“If Tim Cook left tomorrow, that would be a problem,” said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple observer and managing partner at Loup Ventures. There are an estimated 900 million Apple smartphones in circulation, and 500 million of its other devices.Īs CEO Tim Cook focuses on delivering better software to keep customers, rather than luring in new ones with another “one more thing” device, an industrial design deity like Ive has become less and less relevant to the company’s bottom line. Today, the pace of hardware innovation has slowed and updates to the iPhone are only incremental. I have a lot of trust in their ability to continue in the fashion they’ve been designing in for the last 20 years.”īut the next 20 years are likely to look very different for Apple, for reasons that have nothing to do with Ive’s leaving, although they help to explain its timing. “Apple has a great team and a great culture that will endure. “I don’t think anybody is surprised by it,” said Yves Behar, founder of Fuseproject, a Silicon Valley design firm. Ive, whose design discipline was all about stripping away the unnecessary to reach the essential, had succeeded in making himself superfluous. The market’s nonchalance would have been unthinkable even five years ago, when Apple was still a company known for its category-defining product launches polished to perfection by Ive’s design team. But it didn’t nosedive in the way Ive fretted about, pondering his eventual exit in a 2015 New Yorker profile. When he announced his complete departure from Apple last month, along with plans to open a new design firm, LoveFrom, with Marc Newson, the company’s stock dipped. He gave up day-to-day managerial duties, increasingly held meetings near his San Francisco home rather than make the trek down the Peninsula to Cupertino, and devoted his energy toward seeing Apple Park - the perfectly circular spaceship of a headquarters that he had conceived with Jobs - through to completion. Since 2015, after the release of the Apple Watch - one of his signature products, especially in its ultra-luxe iterations - Ive had been scaling back his involvement in the company. Instead of disappearing into the countryside, he ascended, succeeding Jobs as Apple’s top product visionary and the enforcer of its unique aesthetic, which seeks to pare away all but what’s essential. The incredible success of the iPhone, combined with the terminal illness of CEO Steve Jobs, forced Ive to put those plans on hold. As early as 2007, when the chubby original iPhone was first being assembled in China, Ive, who goes by Jony, was contemplating an early retirement to a 17th-century mansion in the West of England, where he could tinker on the occasional luxury product while being close to his family.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |