I suppose anyone leaving Apple's ID team (especially Jony Ive's inner circle) would get the equivalent of Jony Ive's job at any number of companies around the world. And companies would be happy to have that calibre of talent on board.
Some of it might be better career prospects, and some of it might really be "I've been at the pinnacle of my profession, I think I'm done"
Or something as human as, "I'm tired of designing laptops, phones, and peripherals. I want to try designing something very different for a while."
Life is fleeting. Go start new careers every 5-10 years if you have the luxury of that option. You decide what "career" means. Maybe you go become a stand up comedian. Maybe you just go program something different than you have been.
Eh, I don’t really think I want to do that. I like my job, where it is comfortable and familiar, and I can do it easily 9-5. They pay me well, keep giving me more money and incentives to stay, and they like me.
I like having an easier time at work, and then being able to spend my hours and brainpower relaxing with my kids and wife.
Yes, life is fleeting. I don’t want to spend all my creativity and brainpower on work.
Note also that he had a quarter century of experience before Apple, having worked on anything from the (RotJ?) Darth Vader helmet to the Oral B CrossAction, which is, a bit surprisingly, the product he thinks defines his career.
This might be the only video of most if not all of the ID team at Apple [1]. I've been following Apple since I was 16 or 17 and I think in that time they've been pretty anonymous in the Apple story. Found a photo of them [2].
I personally think right now that industrial design, architecture and still fashion have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to designing great things with regards to technology. Gone are the days where you can be concerned with the physical looks of a thing. I've met designers who can do everything just that the upper management team(s) don't get it.
If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.
I imagine a lot of these designers are leaving because they're trying really hard but keep making things that never see the light of day.
We are getting new form factors, they're just so radical you don't recognize them: laptop->tablet/phone, phone->watch, desktop->VR headset, home assistant. None of them are perfect substitutes yet, which is why the old form factors persist, but look at how many people are doing on their phones today what used to require a laptop or desktop. It's not hard to imagine a watch plus earbuds replacing the phone for most (but not all) users, and home assistant replacing a desktop for some (but not most).
> If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.
It could also be diminishing returns as technologies mature. Most smartphones have converged on the black slab. That may because physics and relatively inelastic customer needs define the form factor. Said another way, is a breakthrough new form worth ever larger amounts of nonrenewable resources? At what point does it stop? Do we mine the Earth into a wasteland for a single, levitating, all-knowing monolith?
"People don't design ships, the ocean designs ships". The black slab is popular not because people are making it, but because people are buying it. This doesn't mean that it is optimal, but companies have to respond to market pressures.
Ted Selker at IBM Almaden Research had an amazingly successful streak of getting useful innovations from the lab to the market with the ThinkPad, including the TrackPoint (the red joy button), the butterfly keyboard, and the transparent LCD display with removable back cover that works with an overhead projector (at a time when overhead projectors were much more common that expensive video projectors).
>He worked for short times at Atari and Xerox PARC before joining IBM in 1985. At IBM, first at T.J. Watson Labs, then at Almaden research labs, he rose to Fellow, inventing the TrackPoint cursor control device, making major contributions to the ThinkPad notebook computer, designing artificial-intelligence help and teaching systems, designing wearable computing devices, researching eye tracking systems, and designing an intelligent "living room of the future".
>IBM ThinkPad 760CDV - Similar to the 760CD, this unique model had a removable back cover on the LCD that would permit light to shine through for use on an overhead projector.
Essentially, if you are a public company, you can't afford to spend resources on products that have a limited market when you have projects that you know will be successful to produce. You can only spend the occasional resource on what I call "technological flexing" where a company develops a product to show off what they are capable, such as the Galaxy Fold.
As someone that work in the product design field, I fully expect that the vast majority of my ideas don't see the light of day. You have to have zero ego when it comes to discarding good but impractical ideas. My job is to come up with the best ideas that provide the most value to customers and the lowest cost to the company.
The last paragraph rings true to me. I've had designers leave my company because I consistently picked other designs over their's. IMO it comes down to a builder versus maintainer mindset.
Do these three people have 45 years combined experience on the industrial design team, or do you get promoted into that team after substantial experience on other teams at Apple? That could be the difference between a dramatic loss of institutional knowledge and ho hum normal turnover (12% annually).
Probably the former, given that the team has been around for a long time. There was another defection even before their earliest example of 2016. In that case it was someone with a decade of experience on the team and another 25 years in the field who went to Google (ouch).
Do you think the industrial designers were actually involved in the engineering of the keyboard (the source of the issues) or just the aesthetics (which look fine)?
Given that the old keyboard worked fine, and the only reason we have a new one is to shave a few millimeters, then yes I believe the designers are most directly responsible. Plus ID would tell you their role is much more than "aesthetics."
My uninformed guess is the designers insisted on thinness that engineering was unable to achieve without compromising other goals (reliability, feel, battery life). Aesthetics don't exist in a vacuum, and as a not-so-proud owner of this model I'd say Apple made the wrong choice.
Definitely, in fact most of their design work actually consists of designing fixtures and other parts used in the manufacturing process rather than the laptop parts themselves
I don’t think Apple leadership is concerned about being the world’s most valuable company in any given quarter or any given year.
This article alludes to a tie between design team departures and declines in sales growth.
Apple did not get big chasing quarterly profit numbers, it got big releasing game changing products and product improvements at the right time.
While this design group deserves strong regard, building AR glasses and software interface to control them is not something that a dozen people solely define, it comes from trial and error and enlightened engineers building and offering alternative ideas based on what only they could know is achievable in windows of potential release.
In fact, over the air updates, which was one of the most amazing accomplishments and features of iOS has little design at all. It’s just smart engineering that works well.
So I do not see these departures as a threat to glasses or autonomous systems because the prestige of the company combined with its quality of “taste” as jobs put it means it is not going wayward because three people leave.
> Apple did not get big chasing quarterly profit numbers, it got big releasing game changing products and product improvements at the right time.
they released those products over a decade ago. they got big because they took the momentum from those innovations and turned them into a lifestyle, creating “upgrade” fever and everything else that came with that. in the meantime, they became an industry bully, pressuring suppliers and vendors for more and more discounts while pressuring consumers to pay more and more for moderate iterations of their products.
>In fact, over the air updates, which was one of the most amazing accomplishments and features of iOS has little design at all. It’s just smart engineering that works well.
I disagree with your statement completely, a lack of interface is still an interface and requires careful design considerations on the backend.
I think this quote sums it up:
Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it. - Jared Spool
Readit News
Some of it might be better career prospects, and some of it might really be "I've been at the pinnacle of my profession, I think I'm done"
Life is fleeting. Go start new careers every 5-10 years if you have the luxury of that option. You decide what "career" means. Maybe you go become a stand up comedian. Maybe you just go program something different than you have been.
I'm going to start an aerospace company and try something radically different.
I'm single, I have no kids, and don't own a home. Why not? You know?
I like having an easier time at work, and then being able to spend my hours and brainpower relaxing with my kids and wife.
Yes, life is fleeting. I don’t want to spend all my creativity and brainpower on work.
https://youtu.be/a7cJHTpW4Tg (jump to 49:00 or so for the more relevant bits)
Note also that he had a quarter century of experience before Apple, having worked on anything from the (RotJ?) Darth Vader helmet to the Oral B CrossAction, which is, a bit surprisingly, the product he thinks defines his career.
It felt to me that they wanted to do this with the least publicity possible. They don't even have their company name at the index at first floor.
The more straightforward guess is that perhaps there are problems with some aspect of working on this team.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2013/04/09/ron-john...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEW4D_CERkE
[2] https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Apple_I...
If we can get these super thin laptop designs why can't we create new form factors? It's purely because people are afraid right now to create new product segments or try new things.
I imagine a lot of these designers are leaving because they're trying really hard but keep making things that never see the light of day.
It could also be diminishing returns as technologies mature. Most smartphones have converged on the black slab. That may because physics and relatively inelastic customer needs define the form factor. Said another way, is a breakthrough new form worth ever larger amounts of nonrenewable resources? At what point does it stop? Do we mine the Earth into a wasteland for a single, levitating, all-knowing monolith?
IBM Pointing Stick #1 - 10_25_91:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY&feature=youtu.be...
(Not Edwin Selker!)
Ted Selker Oral History:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpw7Bml_XvI
>He worked for short times at Atari and Xerox PARC before joining IBM in 1985. At IBM, first at T.J. Watson Labs, then at Almaden research labs, he rose to Fellow, inventing the TrackPoint cursor control device, making major contributions to the ThinkPad notebook computer, designing artificial-intelligence help and teaching systems, designing wearable computing devices, researching eye tracking systems, and designing an intelligent "living room of the future".
(Check out his red TrackPoint lapel pin!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760
>IBM ThinkPad 760CDV - Similar to the 760CD, this unique model had a removable back cover on the LCD that would permit light to shine through for use on an overhead projector.
IBM ThinkPad 701c "butterfly" keyboard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLj3aCfqzOM
Opening and closing IBM ThinkPad 701c with unique keyboard folding mechanism.
ThinkPad TrackPoints - how do they work?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3A7LDyizlc
Early TrackPoint prototypes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4Ss6F1qIHU
I always thought that ThinkPads were done by IBM Japanese RnD centre
As someone that work in the product design field, I fully expect that the vast majority of my ideas don't see the light of day. You have to have zero ego when it comes to discarding good but impractical ideas. My job is to come up with the best ideas that provide the most value to customers and the lowest cost to the company.
>Apple employs three recruiters whose sole task is to identify designers to join the group; they find perhaps one a year.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-c...
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This article alludes to a tie between design team departures and declines in sales growth.
Apple did not get big chasing quarterly profit numbers, it got big releasing game changing products and product improvements at the right time.
While this design group deserves strong regard, building AR glasses and software interface to control them is not something that a dozen people solely define, it comes from trial and error and enlightened engineers building and offering alternative ideas based on what only they could know is achievable in windows of potential release.
In fact, over the air updates, which was one of the most amazing accomplishments and features of iOS has little design at all. It’s just smart engineering that works well.
So I do not see these departures as a threat to glasses or autonomous systems because the prestige of the company combined with its quality of “taste” as jobs put it means it is not going wayward because three people leave.
they released those products over a decade ago. they got big because they took the momentum from those innovations and turned them into a lifestyle, creating “upgrade” fever and everything else that came with that. in the meantime, they became an industry bully, pressuring suppliers and vendors for more and more discounts while pressuring consumers to pay more and more for moderate iterations of their products.
Deleted Comment
I disagree with your statement completely, a lack of interface is still an interface and requires careful design considerations on the backend.
I think this quote sums it up:
Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it. - Jared Spool