That Ive had one foot out the door for years was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. It's not a coincidence that that
Designed by Apple in California came out when it did. Remember that?
Not to toot my own horn (okay yes I am), but I wrote something in that thread that I thought was pretty relevant in retrospect:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Robo
There's another argument, not that Apple shouldn't be selling their superior design monograph but that they shouldn't have even bothered to produce one in the first place, that even an hour of Jony Ive's time spent thinking about this book is too much when he should be glue-gunning Xeons into Mac Pros or whatever. But I think that argument is also weak, and the reason why is that Apple is a company made up of people. This means that, yes, those people have egos and care about things like their "legacy." But much more importantly, it means that those people also leave and retire and die, and new people have to learn Apple's way of doing things. This is of extreme importance to Apple, because Apple's way of doing things has been enormously successful.
Imagine that Jony Ive had decided that he wanted to pass on what he has learned in his career so far, and wrote a treatise enumerating his principles of design. Such a book would have huge educational value, would it not? Not just within Apple, but to the design world at large. It would cause an immediate sensation among the people that care about chamfers and fonts. Jony Ive and his team have shaped some of the most popular products in history and defined and redefined what the very idea of "high technology" looks and feels like. Who wouldn't want to study their guiding principles? Could Apple afford not to document them?
I would posit that this is that book.
[snip]
Jony Ive leads the most renowned industrial design studio in the world. If he led an independent Ive & Co., a monograph like this wouldn't just be expected at this point in his career, it would be anticipated. Of course, Jony Ive's studio is owned by Apple, which is its only "client." But that doesn't mean that the people that work there care any less about putting "their book on the shelf," so to speak, and if anything it makes it extra important for that "client" to preserve their values.
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It's tempting to draw a line between Ive leaving and recent events, like he stormed out in a huff because Tim told him to make the laptop keyboards 1 mm thicker, or because they wouldn't let him make the Apple Car interior as luxe as the one in his Bentley Continental. But I think this has been in the works for far longer than the recent keyboard kerfuffle, and I'm not sure he was even that involved in the design of the recent MacBooks anyway.
I'm not going to say that Ive leaving is a good thing or a bad thing, because honestly I think it's not going to lead to huge changes. I think Ive's values have become Apple's values, in almost the same way Steve's values have. Or perhaps Ive's values always were the same as Steve's values, which is why he stayed at Apple as long as he did.