“I think most of the products would have still succeeded if the software was just as good. “Jony Ive gets a lot of credit for polishing up the laptops, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, when a lot of that credit belongs to the software designers who really made them easy to use,” Merchant said. Just as Jobs had his famed “reality distortion field,” Ives’ aura acquired a life of its own. Possessing some of the same traits as Jobs, he was a natural figurehead after the latter’s death from pancreatic cancer. Ive possessed a genius for taking the fruits of Apple’s research and development, and turning them into things that even un-techie consumers yearned to hold in their hands. When Jon Rubenstein, then the head of Apple’s hardware engineering, convened a team to build a portable music player out of new hard drive technology, Ive was in place to hone the iPod’s milky surface and shine its metallic back.Ĭrucially, according to Brian Merchant, author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone,” Ive used his institutional clout to give two user interface designers who were working on touch-screen prototypes in the early 2000s, Imran Chaudhri and Bas Ording, room to experiment. The iMac marked the company’s return to prominence and Ive’s ascent to the top of Apple’s organizational chart, where he became a close collaborator with the famously dictatorial Jobs. At the time, Apple seemed like a has-been, a maker of niche products for nerds who disdained the corporate hegemony of Microsoft but didn’t want to learn enough about computers to build their own. Ive entered the computer consumer’s consciousness with the release of the candy-colored iMacs in 1998, after Jobs returned to the company and found him toiling in obscurity, sitting on a sheaf of good ideas. “Even though you could talk about Tim Cook and Jony Ive in the same sentence, for the last few years they’ve made very different contributions - Cook is someone who is actively involved, versus someone who has been evolving out of their role.” “If Tim Cook left tomorrow, that would be a problem,” said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple observer and managing partner at Loup Ventures. There are an estimated 900 million Apple smartphones in circulation, and 500 million of its other devices.Īs CEO Tim Cook focuses on delivering better software to keep customers, rather than luring in new ones with another “one more thing” device, an industrial design deity like Ive has become less and less relevant to the company’s bottom line. Today, the pace of hardware innovation has slowed and updates to the iPhone are only incremental. I have a lot of trust in their ability to continue in the fashion they’ve been designing in for the last 20 years.”īut the next 20 years are likely to look very different for Apple, for reasons that have nothing to do with Ive’s leaving, although they help to explain its timing. “Apple has a great team and a great culture that will endure. ![]() “I don’t think anybody is surprised by it,” said Yves Behar, founder of Fuseproject, a Silicon Valley design firm. Ive, whose design discipline was all about stripping away the unnecessary to reach the essential, had succeeded in making himself superfluous. The market’s nonchalance would have been unthinkable even five years ago, when Apple was still a company known for its category-defining product launches polished to perfection by Ive’s design team. But it didn’t nosedive in the way Ive fretted about, pondering his eventual exit in a 2015 New Yorker profile. When he announced his complete departure from Apple last month, along with plans to open a new design firm, LoveFrom, with Marc Newson, the company’s stock dipped. He gave up day-to-day managerial duties, increasingly held meetings near his San Francisco home rather than make the trek down the Peninsula to Cupertino, and devoted his energy toward seeing Apple Park - the perfectly circular spaceship of a headquarters that he had conceived with Jobs - through to completion. ![]() Since 2015, after the release of the Apple Watch - one of his signature products, especially in its ultra-luxe iterations - Ive had been scaling back his involvement in the company. Instead of disappearing into the countryside, he ascended, succeeding Jobs as Apple’s top product visionary and the enforcer of its unique aesthetic, which seeks to pare away all but what’s essential. The incredible success of the iPhone, combined with the terminal illness of CEO Steve Jobs, forced Ive to put those plans on hold. ![]() As early as 2007, when the chubby original iPhone was first being assembled in China, Ive, who goes by Jony, was contemplating an early retirement to a 17th-century mansion in the West of England, where he could tinker on the occasional luxury product while being close to his family.
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