> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you.

Agreed with this. When you're coming to the CDO position after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that company, most recently as the head of both human interface and industrial design across the entire organization, and having been described as being the person with the most operational power at Apple, after Steve Jobs himself, even before being promoted, my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that produced these designs, and that he was aware of and approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than that.

But since in this thread we are being asked to hold ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or made my data available for replication at this time. I'm just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.

> my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar

Ive is part of the Senior Leadership Team.

No major decision in the company sneaks under his radar.

But that doesn't mean he is responsible for every decision.

There's a big difference between "Jony Ive, as CDO, must have signed off on this, and thus bears responsibility for it" and "Jony Ive was pushing for this, for these specific reasons".

> Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.

This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out.

You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something.

It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof.

And speaking of your first comment:

> Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.

... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades?

So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge?

Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year.

So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.

> You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something.

This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.

You're naming people that are managing entire companies.

The person in charge of design, for a company that has a handful of physical products, is a completely different situation. It's reasonable to blame them for top level product design decisions. What happens in that specific realm is what they want. The top priority of their job is those few dozen decisions. The opposite of a CEO that's overseeing ten thousand different things.

Be a little less stuck on the word 'pushing'. The fact is, when it's one of the main things you're in charge of choosing, and you allow a decision and then stand by it for a long time, you are now pushing it.

Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman.

Kevin Scott is a CTO. He's in charge of top level product technical decisions

The top priority of his job is those few dozen decisions.

Be a little less stuck on the word "Director". The fact is, when you're one of the main people in charge of allowing decisions, it's not the same as personally championing them.

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> Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with that wording, you're upset at a strawman.

You know you can just read the comment I referred to right if you've already forgotten right?

The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.

Does that sound like personally assigning blame to Johnny Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said Ive's team or something, but it's the common refrain parroted on this site

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If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod, do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod".

You see how there's a difference there even though both acknowledge that John has a part in what happened?

It's not that complicated to see the difference if you've ever interacted with any sort of situation where the buck actually stopped with leadership, but I guess that's not universal.

> Kevin Scott is a CTO. He's in charge of top level product technical decisions

Then it's probably fair to blame him for some high-level decisions. But technical decisions go well beyond design, and microsoft has so many products, so it's harder to say how much you can point at him.

> The top priority of his job is those few dozen decisions.

I honestly have no idea which few dozen you mean. Across all of microsoft? I could list a bunch for "apple product design", like the way airpods fit, the decision to have no holes in airtags, the keyboard and touch bar choices in macbooks, etc.

Maybe the start menu location? You could probably blame him for the choice of xbox models too. I'm not singling out Apple in saying that executives should be considered responsible for certain high-level decisions.

> Be a little less stuck on the word "Director".

I'm stuck on the word "design". He's the design guy.

> The fact is, when you're one of the main people in charge of allowing decisions, it's not the same as personally championing them.

If it's one of the top few most important decisions under your job purview, the difference is so minor as to not matter outside the company.

> Does that sound like personally assigning blame to Johnny Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said Ive's team or something, but it's the common refrain parroted on this site

Assigning him blame is not the same as saying he 'pushed' it. The buck stops here for design. He gets the blame because he strongly approved it and he could have easily spent entire days on the decision because that's the core of his job, and spending enough time on the decision is also his job.

> If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod, do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod".

John decided to delete a database in prod. Ive decided to go with this keyboard.

Assuming the delete wasn't accidental, because the keyboard definitely wasn't accidental! If it was an accident this analogy isn't relevant.

Just putting this out there [1] - Steve Jobs would have rightfully put responsibility for these design changes under the Chief Design Officer.

"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."

In other words, you have no excuse for failure. You are now responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn't matter what you say.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference...

I think it's fair to say that Jony was ultimately the DRI ("directly responsible individual" in Apple-speak) for all industrial design, so he "owns" it, which is a bit above "signing off" or "accepting", whether or not he was personally pushing for something.

This is a bit of a quirk of how Apple structures responsibility, and makes it a bit more fair to say that "Jony made a disliked change" in a way that doesn't quite apply at Google or Microsoft, where responsibility tends to be a bit more diffuse.

DRI has expanded throughout the tech industry, I can't remember the last time I was on a team that didn't use the concept.

But I provided a simple analogy above.

Say John manages Joe and is the DRI for data storage. If Joe goes and deletes the production database, John has some blame even though he didn't personally delete the database.

Do you not see the difference between saying "John deleted production?" and "John's subordinate deleted production?"

Both are assigning some blame to John, but only one is factually true.

This entire conversations almost feels like the typical HN inability to realize the world is not black and white.

It's like people need Johnny Ives to personally have opened up a CAD drawing and shrunk the MBP because it's utterly impossible that a larger team decided on the vision for an entire flagship possible.

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Lol the replies. What a weird way to dodge a simple question lol.

"John's subordinate deleted production" implies that John is partially responsible, but accurately reflects he did not personally delete it.

You're not even mentioning Joe, you're accurately reflecting John was in charge, but you're also not lying and saying John did it.

I work at Apple, I'm a senior engineer - been there for almost 2 decades. I'm DRI on a few things here and there.

Not a single decision is made on things that I am DRI on without me being a part of that decision. I may not get my way if I'm over-ruled for corporate reasons, but I know about it, and being the DRI, I get a slightly-larger-than-average say in what happens. Generally it takes a director or VP to over-rule what I want, and then the radar is very clearly marked as such.

Apple takes the concept of the DRI very seriously. You don't give responsibility without also giving power.

My opinion: There is zero chance (not "a small chance", zero chance) that Jony Ive didn't sign off on, and explicitly endorse the Touch Bar. Something that obvious, in that commanding a position in the user interface would never have escaped his personal input and attention.

Thank you for saying this, your personal experience here is just about the best insight we could ask for. Subjectively, there's an odd lack of current Apple engineers weighing in on threads here at HN relative to other FAANG companies. I've often wondered if the company's rules were stricter.

Apple engineers are generally shy to weigh in as Apple engineers. Apple takes the "opinions my own" more seriously than most.

Isn't it well-known that Apple's culture is extremely secretive?

"John was responsible for production having been deleted" because of the systems and processes he did or did not put in place. At a high enough level of abstraction, this is all that matters.

Jony was responsible for the Touch Bar.

Anyway, some evidence: "For years, Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive has expressed a desire for the iPhone to appear like a single sheet of glass", suggesting that this could have been part of a larger overall design direction. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-unlikely-to-make-big-chan...)

I'd be willing to bet that they mocked up MacBooks with full touchscreen keyboards.

Further, I don't think it's a coincidence that I don't mind typing an email (core C-level activity) on an iPad on-screen keyboard, but I'd find it infuriating to try to code on.

John’s subordinate asks John if he should delete production. John says go ahead.

People say a lot of things about gate's Microsoft, Ballmer's microsoft, Job's apple, and Larry page's Google.

> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you.

That's only because in your ignorant reality you have made it so.

The actual reality is that what constitutes a product is so much more than just the design. For example it includes what features should and shouldn't be there. And that is a decision largely coming from the Product team. Or how it works. Which comes from Hardware Engineering team.