Jason Snell, in his Six Colors post, “Apple design’s luxury bubble”:
In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, Apple elevated Jony Ive to a position of total design authority as a way of signaling to the wider world that the company was going to be okay after losing its co-founder and leader. In that era, there was a genuine fear that a company led by an operations guy was not going to be able to keep the magic going. (Certainly, that’s a narrative that current and former Apple designers have been happy to push ever since.)
The more I think about it, the more this (perfectly reasonable!) tactical decision has come to feel like the original sin of the Tim Cook era. An unchained and elevated Ive sent the right message to the world, and Ive really is a talented designer who built beautiful things. But without Steve Jobs to rein things in, Apple’s design sense got more insular, more obscure, more minimal.
Eric Schwarz also touches on the link between Jobs’ death and the push toward metal and glass design in his post, “Aluminum Rounded Rectangles”, but rightly points out the wheels were in motion even before Jobs died:
… this passage got me thinking about when Apple actually started on this trajectory. While a lot of this happened immediately after the passing of Steve Jobs and continued through Jony Ive’s tenure, I’d argue that this trend started in 2001 with the Titanium PowerBook G4 and was cemented with the white iBook G3. While that PowerBook G4 had a bit of personality (it was painted and had a port door!), a revision later gave us the legendary 12″ aluminum model, and set the stage for Macs that basically look like what we have today. The iBook gave way to the plastic MacBooks, but again, an understated folding slab of computer.
I don’t think we can completely blame the vacuum created by Jobs’ death (as Eric notes), but I think it was certainly accelerated dramatically when Ive became the single source of all things hardware design at Apple with no oversight or pushback.
Snell touches on this as well:
It’s one reason I’m so critical about Ive, his overlong tenure at Apple when he was obviously burned out, and the fatal mistake of placing software design in the clutches of him and his lieutenants: I just get the sense that those designers became untethered from the rest of us, chasing idealized product dreams based on the expensive luxury brands they wore, drove, and otherwise used every day. Not that Apple designs ugly stuff, but there is undoubtedly an antiseptic sameness to a lot of it that smacks of a design team that has disappeared up its own white void.
By the time Ive was given the reigns to user interface, he was already noticeably burned out with hardware. Every Ive introduction video was the same word salad, every piece of hardware looked (effectively) the same. Giving Ive control over both sides of the house at the peak of his disinterest was an enormous mistake. He stuck around for six years after the release of iOS 7, but seemed much less involved after the first release. This worked in iOS’ favor, as it allowed others in the design group to slowly fix myriad issues the first major release created. But that took years.
By contrast, in the case of Liquid Glass, Alan Dye bailed only a few months after its release. One of my least favorite “leadership” patterns is stubborn, sure-of-themselves fraudsters who use political skills to force their bad ideas through at great cost only to immediately jump ship for something else, leaving the damage behind for everyone else to clean up. At least in Ive’s case he gave us many years of amazing hardware. Dye simply rode the coattails of many others (Ive included), dropped a bomb and then left for one of the worst companies on earth.
