Apple continues to achieve record results from a financial point of view but if we try to put the company under the magnifying glass we find here too some problemsespecially as regards thethe design team.
A report Bloomberg highlights how much Apple has changed since losing Jony Ive.
As we know, the former head of design founded his company LoveFrom and most of the senior designers who worked under him left Apple to follow him in this new project.
At least 15 designers have left Apple, something that practically never happened between 2000 and 2015. There are very few senior designers left at Apple right now: those who did not go with Ive moved to GoPro, like Danny Coster or there are those who founded their own company as in the case of Christopher Stringer with Syng, which produces high-end speakers.
At the beginning of 2019 another 4 designers left Apple, more recently there have been another 6 departures including 4 to join the company of Ive. Last month Apple confirmed that current VP of design Evans Hankey intends to leave the company next year.
Gurman reports the experience of a designer currently employed at Apple who for obvious reasons will remain anonymous:
The strength of the team was that we were a close group. The working environment was incredible and people always thought about designing things in an unconventional way. It was a special team. It wasn’t easy after Steve’s death, things got more and more complicated, the pressures were more and more as well as external distractions.
Steve encouraged experimentation in design, for him it was fundamental. Now the designers have little say in the matter and this is precisely the reason that is leading these people to leave the company. That Apple has changed is something visible to all: under Ive the products were increasingly thin and futuristic, even at the expense of convenience, physical ports and so on. Apple today is doing nothing but reusing the same designs by “making them ugly” with the addition of ports and other features that please users but “suffocate” designers who no longer have a way to express themselves. Even the iPhone has remained the same since the iPhone X and it is clear that innovation in terms of pure design is going slowly (if not completely diminishing).
Apple recently launched a new Apple TV that is smaller and more compact than its predecessor. There were all the prerequisites to create a completely different device, but instead it still has the same design as before, albeit smaller.
Between COVID-19 and the financial crisis, with new hires blocked to try to preserve earnings as much as possible and make investors happy, Apple is risking quite big. There are few senior designers left on the team, and the new ones, of course, are not in a position to impose themselves on the engineering team or administration.
If we love Apple it is certainly also for the design of the products, but for some years Apple has been more attentive to costs and revenues rather than the aesthetic characteristics of the products, says the Report. What do you think?
Bloomberg: Apple is taking a big risk because the design team is weak and dissatisfied | iSpace