Jony Ive Responds to Criticism
Rick Tetzeli (via MacRumors):
The first product Ive shepherded to market after Jobs’ death, the Apple Watch, should have been the ultimate “intimate device”: What could be less obtrusive than a tiny computer you wear on your wrist? In fact, though the first Apple Watch had defenders (“smartwatches finally make sense,” the Wall Street Journal wrote), many critics slammed it (“you probably shouldn’t buy one,” warned the tech website Gizmodo). I stopped wearing mine after two weeks. The interface was cluttered, and unlike my iPhone, I had to stop walking to use it on the street.
Two years later, reviews of Series 3, as the new watches introduced this fall are called, are glowing (“the next iPhone,” Wired proclaimed). How did that happen? Ive, and Apple, adapted. They realized they had been underplaying the watch’s role as a fitness tracker and brought on Nike as a partner. “We don’t get it right all the time,” Ive says of the long process of perfecting any Apple product. “As designers, you’re having to constantly learn.” By September, the Apple Watch had reportedly become the best-selling timepiece in the world.
Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, just doesn’t understand the criticism of the company’s new corporate headquarters.
More than that, he doesn’t think any of it is valid.
[…]
“We didn’t make Apple Park for other people,” Ive said. “So I think a lot of the criticisms … are utterly bizarre, because it wasn’t made for you. And I know how we work, and you don’t.”
If there’s a silver lining for Mac users, it’s that Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer and one of the most powerful people at the company, says he’s listening to user complaints.
“Absolutely, all of your feelings and feedback around the MacBook you use, we couldn’t want to listen to more,” Ive said earlier this week in Washington DC. “And we hear — boy, do we hear.”
Previously: Apple Park’s Open Work Spaces, New MacBook Pros and the State of the Mac.
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“I know how we work and you don’t.”
Good luck holding on to good software developers by railroading them into idealistic open floorplan designs. I’m not a startup-junkie college kid; I’m a senior-level software engineer who requires a quiet space with a door to be productive when not in meetings. I’m the norm.
This attitude (we always know best and form now overrules function) is part of what’s wrong with Apple today.
