The gold watch had two distinct purposes: As one note, I found the criticism that Jony wanted a gold watch so that made the Apple Watch a boondoggle to be enormously hilarious. During the period, the company has shipped some enormously successful products - including the major category hit Apple Watch. What prolific designer do you know that is excited about doing more management and less design?Īlso, I fully reject the narrative that Apple has somehow floundered because Jony has been absentee. But the more important point is that no one I know felt that Jony had checked out or abandoned the team.Īs he stated himself, Jony was just plain tired. There are also bits and pieces in the various stories over the past few days that are not, as I understand them, accurate, or represented in an accurate context. The design teams, in and out of the industrial design people, absolutely saw less of him than before. He has absolutely spent more time in the city than down at Apple headquarters over the past few years. He has a design studio in other homes like Hawaii and London. They absolutely held design meetings at The Battery to collate device opinion. ![]() Jony did, in fact, move to holding design meetings at his house in SF. Given that I have covered the company closely for years, I know a lot of the people who were involved in some of these situations. I do have thoughts, though, about the way that these anecdotes are tied together in a narrative. I’ve never been that good at it and I don’t really have the stomach for it these days. So I will not be fisking the stories that have come out about Jony and his work habits. ![]() I’m not the Journal’s (or any other publication’s, thank god) public editor. This is a crucially important point that many in the public sphere miss.”Īll of that growth means that the job of someone like Jony would naturally shift from scooting a pencil around a drafting board to something more like management - or, in Apple’s case, teaching. “Wanting Apple to go back to the days when some of the designs were more bold, iconic, possibly polarizing, but in that time Apple was selling tens of millions of products not hundreds of millions of products. “Many of Apple’s critics are purely nostalgic,” Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies puts it. Enormous growth in product volumes, splintering product lines that made an attempt to leave less room under the pricing and feature umbrella and, yeah, a hell of a lot more people. And the past decade of Apple has been nothing if not an explosion of management challenges. Shocking, this was not - a surprise it was always guaranteed to be given how much control Jony keeps over how and when he does press.īack in 2015, it was clear that Jony wanted to do less paper pushing and more pencil pushing. Most watchers of the company that I know who were asking and listening to Apple people over the past couple of years are aware that Jony has been on borrowed time with the company. Tim Cook’s email (actually quite plainly stated) was touted as “scathing” the Journal posited the question: “Why hasn’t Apple had a hit product in years? A look at the internal drama around the departure of its design chief helps explain.” A conclusion that its story only hints at. Ironically (or perhaps inevitably), even the phrasing of the tweets that accompanied these stories were couched in inflammatory positioning. If you take the sum of the breathless (dare I say thirsty) stories tying together a bunch of anecdotes about Jony’s last couple of years, they are trying to paint a picture of a legendary design figure that has abandoned the team and company he helped build, leading to a stagnation of forward progress - while at the same time trying to argue that the company is doomed without him. If those narratives look contradictory, then you have eyes. Jony had checked out, become incompetent or just plain lazy. ![]() The narratives, to summarize, are essentially that: The response to this news has been predictably histrionic from Apple watchers and press. After almost 30 years with Apple, Jony Ive is leaving to found his own firm, LoveFrom, with his friend and frequent collaborator Marc Newson - also leaving Apple.
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