Or for the refusal to make any strong choice at all, which may be why we’ve been seeing so many similar iPhones and iPads over the past few years, so many Macs with groundbreaking components and laurel-resting designs. If design by committee has been the de facto approach for the past four years, it’s now been made official.Ĭommittees tend not to make blunders–it takes a strong leader to really mess something up–but they do have an instinct for unsatisfactory compromise. This week we also got the news that Ive’s replacement will not be replaced, with a core group of 20 designers instead reporting directly to the chief operating officer, who is no stranger to design and likely has his own ideas. Maybe Apple is no longer a company that focuses on individual personality, or indeed on thinking different. The Action button is nice, but it’s also the sort of thing that almost any tech company would have made. But the presence of a strong personality at the head of the design team meant Apple was better equipped to take risks, and more likely to create products with its own cultural imprint.
SIR JONY IVE MAC
In broader terms, his arch-minimalism could be frustrating for those who wanted more physical controls, and one suspects that his departure was an important factor in the Apple Watch finally being allowed a much-appreciated extra button and the Mac Studio getting front-facing ports. That doesn’t mean Apple’s designs on his watch were always perfect, of course there were plenty of missteps. What Ive brought to Apple was a coherent personal vision. And while each individual contribution made sense in isolation, the result was a farcical dongle and scores of unimpressed reviewers. One member of the team will have championed the adoption of USB-C another will have insisted on a budget design with no room for a magnetic charging connector and a third will have explained why the Apple Pencil 3 option wasn’t feasible.
Would the details-obsessed Ive, for example, have put up with the 10th-gen iPad’s Apple Pencil support? With no dominant voice leading the way–Tim Cook doesn’t seem the type to pull rank on design decisions, while Ive’s successor, Evans Hankey, doesn’t have anything near the same clout–one suspects the solution was reached via committee. It’s difficult not to imagine the direction that certain Apple products might have taken in the past few years if Chingford’s finest still had his hand on the tiller. Officially his tenure as head of the Cupertino design shop ended in 2019 with a consultancy arrangement continuing until last year, but it’s generally felt that his involvement in the day-to-day design work reduced significantly when he was given the title of Chief Design Officer in 2015. Nevertheless, Ive’s extracurricular activities will likely trigger a sense of “what might have been” among seasoned Apple watchers.
0 kommentar(er)
