“… putting the industrial design team under COO Jeff Williams not only makes sense but will be critical for Apple to continue to develop great products and make them with the kind of quality and in the large quantities that their customers demand.
“That is why putting this team under Williams, and not Cook is important for Apple’s future. Jony Ives was unique in that he understood great design and how to create products that could be made in Apple’s unique world-class manufacturing system. Designers under him were taught his way of thinking but may not have the skills or experience to create designs that also match the criteria needed to manufacture them elegantly and in huge quantities.
“Apple pairing these designers under Jeff Williams and operations shows Apple covets the two disciplines being coupled together and redesigned the org chart to reflect this strategic thinking.”
MacDailyNews Take: Even the first iMac had to be sourced, manufactured and costed, we suppose.
“Designers under him were taught his way of thinking but may not have the skills or experience to create designs that also match the criteria needed to manufacture them elegantly and in huge quantities.”
Nice way of saying the BEANCOUNTER FACTOR plays a larger role than ever before.
We shall see…
No, GeoB. It is a nice way of saying that Jony Ive did his own beancounting, making sure that designs could be manufactured in a way that made economic sense. Because he did that reality-checking, the designers under him could throw ideas around without worrying very much about whether they worked from an industrial engineering perspective. With Jony gone, somebody else needs to fill his role as a filter against impracticable ideas.
Tim Cook is an industrial engineer, but he wears too many other hats as CEO to get into the mud on design details. (Steve Jobs ran an enormously smaller company that gave him the space to micromanage details while Cook managed operations.) Williams is the logical person to act as the practicality filter until the new software and hardware design chiefs prove they can do it themselves.
“No, GeoB. It is a nice way of saying that Jony Ive did his own beancounting, making sure that designs could be manufactured in a way that made economic sense.”
No, USER. You totally missed my point not having the capacity to read between the lines or look into the future. So I will spell it out for you.
The “beancounter factor” has greatly accelerated during Cook’s CEO reign. Cheap keyboards that don’t work, removal of ports, and on and on I won’t run through the full list here.
“We shall see” translated is without Jony we shall see if beancounter Cook and new team accelerates cutting corners for more profits. Would not surprise me.
Regarding Jony, if he was happy with Cook he would not have left Apple. Plain and simple common sense. Much more is there there that has not been revealed, typical for an amicable parting of the ways.
One thing for certain, master beancounters like Cook have always had a problem working with creative geniuses. Exit Scott Forstall. Exit Jony Ive. Mums the word. Great record, Tim. /s
God help Apple under Clueless Cook until he is replaced…
Even if everything you say were true, it still would not mean that the paragraph you directly quoted means what you claimed it meant.
I stand by my comments…
Not your fathers Apple anymore. Tim Cook has turned Apple into Oldsmobile.
Wil be interesting to see how the balance between truly imaginative and innovative products stack up against those with boring and mundane products with go-faster stripes to make them interesting. News of the MacBook Air update only further raises that question.
Jony Ive, with Steve Jobs’ death, became unhinged user-friendliness-wise. His thin for the sake of thinness, even using crappy keyboards that breaks easily and most people hate was allowed for the sake of ‘design.’ Also putting the phone’s sleep button at the right side so you’ll always accidentally press the volume buttons instead of leaving it at the top was really idiotic. Next is the poor iOS UI where you can no longer tell which are buttons and which aren’t and the totally crappy iTunes and Music UI that’s so difficult to figure out. Hopefully the COO has more common sense than Jony Ive.