Thoughts on Ive’s departure, and Gruber’s take
TLDR: it’s been clear for some time that Ive was on his way out. Creativity is a process defined by renewal and change, and the only surprising aspect to all of this is that Ive stayed around for so long. Gruber is concerned that there is no replacement for the Chief Designer role, and as such, no clear indication of who will be the final arbiter of design at Apple. I hear his concerns, but believe it’s time to think differently about how good design happens and focus not on design messiahs but rather on the teams that build great products together.
There is much panic throughout the web - and I am sure on the 11 o’clock news across America tonight - about Jony Ive’s departure from Apple. The stock has dropped in after hours trading, and panic has or will set in for many. However, Apple’s institutional structure will, in my view, take it far and the design house within the company is, by all accounts, still strong. After all, we’ve seen many good products in the last few years (Airpods, iPhone X, iPad Pro (2018), and Mac Pro (2019)), even with Ive clearly focused elsewhere. I don’t think this change of leadership is fatal, though things are certainly shifting into unknown territory.
John Gruber shared his thoughts this evening about the announcement. Starting with his thoughts on the relationship between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive.
My gut sense for years has been that Ive without Jobs has been like McCartney without Lennon. Or Lennon without McCartney — take whichever analogical pairing you prefer. My point here is only that the fruit of their collaborations were, seemingly magically, far greater than the sums of the duos’ talents and tastes.
One thing I do know — which Cook alludes to in his statement above, and which I think was made crystal clear in Ian Parker’s extraordinary 2015 profile of Ive in The New Yorker, which is, in my opinion, the most insightful piece ever written about post-Jobs Apple — is that Jony Ive had moved beyond designing computers. And let’s be clear: the entire point of Apple has always been and should always remain designing computers. Everything they make is a computer. Their genius in recent years has been making things that don’t seem like computers but really are computers. Apple Watch is a computer. AirPods are computers. We’ve got computers — excellent computers — in our fucking ears. That’s Apple.
Gruber goes on to say that Ive’s focus had clearly turned elsewhere, including most notably on Apple Park.
Ive is being “replaced” by two people, a hardware design lead (Evans Hankey) and a software design lead (Alan Dye). Both reporting to COO Jeff Williams. Gruber is, to say the least, concerned:
It makes me queasy to see that Apple’s chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can’t see how that comes from operations. I don’t think that “chief design officer” should have been a one-off title created just for Jony Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don’t think Ive ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer.
I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced.
And, for what it is worth, Gruber is not a fan of the knighthood designation mentioned in the Apple PR Announcement:
Fuck this “sir” shit. We don’t have titles in the United States.
This seems like an odd thing to focus so strongly on.
In any event, I think Gruber’s main point - that there is no clear indication of who will be leading design decisions at Apple - is fair. This does seem messy. In particular, there is some suggestion in the announcement that Jeff Williams is now a big product guy (b/c there is now some new leadership underneath him in the operations wing who will take on more responsibility, freeing up Williams for other work). Williams has indeed been leading the Apple Watch program, which has seen success. But, my feeling is that his interest has been driven by the health capabilities of the Watch, and not on the overall product (including hardware and software design). Maybe I’m wrong and Williams has transformed himself into a design and product type, but the chief of operation seems like an odd lead of the design wing of Apple.
Neil Cybart at Above Avalon has long opined that Apple’s key differentiation is its strong sense of design as a singular guiding principle. Design of the UI, the hardware, the experience. Apple’s products are a complete thought, designed and crafted from end to end. Will this continue to be true, can it?
It is, as they say, dangerous to compare then to now, but Apple’s best years have correlated with strong design leadership. Jobs, and then Jobs-Ive, and finally Ive alone.
What’s next? What will we, one day, call this coming era? Will it have a single headline name, will it be the “Williams” era? Or, is it time to think different?
I think it is. Apple is big, like, the biggest company ever big. And to define the products of the last few years as solely the work of one man, or of one mind, is unfair and misguided. Apple is secretive, and as a result we tend to only focus on the people Apple chooses to talk. But, it is clear that there are huge, very talented teams working on the products there. We should celebrate them, and their work. While it’s hard to give them a short, easy to remember label, we must focus on the results of their work. And if the last year or so is any indication (post butterfly keyboard, and dongle-mania, which I believe were the last big things Ive probably worked on), they are today firing on all cylinders. Ive’s best decision is to recognize that, and take his cue to move on to what is next.
