None of those things were mistakes, they were choices made as a result of tradeoffs that people agonized over.
I think it makes perfect sense to me, Ive seems like he's got a big personality and a laser focus on a set of things he has a deep deep understanding of. Without Jobs maybe there was nobody to challenge Ive and thus the balance was pulled too far toward his vision and the greater picture has suffered.
And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.
Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr.) That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.
But it wasn't for executives. It was supposed to be a downmarket phone. You may think the colors were horrid, but I think they added much needed character to the iPhone line, much like the XRs.
Except Apple has previously found wild success in selling brightly colored devices down market, see the original iPod Mini for example. A selection of colors both appeals to the sort of person they are targeting with the lower end device (teens/young adults) while also preserving the marketshare of their higher end device by turning off the kind of older, more reserved buyer who might otherwise buy the less expensive option. There's also the entire Apple lineup in the early "Second Coming of Jobs" era with the iMac and, to a lesser extent, the Power Mac G3.
Design-wise, I really wanted one. Technology-wise, I couldn’t justify it.
Prominent finance people criticize other finance people for their decisions all of the time (Buffet et al). I think I could name a hundred other professions where this is also true (I use finance as a good analog). Just because <insert prominent professional> makes a criticism doesn't make it suddenly true.
I personally hated iOS7. Guess what, it clearly didn't stop people from buying more iPhones[0]. At the end of the day, Arment, Heliemann, and Gruber can all take a seat while iOS single-handedly rakes in billions for Apple. This is how business works.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/276306/global-apple-ipho...
Furthermore I also thought I put in enough qualifiers in my statement that I did not have to defend it as being my overarching philosophy regarding every situation it might possibly be applied to. After I wrote the preceding sentence I proceeded to write another 3 paragraphs until I realized that I was actually writing a bad version of an essay on aesthetics and requirements for being able to speak with critical insight, so I erased those paragraphs and here we are.
You can put a lot of thought into something and still make a mistake.
I got the sense there was a conflation of "didn't do things the way I wanted" and "poor design choices".
Every design choice is a tradeoff and industrial design is about making the right tradeoffs. He did not make the right tradeoffs. He regularly sacrificed functionality for the looks, and preferred form over function. While I do respect many of the things he did, I am glad his time at Apple is coming to an end.
This is something I have had a hard time with over the years... I even emailed Jony in hte past abt some of the design "choices" that were made that REALLY irkd and cost me and MILLIONS of users too much money.
The overall body design of the iphone has been "sleek and slick" -- meaning that it was WAY too easy to drop and break.
The physical phone should have been more heartily designed from day one - and allowed for a lanyard attachement bracket on all models.
Screw the people who claim things like: OH that was a design decision to keep the 'vision' blah blah blah -- esp. and including specifically Ive.
The reason is that 'aesthetic design decision' cost consumers billions over the years.
I have a 6S+ -- my ~27th iphone
The argument is "why dont you go get a case!"
Why should such a 'perfect' design, so perfect where it doesnt want a lanyard or other safety features interrupting its elegance, require a case?
So, Fuck Ive worship.
I like the phone, I've had every iteration up to the 6S+ (which is my favorite, and I have had many of them. but I am not going to praise the shortcomings of the device and hero-worship the guy.
The original Magic Trackpad should've had a port for wired connections. That would've allowed you to avoid having to constantly change batteries, as well as avoid the flaming garbage can that is bluetooth. At least they listened and fixed these issues with Magic Trackpad 2.
At a fundamental level Ios7 relied on color instead of texture for visual segmentation — and I’m not sure about others but the texture processing hardware in my brain is about a million times more reliable at performing segmentation tasks than any subtle abstract color blend detection engine in my brain will ever be ...
I hope that whatever new design mentality arises after this change is able to better improve the efficiency with which im able to use my devices - and that the devices are once again striving to meet me as an actual human rather than chasing some local optimum that might exist by imagining some 1 or 2D abstract idea of a human ...
The battery had to be reduced in thickness, so it had to get wider and/or taller, and now we have iPad minis as phones.
-edit
...and Jobs was not keen on the iPad minis.
— Steve Jobs
And I say this as someone who is terribly excited Ive is leaving and hoping for more funcional products.
In his shoes and with his talent and ability to leave, I also would not have agreed to be in charge of all design only to have Steve Jobs keep veto power over me.
You can can be an absolute genius as a collaborator but stumble a bit when working without someone around who can tell you ‘no’. There are a lot of brilliant writers who absolutely need a good editor.
Sometimes it takes working with specific types of people to bring out someone's talent in the best way. I think Steve Jobs did that for Jony Ive in a unique way - it brought out the best in his work.
This goal was so overachieved than young readers probably will have to google the term.
Apple knew that various size iPhones were in the pipe.
In other words, the function, not the form.
It's possible to be preternaturally talented and still either (a) make mistakes, especially balancing priorities (say, thinness vs utility) (b) get into situations that are beyond the range where talent is a guarantee of success.
For me, the most striking change in iOS 7 was that the icons lost all of their character. I put together some before and after examples:
https://i.imgur.com/hg8s50I.png
The design was... sterilized. I specifically remember that when I updated my iPad and saw the new Safari icon, I said, out loud, "what the fuck is that?"
Again, I don't know anything about usability or- well, I don't even know enough to have the vocabulary to describe what I don't know about design. But I thought the new icons were really dumb.
More to the point. Why did they need to be changed? What was so wrong with the way they were that a hundred million users needed to re-learn a user interface?
These two sentences don't make sense when read together. If Apple design -- hardware and software -- declined during Ive's rein that, to me, is evidence that Ive is not preternaturally talented. The moment iOS 7 was unveiled at WWDC I knew Emperor Ive is wearing no clothes. The number of basic design mistakes iOS 7 was astounding.