Apple’s launch of a mixed-reality headset will be first steered entirely by CEO Tim Cook and under direction of the operations team headed by COO Jeff Willams – over the objections of the industrial design team.
Patrick McGee and Tim Bradshaw for Financial Times:
After seven years in development — twice as long as the iPhone — the tech giant is widely expected to unveil a headset featuring both virtual and augmented reality as soon as June.
The stakes are high for Cook. The headset will be Apple’s first new computing platform to have been developed entirely under his leadership. The iPhone, iPad and even Watch were all originally conceived under Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011.
See also: Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
The timing of the launch has been a source of tension since the project began in early 2016, according to multiple people familiar with Apple’s internal discussions.
Apple’s operations team wanted to ship a “version one” product, a ski goggle-like headset that will allow users to watch immersive 3D video, perform interactive workouts or chat with realistic avatars through a revamped FaceTime.
But Apple’s famed industrial design team had cautioned patience, wanting to delay until a more lightweight version of AR glasses became technically feasible. Most in the tech industry expect that to take several more years.
In deciding to press ahead with a debut this year, Cook has sided with operations chief Jeff Williams, according to two people familiar with Apple’s decision-making, and overruled the early objections from Apple’s designers to wait for the tech to catch up with their vision.
Just a few years ago, going against the wishes of Apple’s all-powerful design team would have been unthinkable. But since the departure of its longtime leader Jony Ive in 2019, Apple’s structure has been reshuffled, with design now reporting to Williams.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote just last month:
Unsurprisingly, parts-orderers do not understand design, so they do not value it as highly as they should. This too shall pass in the not too distant future, hopefully for the better, not the worse.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. — Steve Jobs
To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. – Steve Jobs
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. – Steve Jobs
Tripp Mickle for The New York Times, May 1, 2022:
It had been nearly three years since Steve Jobs died at the age of 56, and as C.E.O., Mr. Cook had looked to Mr. Ive — the man Mr. Jobs called his “spiritual partner” — to lead product development… In the wake of Mr. Jobs’s death, colleagues said, Mr. Ive fumed about corporate bloat, chafed at Mr. Cook’s egalitarian structure, lamented the rise of operational leaders and struggled with a shift in the company’s focus from making devices to developing services.
Disillusioned with Mr. Cook’s Apple, Mr. Ive would depart five years later, in 2019. His exit would change forever the balance of power at the top of a company long defined by its product ingenuity, leaving it without one of its most creative thinkers and the driving force behind its last new device category…
In Mr. Ive’s absence, Mr. Cook has accelerated a shift in strategy that has made the company better known for offering TV shows and a credit card than introducing the kind of revolutionary new devices that once defined it.
This account of Mr. Ive’s resignation is adapted from a new book, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, that I wrote. The book is based on interviews with more than 200 people, including former and current employees at Apple, as well as with friends and former colleagues of Mr. Ive…
[Jobs’ and Ive’s] fast friendship and collaboration contrasted with the evolution of Mr. Jobs’s relationship with Mr. Cook. It took a push from colleagues who feared Hewlett-Packard might poach Mr. Cook for Mr. Jobs to promote to him to chief operations officer in 2005, according to people familiar with the promotion. Mr. Jobs’s decision to later tap Mr. Cook as his successor was motivated in part by the recognition that half of the company’s value came from Mr. Cook’s ability to manufacture and deliver its devices on time. Those skills would be critical to taking the iPhone from sales of 10 million units a year to 200 million.
Even so, Mr. Jobs considered Mr. Ive the company’s second-most powerful executive. He thrust the design team to the forefront of Apple’s product development process, ensuring it played a central role in the iPod, iPhone and iPad…
Mr. Cook seldom visited [Ive’s design] studio… On one of the few occasions he did, it was to see a Leica camera Mr. Ive had helped design for a charity auction. Mr. Ive glowed as he detailed the designers’ work on the camera for Mr. Cook, who nodded expressionlessly. People watching across the studio would later joke that they caught Mr. Cook’s eyes straying from the charity camera to the nearby design tables topped with iPhones, iPads and Macs that the company sold for tremendous profit. He stayed only a few minutes.
SEE ALSO:
• Apple’s famous design team now has no original members left – May 3, 2019
• Another Apple industrial designer leaves company – May 1, 2019
• Significant turnover hits Jony Ive’s famed industrial design team at Apple – April 25, 2019
• Steve Jobs left design chief Jonathan Ive ‘more operational power’ than anyone else at Apple – October 21, 2011
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.
Some of Ive’s designs sacrificed too much functionality. Cook has led Apple to more mainstream acceptance. Too bad some pundits would rather stay in a niche market, proclaiming superiority, while at the same time bemoaning its niche status.
The boss sees all the parts, the design team sees design. When Jobs and Ives were soul partners this worked fine because Jobs could push and pull design and shuffle the larger deck to ensure that the well designed products matured as needed. Without that left brain right brain lock, the design team suffered more than the company because they lost access to the bigger picture. Cook knows that upward momentum only lasts for a time until it needs a boost or will reverse. Downward momentum is hard to reverse. So Apple needs its next product now. iPhone is losing momentum as people keep their phones for longer and longer and defining features are satellite connectivity from mountaintops. Services are slowing. MacBooks reached their final form about a decade ago with the only advancements left on the table being adding or subtracting ports. The Car is hopelessly behind and may never seee the light of day. It’s not about ego, it’s about keeping the company’s nose facing upwards and more important keeping the world’s best employees who very much work for vision and challenge not maintenance of the status quo. So yeah, the design team is surely correct that the design isn’t fully baked and the experience will be less than optimal. And Cook is right that on the balance the time is now. Release a reference design for pros at an outrageous cost and iterate over the next 20 years. With the right software chops the experience should still be revolutionary. If it falls on its face today, a lighter headset with better battery life won’t make a difference. And that’s the real question isn’t it? Is a AR/MR/VR headset actually valuable, or is it a chimera? If the design team means that the whole sha-bang is a bust, that the very concept is flawed, we’ll then you can see the reason that the conflict is becoming public. That would fly in the face of the above, suggesting that Tim Cook doesn’t actually know a good product from a bad one. If that’s the case get ready for a reverse in momentum and a hasty exit from Cook before the slo-mo train crash really gets going. Time will tell.
I agree with Gerald Kent above. Jonny, without some kind of backstop, was starting to design for the sake of design. Functionality suffered. Certainly repairability. Yes, form and function are the Ying and the Yang. They must dance together nicely if Apple is to continue to succeed.
I don’t want beautiful, emaciated tech tools that are no longer easy to use. Why someone didn’t kill the butterfly keyboard before that was mass-produced is mind-boggling. Clearly designed by someone who didn’t know how to type.
I’ve read that Leica camera story before (probably here) about how Timo and Jonny didn’t click, and all Captain Cook cared about was profits. There may be some truth to Mickle’s slant, but it’s not aging well. I’m sure there was more going on than Jonny not feeling adored by Timo. Ive’s trippiness and slow, “deep,” reflective way of speaking didn’t age well for me either.
As Higo writes, the Jobs/Ive partnership worked well probably because Steve saw all of the moving pieces, he WAS the vision, and was able to keep Jonny in his silo feeling appreciated.
I don’t love everything Tim does, but he’s done an excellent job of filling the monstrously large shoes of Steve. Much better than I ever imagined. He’s made it certain that Apple is not going to disappear in our lifetimes and that was a very real possibility in the 90s. I don’t want the design team to disappear either and hope they can find that magic balance again.
I’m with Tim on this one.
All don’t have to be perfect at once. First iPad didn’t have a camera. First iteration of iOs for iPhone didn’t have copy, cut and paste. Somehow, to progress, you have to accept that all might not be perfect.
Maybe Tim wants to get this out soon as his legacy. He’ll be retiring soon.
I agree with comments about loss of functionality to further a design. Take the so -called ‘Magic Mouse’: you can’t even use it when it’s charging! And then there’s that f’ing keyboard…, not to mention loss of ports on all macbooks (fortunately fixed in my new MacBook Pro).
I’ll reserve my judgement until I see what it’ll do but it’ll all come down to how they sell it. Even if they could make it work for Facetime so that it seems like you’re in the same room as the person you’re calling, that’d be awesome. You’d need some kind of immersive camera though, maybe the updated Homepod/Apple-TV thing we’ve heard rumored. I guess it might be cool for movies, but assuming it’s $1000+ and only really usable at home for a limited set of use-cases to start, I hope at least one or two are home runs. Maybe this is Cook’s attempt to kick the design team in the butt like Jobs would have (albeit several years late if its really been in development for 7 already).
‘The headset’ is precisely how I know Apple is now being, if not run by, then at least fueled by, under 35 year-old idiots that honestly believe they can shape-shift into birds or cats, and that having a box to p**p in at school is perfectly reasonable. Nobody with an actual, adult, life wants this. I predict this will be an Apple failure on par with the Apple boombox. They will pretend they just hiccuped when in actuality their entire software line is designed seemingly exclusively around new emojis. Steve is not just turning in his grave; he is doing backflips. Modern Apple is a joke, and I ‘fought back for the Mac’ back in the day. This is very expensive bull**** for 21st century children that can’t tie their own shoes, and that quite literally no one asked for. This is the antithesis of yet another former Apple edict when they were still a respectable company. That Apple is currently the best option is alarming, indeed, and again, as a user, I go back to the Apple II. This is not going to last (think SVB failing was something? Brace yourselves), and the eventual collapse is going to be a wonder to behold.