Software functionality was much higher pre-internet.

 

Going back to the 8086 days, Nearly all software worked as described out of the box.  Yet to day with the internet allowing for updates and post release finishing touches we have gone backwards.

[suicidalfranco]

7 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Again, that's revisionalist history.

 

Apple is far from the first to do just about anything. They just yell the loudest when they do do something.

 

And many of the things aren't uncommon before Apple does them.

and vaio was already at that slim form in 2003

[Commodus]

14 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Again, that's revisionalist history.

 

Apple is far from the first to do just about anything. They just yell the loudest when they do do something.

 

And many of the things aren't uncommon before Apple does them.

That's not completely the case.

 

While it's true that there were ultraportables before the MacBook Air, they tended to be very slow and have limited battery life.  Apple's trick was to make a thin and light laptop that offered genuinely decent performance, something that felt like a balance rather than a giant compromise.  It went so far as to have Intel design a processor (the Core 2 Duo S) that would be the template for the 15W processors you see now. 

 

And make no mistake: many companies copied Apple, primarily when the 2010 redesign came out.  Very explicitly in some cases.  Intel even devised an "ultrabook" spec that conveniently fit the dimensions of the MacBook Air.  I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a large chunk of the laptop market you see now was directly influenced by Apple's design choices in the past decade or so.

[mr moose]

7 hours ago, Commodus said:

And make no mistake: many companies copied Apple, primarily when the 2010 redesign came out.  Very explicitly in some cases.  Intel even devised an "ultrabook" spec that conveniently fit the dimensions of the MacBook Air. 

All companies copy all companies,  Some times apple lead the way with and somethings other companies lead the way with.  But promoting the idea that any one company was responsible for any of it is like trying to argue that electricity wouldn't be the same without Edison or that Stephenson invented the train loco.

 

7 hours ago, Commodus said:

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a large chunk of the laptop market you see now was directly influenced by Apple's design choices in the past decade or so.

I do,  you can just as easily go one step before apple and give the glory to Sony.  It's always an evolution, never a single entity.  

 

The most mundane thing about this article, is that it is a news piece pointing out the obvious. It shouldn't even need to exist.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/255706/why_ultrabook_laptops_arent_just_macbook_air_clones.html

[Commodus]

Just now, mr moose said:

All companies copy all companies,  Some times apple lead the way with and somethings other companies lead the way with.  But promoting the idea that any one company was responsible for any of it is like trying to argue that electricity wouldn't be the same without Edison or that Stephenson invented the train loco.

That's true, but also a gross oversimplification.  The fact is that some companies inspire copies far more than others, and Apple is certainly one of them.  The iPhone was primarily responsible for the rise of the fully touchscreen, consumer-oriented smartphone; Google literally rethought its Android strategy because of it (the focus was originally on a BlackBerry-alike).  The iPad is basically the reason why mobile OS-based tablets exist.  And yes, the MacBook Air had a tremendous influence on laptop design, leading to a slew of similar-looking thin-and-light laptops with a class of processors that didn't exist until Apple asked for it.

 

5 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I do,  you can just as easily go one step before apple and give the glory to Sony.  It's always an evolution, never a single entity.  

 

The most mundane thing about this article, is that it is a news piece pointing out the obvious. It shouldn't even need to exist.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/255706/why_ultrabook_laptops_arent_just_macbook_air_clones.html

I'll give credit to companies like Sony for spurring the true ultraportable category, but remember -- the whole point of the MacBook Air was to overcome the weaknesses of laptops like the X505.  Sony's system was ultra-portable, but also extremely limited with a very slow processor and poor battery life.    There hadn't really been a push for a laptop in the middle ground where you had a thin-and-light system but still had enough power that you could actually enjoy using it as a main computer.

 

And yes, I know that to some extent the ultrabook and its offshoots were to some extent the logical paths of the industry.  But the simple reality is that Apple got the ball rolling in earnest, even if it took a couple of years to really figure out what worked.

[mr moose]

15 minutes ago, Commodus said:

That's true, but also a gross oversimplification.  The fact is that some companies inspire copies far more than others, and Apple is certainly one of them.  The iPhone was primarily responsible for the rise of the fully touchscreen, consumer-oriented smartphone; Google literally rethought its Android strategy because of it (the focus was originally on a BlackBerry-alike). 

That's just not true,  Being the first to include a specific feature does not mean that they were responsible for it being used by everyone.  If you want to use that logic then you have to say that ultralights are only a thing because Sony did it.   Android went through about 5 iterations before iPhone was even released. 

 

Quote

The iPad is basically the reason why mobile OS-based tablets exist.  And yes, the MacBook Air had a tremendous influence on laptop design, leading to a slew of similar-looking thin-and-light laptops with a class of processors that didn't exist until Apple asked for it.

 

I'll give credit to companies like Sony for spurring the true ultraportable category, but remember -- the whole point of the MacBook Air was to overcome the weaknesses of laptops like the X505.  Sony's system was ultra-portable, but also extremely limited with a very slow processor and poor battery life.    There hadn't really been a push for a laptop in the middle ground where you had a thin-and-light system but still had enough power that you could actually enjoy using it as a main computer.

 

Not too sure what you are trying to prove here.  ipad is and mobile is just your opinion, not really reflected by any obvious change in mobile trends and trying to claim that apple did something important for the industry by releasing a better performing ultra is like arguing Ferrari changed the face of the auto industry because until then there was real high performance sports car.  

 

Quote

 But the simple reality is that Apple got the ball rolling in earnest, even if it took a couple of years to really figure out what worked.

That's not reality, you have just convinced yourself that it is.  No company holds the title for game changer.  Every product you can buy today is an evolution of products from before it, which they themselves are base on products before them going all the way back to the wheel.  

 

To be honest, I think if apple did do anything that was redefining in the industry it was their marketing division.  That effort has convinced millions of people that apple are responsible for everything. 

[Commodus]

3 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's just not true,  Being the first to include a specific feature does not mean that they were responsible for it being used by everyone.  If you want to use that logic then you have to say that ultralights are only a thing because Sony did it.   Android went through about 5 iterations before iPhone was even released.

Sometimes it is true.  You do know what nearly every smartphone looked like before the iPhone, right?  They either had no touch at all, or had resistive touch that required a pen; they were business-oriented; internet and media functions were practically afterthoughts.  Hell, I still remember how Symbian phones would prompt you to choose a connection type every single time you wanted to do something online.  Flash forward to 2008: RIM rushes out the BlackBerry Storm explicitly to give Verizon an iPhone-alike, Nokia made the 5800 XpressMusic to offer an iPhone-alike, Windows Mobile 6.5 shoehorned in touchscreen features to compete with the iPhone... and of course, the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream was a touchscreen phone because of the iPhone.

 

For that matter, it's well-documented that Google had an about-face on Android when the iPhone was introduced.  Yes, Google had been working on Android for a while, but its main interface strategy died while Andy Rubin was watching Steve Jobs' iPhone introduction.

 

And yes, to some extent Apple does own a debt to Sony.  It's just hard to ignore how that middle ground category exploded only after Apple had success with the MacBook Air.

 

19 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Not too sure what you are trying to prove here.  ipad is and mobile is just your opinion, not really reflected by any obvious change in mobile trends and trying to claim that apple did something important for the industry by releasing a better performing ultra is like arguing Ferrari changed the face of the auto industry because until then there was real high performance sports car.  

How is it just an opinion?  Before the iPad, tablets were almost always Windows PCs without keyboards.  The Samsung Galaxy Tab was designed as a response to the iPad, as were the Motorola Xoom, the LG Optimus Pad and others.  I distinctly remember the marketing, they were neurotically obsessed with countering the iPad.

 

I don't think the Air was just a higher-performing ultraportable; it helped establish a new middle category.

 

24 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's not reality, you have just convinced yourself that it is.  No company holds the title for game changer.  Every product you can buy today is an evolution of products from before it, which they themselves are base on products before them going all the way back to the wheel.  

 

To be honest, I think if apple did do anything that was redefining in the industry it was their marketing division.  That effort has convinced millions of people that apple are responsible for everything. 

Of course there's an evolution, but you can't pretend that certain devices don't spark new categories or rethink old ones.  Technological progress isn't a perfectly steady stream -- there are bursts where products reshape categories and trigger waves of me-too offerings.  Apple doesn't have an exclusive on that by any means (I'd point to devices like Motorola's StarTAC and the IBM PC, for example), but if you've actually followed the tech industry closely, you can mark at least a couple of inflection points where Apple products prompted major industry changes.

[mr moose]

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

Sometimes it is true.  You do know what nearly every smartphone looked like before the iPhone, right?

Yes, they were all slowly becoming rectangles with big screens.

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

  They either had no touch at all, or had resistive touch that required a pen; they were business-oriented; internet and media functions were practically afterthoughts. 

Again, you are trying to argue that because apple first implemented a capacitive multi touch screen that they were the sole reason anyone did.  That's not how it works and a glance over the history of any tech industry will show you that.

 

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

Hell, I still remember how Symbian phones would prompt you to choose a connection type every single time you wanted to do something online.  Flash forward to 2008: RIM rushes out the BlackBerry Storm explicitly to give Verizon an iPhone-alike, Nokia made the 5800 XpressMusic to offer an iPhone-alike, Windows Mobile 6.5 shoehorned in touchscreen features to compete with the iPhone... and of course, the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream was a touchscreen phone because of the iPhone.

none of that invalidates anything I've said, nor anything anyone else has said. 

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

For that matter, it's well-documented that Google had an about-face on Android when the iPhone was introduced.  Yes, Google had been working on Android for a while, but its main interface strategy died while Andy Rubin was watching Steve Jobs' iPhone introduction.

point? citation? anything that makes this claim even remotely relevant?

 

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

And yes, to some extent Apple does own a debt to Sony.  It's just hard to ignore how that middle ground category exploded only after Apple had success with the MacBook Air.

 

How is it just an opinion?  Before the iPad, tablets were almost always Windows PCs without keyboards.  The Samsung Galaxy Tab was designed as a response to the iPad, as were the Motorola Xoom, the LG Optimus Pad and others.  I distinctly remember the marketing, they were neurotically obsessed with countering the iPad.

And?

 

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

I don't think the Air was just a higher-performing ultraportable; it helped establish a new middle category.

You keep saying that, but it's not true,  introducing faster products is not the same as creating new products.   It seems the whole concept of "middle category" is just another way to try and pedistool a product.

 

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

Of course there's an evolution, but you can't pretend that certain devices don't spark new categories or rethink old ones.  Technological progress isn't a perfectly steady stream -- there are bursts where products reshape categories and trigger waves of me-too offerings.  Apple doesn't have an exclusive on that by any means (I'd point to devices like Motorola's StarTAC and the IBM PC, for example), but if you've actually followed the tech industry closely, you can mark at least a couple of inflection points where Apple products prompted major industry changes.

 

The difference is I am not exaggerating that change the way you are.  All companies add something,  no companies adds that much that they are the cause of industry wide change.

[kokakolia]

Is it hard to admit that Apple prompted major industry changes? 

 

To me the funniest example of that was the headphone jack. Apple wasn’t the first company to release a phone without one. But after Apple released the iPhone 7 without the headphone jack, suddenly every Chinese manufacturer released phones without headphone jacks. And then almost everyone followed. And now the headphone jack is making a slow comeback.

 

 

[Drak3]

2 minutes ago, kokakolia said:

Is it hard to admit that Apple prompted major industry changes? 

Yes, because it isn't true.