Jony Ive Moving Back to England (and Possibly Leaving Apple)?

[FanIn80]

Yeesh. Finding a new CEO is one thing, but having to replace Ive would be disastrous.

Apple’s head designer Jonathan Ive wants to return England to live, reports the Sunday Times. Ive, of course, is one of the key geniuses behind Apple’s string of blockbuster hits and is perhaps the world’s most influential industrial designer.

British-born Ive has reportedly proposed a plan to “commute” to Cupertino, Calif., from his $4 million manor house in Somerset, but Apple’s board is none too thrilled with the idea. Ive is said to be at “loggerheads” with the board, reports the Sunday Times.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...le-shares.html
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/27/...ck-to-england/

[silentsim]

I think the Apple board caves if anything, Ive is too valuable to the company.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by silentsim

I think the Apple board caves if anything, Ive is too valuable to the company.

Yeah, let's hope so. Holy cow.

[Yorkshire Flame]

Uh oh. Sneak peak of the Ive-less iPad 3:

[mykalberta]

Why wouldnt Applie just setup a second design office in England. Just a small group that Ive would work with. With telecommuting so easy now you would think it would be a way to make it work.

[MrMastodonFarm]

Google has offices just a short drive away from Somerset in London.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

Why wouldnt Applie just setup a second design office in England. Just a small group that Ive would work with. With telecommuting so easy now you would think it would be a way to make it work.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the deal is with that. You'd think that would be an obvious solution.

[Sliver]

His house is only worth $4M? Seems modest.

[Russic]

My god Apple cannot lose that man. They have enough cash in the bank to buy Saturn but they won't fly 1 englishman across the pond? Somebody needs to make a pros and cons list and beat this board to death with it.

[sclitheroe]

Nobody is irreplaceable.

The key is that Apple focuses heavily on industrial design, and is likely to continue to do so. There are lots of good designers out there. Apple has an established aesthetic, and an entire portfolio of popular products upon which to evaluate future design decisions.

And Apple has made plenty of missteps under Ive's tenure. So while we did get unibody Macbooks, we also got the G4 cube, too-soft plastics on iPod Nano's, polished backs on products that scratch all to hell, poor hinges on the first gen Air, the inability to deliver a white iPhone, etc. While you can't pin everything on Ive, you also can't ascribe all success to him either - a lot of smart people contributed a lot of excellence to stuff like the milling required to deliver unibody machines.

If Ive leaving scares you, the glaring user interface inconsistencies and poor design choices creeping into OS X and iOS unabated should absolutely terrify you. Just look at iTunes and Facetime as examples of two brutal departures from the human interface guidelines. Or the truly terrible calendar app built into the iPad (I'm still bitter about not being able to customize calendar colours, and those horrid little scroll arrows for moving fowards and backwards days)


The whole thing smells like an unsubstantiated rumor designed to make someone some money on shorting APPL.

[Russic]

^^ hmmm ... some very good points. I'd still rather see him stay, but you've calmed me for now.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Russic

^^ hmmm ... some very good points. I'd still rather see him stay, but you've calmed me for now.

I'd like to see him stay as well. I sorta doubt he's going anywhere.

I can't believe I came up with that list of misses, and didn't mention the hockey puck mouse.

[HotHotHeat]

Any Ive fans will be glad to read this update . . .

http://www.9to5mac.com/57012/jony-iv...il/#more-57012

[Russic]

Originally Posted by HotHotHeat

Any Ive fans will be glad to read this update . . .

http://www.9to5mac.com/57012/jony-iv...il/#more-57012

[ive voice]
this news is so brilliant, so mind-blowing that it can only be described as magical.
[/ive voice]

[FanIn80]

Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. It’s considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet to be bettered by modern science. Japanese smiths work through the night (better to judge the heat of metal by eye) hammering, melting and forging by hand to produce the finest blades in the world.

The steel is folded and refolded thousands of times to create a hard outer layer and a softer inner core resulting in a singular blade: terrifyingly sharp but far less prone to breaking than any sword forged in the West.

Once the blade is complete it is polished to a mirror finish, an elaborate procedure that itself can take weeks. The long and laborious process pushes metal to its absolute limit – which is precisely why Jonathan Ive wanted to see it first hand.

Ive endlessly seeks crucial knowledge that can help him to make the thinnest computing devices in the world, so it surprised no one at Apple that their obsessive design genius would take a 14-hour flight for a meeting with one of Japan’s leading makers of katana.

Afterwards Ive, shaven-headed, heavily muscled, in his trademark T-shirt and jeans, watched intently as the man went about his nocturnal labour.

‘For the first three years Jony was having a pretty miserable time designing Newton PDAs and printer trays,’ says Clive Grinyer. ‘It was a bad existence.’

The design team was eventually forced to surrender the Cray supercomputer it used for simulating new gadgets. Even the designs that did get built were met with a lukewarm reception. Ive’s Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was one of the first computers to have a flat LCD screen but it was saddled with a strangely squashed appearance and a massive price tag. Originally priced at $9,000, it was selling for under $2,000 by the time it was pulled from shelves less than a year later.

But just as Ive was considering a return to England, his luck changed. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple after an absence of 12 years. He purged the company, dropping most of its products and dispensing with staff. Eventually, Jobs took a tour of the design department, then based across the street from Apple’s main campus.

‘Jobs comes in, looks at all Ive’s amazing prototypes and says, “My God, what have we got here?”’ says Kahney.

Ive soaked up the pressure, refusing to hire more designers and continuing to experiment.

‘One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong,’ he has said.

‘It’s the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mosl...gn-genius.html