The Apple world this morning seems divided between those who seemingly haven’t grasped the implications of Apple’s ‘promotion’ of Jony Ive, merely taking Cook’s memo at face value, and those switching into full-on ‘Apple is doomed’ mode. The reality is, I think, a little more nuanced.
It seems pretty clear that this move is, as Seth outlined earlier, about Ive taking more of a backseat role – and especially being able to spend a lot more time back in England. Apple’s decision to announce the news on a day when the US markets were closed was obviously not coincidence.
Apple didn’t want to see a knee-jerk panic reaction on Wall Street setting its stock diving. But is there reason to panic? Or is it all much ado about nothing? Or something between the two … ?
Let’s start with Ive giving up management responsibilities. This is, in my view, a non-event. For all I know, Ive may be the best manager in the world, the master of budget forecasts, the maestro of people management, the– Ok, I’ve run out of superlatives beginning with M. But given that he speaks with great passion about design, and barely mentions management in any of his interviews, I strongly suspect that he has merely tolerated management responsibilities as the price of being in charge of design.
But what of taking a more back-seat role on design? That, surely, is a pretty big deal?
There’s no question that Ive has been massively influential in modern industrial design, and his work a huge part of Apple’s success. For all his famed modesty in interviews, his talk of teams and saying ‘we’ far more than ‘I’, there’s no doubt that Apple’s design language is very much born from Ive’s personal vision.
But his modesty does also reflect a reality of large corporations. Apple works very hard to present itself to the world as a small entity run by a few friendly and familiar faces. Steve Jobs was for many years almost the sole face of Apple. Today, we see more faces than we used to. Not just Tim Cook and Jony Ive, but also Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, Phil Schiller, Angela Ahrendts.
But that’s still a pretty small small group of faces for the largest company in the world by market cap. For every familiar face, there are hundreds of unknown ones, quietly doing incredibly important work behind the scenes. And that’s true of industrial and user interface design too. There’s Richard Howarth and Alan Dye, of course – both faces we’re going to see a lot more of in the coming months. But behind them are a whole army of talented designers and UX experts.
There’s no contradiction here between the two views I’ve expressed: that Apple’s design language stems from one man’s personal vision, and that nothing Apple produces is ever designed by one person. The vision may be Ive’s, but the realization of that vision is the work of a whole team of people.
We don’t even know for sure if the change announced represents much of a shift from what happens today. Does Ive spend most of his time beavering away on CAD systems, making clay models and personally exploring the properties of hundreds of different materials? Or does his team do most of the hands-on work while Ive provides the direction, the feedback, the suggestions, the yes or no decisions?
It could well be the latter, in which case very little need change.
But either way, it’s not hard to see that the latter approach could serve Apple well in future. Ive has created a very well-established Apple design language. He works with a team of bright, thoughtful people who have years of experience at working within that language.
Even for a completely new Apple product, it’s not like Ive is the only man on the planet who can come up with an amazing design that completely fits into the Apple product family. If Ive were to do nothing more than set the criteria and outline the vision, providing feedback and guidance on the different iterations, we’d still get great designs. Indeed, given the experience his team has, we’d still get great designs if Ive just waited for his team to come up with ideas and said ‘add X, remove Y, change Z then come back and show me another one.’
But I doubt that’s what’s going to happen here. Sure, management responsibilities are difficult to fulfill remotely – but design can be done from anywhere. Ive would be as capable of leading design direction whether sitting in a lab in Cupertino or in a home office in England.
And while he could clearly well afford to retire, I don’t see that happening. Offload management stuff, absolutely. Reduce his day-to-day workload, definitely. But it’s clear Ive still loves, eats and breathes design. He couldn’t give it up if he wanted to. And, honestly, Apple would be pretty dumb to give Ive a new C-level title (only the third one in the company) shortly before having to announce his retirement.
So I suspect his new role will be somewhere between the two extremes. A certain amount of hands-on design work. A certain amount of strategic direction. A certain amount of feedback, guidance, decision-making.
But even in the worst of cases, no one individual is indispensable. Apple clearly has an amazing team of designers, well-versed in what it is that makes a design ‘Apple.’ With or without Ive, they will continue to do great work. Life would go on. Apple design would go on. Apple would not be doomed (though the pronouncements that it is would go on).
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Nah, he’s got a C-level position now. If anything this news tells me his time is being freed up to work on big things at Apple.
You’re correct. Aaaaand…we have a 9-5 clickbait headline. Nothing about moving anyone to a C seat should our would indicate a problem, especially from a stock and investor standpoint. Quite the opposite, actually. I understand that news is scant post Watch, but 9-5 are the only ones trying to find a problem with this shift. The only thing this move indicates is that the design leadership is expanding, and Ive (as he should) can get out of the weeds and focus holistically on Apple, above and beyond product.
Rather the reverse: I’m arguing that it isn’t a problem …
C’mon though. The headline is Motley Fool grade click bait pure and simple (I know you know). The rest of the write was great.
It just feels like a page out of Jay Yarrow’s book, i.e. how to turn Business Insider into the The Sun.
Nothing about a C chair indicates any less involvement or a backseat at all. The only outcome of this is even more influence over a more competent design team as is the case with any other C chair at any other company. There just isn’t any logic to trying to find a problem with this promotion. But there are clicks to be be had by implying so.
It’s absolutely no different than BI’s article titled “This could be the end of the Jony Ive era at Apple”, which of course makes zero sense.
The headline was the question I saw some posing (or, more accurately, the assumption I saw some making). My own view, as you see from the piece, is the answer is a definite ‘no.’ I do think Ive is taking more of a backseat (or hands-off) role, and I think that was the deal Apple had to do to keep him when he was previously told he couldn’t move back to the UK, but I don’t see this as a problem for Apple.
Fair enough. It’s all very fuzzy logic. Dude got promoted. A C seat at Apple is inherently more global. Frees him up to sit a little higher on the pyramid. I’m amazed it took this long. My point is, find me another highly valuable leader who was promoted to a C, were the press tried to spin it into something potentially negative. Furthermore, find one who got the seat and thought of that position as “hands off”. There are other, smarter ways to retain someone like him and skirt the investor concerns if the goal is to be hands off and move back to the UK to some degree…giving them a C seat subject to SEC transparency (i.e. investor transparency) is not one of them.
Well, it’s not really a promotion other than on paper, as he already controlled both industrial design and user interface, so the only difference is he gets to hand over management responsibilities. Hence the ‘step back’ perspective. But, as I say, I think it’s nothing to either worry about or celebrate.
It’s funny how often people’s knee-jerk reaction it is to complain. And then, while engaging them based on the subject of complaint reveals there really wasn’t much to complain about at all.
Changing up a) Read–>Reply to b) Read–>Think About It With a Warm Drink–>Reply would do wonders for the lot of us. :)
In other words…just noise for the sake of creating noise. Whatever the intent, the fact here is that the largest market cap business on the planet, which prior to this had ONLY TWO C seat employees (Cook and Maestri)…has just added a third C seat to the company (not trivial, and definitely not a good strategy to expect less from somebody). The weight this carries from an investor and SEC standpoint is massive in it’s ability to affect the stock price (most likely up in the mid to long term). In no uncertain terms does this indicate anything other a heavier emphasis on Ive, and more (not less) to be expected of him by the company and investors alike. Otherwise, what all of these ridiculous articles are actually saying is “Apple is fraudulently reinforcing their leadership at a Chief level, which may increase confidence and therefore increase share price, however they’re really just doing this so he doesn’t leave which would negatively impact the share price…he’s actually not going to be involved as much any more.”
None of the speculation makes any sense.
It is so boring that when any change happens, suddenly Apple is going to fall. I couldn’t agree more that nothing important won’t change.
I mean nothing will change (sorry, typing on the phone:D)
Of course not. Just look at the folks working at Wall St.: Apple points to the moon, Wall St. looks at their finger.
Much of Wall Street is overly emotional, overly ignorant, and overly paranoid. It’s sad, but I believe this move won’t change anything about Apple’s products. He’s not carving clay anymore, probably hasn’t done so in years. But he is the visionary and driving force, the final word, on design, and he will continue to be that at the highest level. What this should show the Wall Street chickens is that Apple is dynamic and does realize a very important thing about business is that you can’t rely on just one person forever and important roles need to have some degree of spread, even if there is a single final gatekeeper at the end. I’d have the stock rise from this decision. If instead the headline was Jony Ive leaving Apple, that is what would justifiably send shockwaves of fear and panic through the ether.
There’s a quote for that – “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ mean”.
Of course Apple is doomed! We all know what happened after Steve Jobs passed…uh, wait what? Oh, never mind.
“there’s no doubt that Apple’s design language is very much born from Ive’s personal vision”
I disagree with this and so should you given that you acknowledge that Apple has a design team, not a sole designer.
Maybe you don’t remember the team that designed the first Mac but I surely do as I knew many of them and the first Mac and its software was a team effort. Steve Jobs was on the team, managed the team and pushed them but to say that Steve Jobs designed the first Mac is just not right, even though his picture was on the cover of the first issue of Macworld. No one person designed the first Mac. One might say that Steve Jobs “had the vision” but in fact, Jeff Raskin had the vision as did Bill Atkinson and many others and Jobs simply took over the vision and drove it home. Jobs was essential but not as singly essential as legend has it IMHO.
As Apple has grown and become more corporate we don’t think of these groups of people as “pirates” or “ex hippy outcasts” but in fact, the various teams that make stuff at Apple are the same kinds of people who made the first Mac and while Ive may be a design visionary I’ve never thought of him as solely responsible for Apple’s current designs. These things are designed by groups of people and the constraints of technology, manufacturing and the market.
I’m a very long term stockholder of AAPL and I’ve never had any concern about any one person leaving Apple. If I thought there was an exodus because Tim Cook was running the company into the ground (like the exodus that happened during Gil Amelio’s tenure) I’d be concerned, but as we now know, after Amelio Apple bought NeXT and back came Jobs, Tevanian and Rubinstein and Ive was already there and the rest is history.
Jobs, Atkinson, Herzfeld, Kare, Tevanian, Fadell, and countless others contributed to the big stuff Apple has done over many years. Very few of them are still at Apple and yet Apple marches on.
These things are absolutely a team effort, and that’s the main thrust of my piece. I do, though, acknowledge the vision that Ive brought to how Apple products should be designed, and I don’t think it would be fair to ignore the historical importance of his role.
I agree, and I fully acknowledge Ive as one of very few people who have had a huge influence on Apple. But, like Jobs built Apple University to keep the Apple DNA moving forward, Ive has built a design department and both Jobs and Cook allowed that department to influence almost every nook and cranny of Apple. The Ive meme is alive and well all over Apple as is the Jobs meme.
Agree.
Betteridge’s Law says the answer to the question in the headline is “No.”
I agree.
My original comment did not include “I agree.” It was somehow added by someone else. I’m glad someone agrees, but it makes my comment look odd.
I agree.
I don’t see it as a “Backseat Role” at all – I see it as still having the vision but spreading it over multiple people. What would happen if “only” Jony Ives had the vision – and he disappeared (for whatever reason)? Would Apple collapse or spiral out of control – NO! I’m sure the Wall Street would predict doom and gloom but there is a whole creative team that collaborates on the design and vision.
I, for one, will not be reducing my position on Apple Stock. I have faith in the “Whole of Apple” not just one person – even if that one person is the greatest designer of the Apple products. I believe that the vision will continue – as will Apple.
Long Live Apple and the Design Teams!
I’d be happier if he was in the trunk.
Moving to a central C level role fills an important gap that Jobs held — being the ultimate decision-maker where there may be conflict. I recall reading that Cook is not nearly the dictator Jobs was, being much more of a consensus builder. In the right amounts, dictators are good and have an important role as they just for right or wrong move things along. You also don’t end up with solutions that look and feel like they were designed by a committee. I can imagine that at any other level, conflict on design direction can occur. In his new role, Ive can ensure consistency across the product line.
Good points Ben. May I just add that it seems Jony is still relatively young and driven. So to retire at this age to go do nothing or only very little, will kill him. Jony is to the computer industry what Adrian Newey is to Formula 1. After leaving McLaren he was supposed to go take it easy to do other things, but within a short while ended up at Red Bull. However, I can’t see Jony moving to another company (Samasung? Gasp!) because he is to attached to Apple as a Company and to the memory of Steve Jobs. What I think is that he wants more freedom to do other things (if he wants to and when he wants to), instead of just focusing on Apple stuff 24×7.
Yep, I definitely can’t see him retiring or moving company. I think if he can live in the UK in practice (even if not officially) and continue to be in charge of design at Apple, he’ll be very happy.
The very idea that any one person at Apple is as important as some of the crazies make them out to be, is downright insulting to thousands of people actually doing the work, and the dozens of people overseeing those thousands.
Yes and no. It’s true that the many are important and too often ignored, but if you take away the visionaries and the geniuses then you’re left with a lot of great people who don’t know which direction to march. You need the industry and commitment of excellent people to implement the vision, but you also need the vision. The idea that a crowd of people can come up with better ideas than an individual is fallacy and disproved by history. The power of the many is real, no doubt, but so too is the power of the one.
You have to love the pundits; even if Ive wants to live in London, this is 2015 and I’m sure he could telecommute and fly in when needed in person. But no, Apple is doomed or the ‘nuanced’ version
of it.
Hopefully this means he gets to abstain from his obsession with everything thin and light.
Had he given the current MBA a retina display and a USB-C port instead of MagSafe, nobody would have complained. Performance would have been respectable, expansion would have remained where it should be and we’d all be happy. But no, he had to (th)”innovate”. I reckon it’s gonna be the third generation when the MacBook gets some respectable specs (for, apparently, 2017) and hopefully some expansion.
Man, 9to5 is really trying to set the conversation and tone of this news early and often. You really puzzle me sometimes. This mixed with other ways you have approached other high profile topics in the past really makes me question you guys sometimes.
I really do enjoy you as an author Ben, and I love a lot of the work you do. However, sometimes things like this creep in and it makes me sit back and wonder. :\
Wonder about … ? I did think when writing this that some were going to read the headline more than the content, but for those who (like you) read the content, I’m not sure what you see as a problem?
You’re assuming he has been taking a more hands off big picture position for the last year – maybe Jony Ive feels confident enough that team he built up and working for Apple can now operate without him having to micromanage every aspect. I don’t know why conspiracy theorists trying to be alarmist because for me as an outsider it is a good indication that they have a strong internal culture that develops and mentors people to ensure that when eventually Tim leaves there is already a large pool of talent to choose from or if Jony Ive wants to try other things at the organisation there is a talented team taking care of what needs to be done.
has = hasn’t
Indeed, as I said in the piece: “We don’t even know for sure if the change announced represents much of a shift from what happens today. Does Ive spend most of his time beavering away on CAD systems, making clay models and personally exploring the properties of hundreds of different materials? Or does his team do most of the hands-on work while Ive provides the direction, the feedback, the suggestions, the yes or no decisions?
It could well be the latter, in which case very little need change.”
This may be a bit too philosophical, but there’s something this move doesn’t account for. Yes, Ive can sit in the UK or China or the moon for all we know and still dream up great designs. But let’s think about what we know about Apple’s design studio:
I’ve himself has described (and pictures have confirmed) that the studio is an open space with several tables laid out with sketches and models of possible designs. Ive’s preference for “techno” music pumps through the studio’s speakers, supposedly helping to inspire. While Ive could certainly replicate all of that in the comfort of his own iin-home office, what he can’t replicate is the brainstorming that goes on in that studio. We’ve read stories about these designers having sit-down, semi-casual meetings where feedback is bounced around and new ideas are conjured. Ive can’t reproduce that even with software like FaceTime or Skype available to him. The instantaneous nature of that kind of feedback is lost.
It also hurts the flow of creativity. The reason Ive uses the term “we” instead of “I” is undoubtedly due as much to his modesty as it is to the hard reality that the final product’s design is a conglomeration of each designer’s ideas and feedback. Can anyone really say that the iPhone would look the way it does now if Ive had designed it exclusively by his own ideas? It is much more likely that he started with a basic shape and that the team as a whole helped to flesh out the specifics.
There is something to be said about a team of creative people working in a single space where the synergy of the team helps to fuel the resulting creations. That is something Ive will be sorely missing.
Then again, perhaps in his new role, this is all moot considering he may not have as much to say about the specifics of the design so much as simply giving a nod to what will work and what won’t. Still, I don’t think the “team spirit” of the process — or lack thereof — can be overlooked.
That’s very true, but those meetings can still happen on a daily basis without him, and I’m certain he’ll be flying back to Cupertino on a regular basis.
True. I imagine those trips to Apple HQ will be come gradually less frequent over the next year or so. I don’t think the move is a death cry for Apple, but I think the design language will certainly change (and should) over the next few years as new “stars” take the reigns and shape the next generation of products, the same way the company’s changed since Tim Cook took over. Apple’s known for its incremental evolution, so I think its users tend to panic more than most when they see big changes coming.
Apple is bigger than Ive, bigger than Cook. There success is more about culture. To use a sports metaphor, look at the St. Louis Cardinals. They can get rid of hall of fame players and coaches, lose one of the best pitchers in the league to injury and they still continue to win. Why? Culture. The single best thing Steve Jobs did in returning to Apple was establishing a winning culture. It’s ingrained. It’s who they are. Lose a key piece and the culture still remains. Apple will be fine. No need to worry. Besides, Ive is still there. He’s going to be able to be a better family man. That helps secure him long into the future. Great move by Cook in my opinion.
The market has not been able to figure out Cook’s decisions and foresight. So far Cook has not disappointed, he has made the right moves and steered the company on course. I dont believe changing Ive’s role would be detrimental to Apple, if not enhancing everything overall.
I agree with Ben’s thoughts. Additionally I also wonder if there is some future proofing/increased safety in the new set up. Right now if Jony Ive was hit by a car tomorrow (sorry to be morbid) then the Apple share price would likely plummet. However, increasing the publics awareness of two other key designers ensures that public appreciation of the genius of Apple is not all loaded on Jony, protecting against the situation Steve created by being such a singularly central figure. I Al so wouldn’t be surprised to see them take to the stage in a way Jony wouldn’t likely want to, putting the design talk in to the spotlight outside of the marketing videos.
I think that Jony is one of the greatest Industrial Designers out there, but he is human. The new role probably just makes official what he has probably already been doing for a while and comes with yet another raise which will help pay for jet fuel in the Gulfstream V. Since Steve passed away Jony has chosen the direction of the companies design language and aesthetic. Having never met Jony it is hard to guess where his real talent lies. Is he good at ideation (I think so), sketching, CAD, etc, etc. We can tell he probably doesn’t care for the PR stuff based on his involvement in it. That’s fine.
The real question I have is didn’t Apple set up a management philosophy and an approach to design that would allow a team of designers to essential do what Jony does 200 years from now? There may even be an algorithm that Big Blue could run that pumps out CAD designs based on this way of thinking. Simplify the interior housing, reduce the clutter, make it thinner…. I think the AI will someday get there whether in 10 years or 25. Jony is simply one of the first designers in technology to get permission to go forward with the design comes first philosophy.
The ID world is completely changing with the advent of 3D printing too. When you can customize any and all products the designer or company behind the design won’t even matter. We’ll have Jony and Apple to thank for that great democratization of design.
Man, the haters are out in full force here on 9to5 on ANY writing, research or opinion on this Ive/Apple story.
It’s an Apple blog covering a considerable appointment in a highly secretive company: what would anyone expect?
Complainers complaining about an opinion piece that doesn’t agree with their own opinion? Say it isn’t so, Internet! (insert “The Scream” painting here) :)
I think it’s good they are giving others more responsibilities. Working under ive will give, and probably has given, them great understandings about how Apple does things. And I mean, jony won’t be around forever. But I think it’s good that we are getting some people in fresh new roles to change things up a little, while still keeping all the important things intact