In response to this story, Tim Cook sent this email to NBC reporter Dylan Byers:
Hi Dylan,
Hope you are well.
The story is absurd. A lot of the reporting, and certainly the conclusions just don’t match with reality. At a base level, it shows a lack of understanding about how the design team works and how Apple works. It distorts relationships, decisions and events to the point that we just don’t recognize the company it claims to describe.
The design team is phenomenally talented. As Jony has said, they’re stronger than ever, and I have complete confidence that they will thrive under Jeff, Evans, and Alan’s leadership. We know the truth and we know the incredible things they’re capable of doing. The projects they’re working on will blow you away.
Best, Tim
Sent from my iPhone
The email has been called scathing. I’d go with emotional and strong. This is certainly a rebuttal, but it feels like someone defending their team, their hard work, and good name. I would expect nothing less from Tim.
His watch called 911 last night after he fell and was unresponsive to the prompts. He has balance issues and we specifically got the watch for this feature after a few incidents prior. He had to get multiple stitches on his forehead but the scans came back negative for internal head bleeding. The doctors said he suffered a concussion and it might take a while to recover from the blunt trauma. I’m extremely thankful for that feature and I don’t know what would’ve happened if we wasn’t wearing his watch.
The Apple Watch saves lives. There are waves of stories about Siri access during emergencies, ECG heart warnings, and fall detection.
To me, Apple Watch has evolved into one of the most significant products Apple has ever released. And I believe the current sensors are just the tip of the iceberg. Apple Watch still has plenty of room to grow.
British GQ, in the intro to an interview with Eddy Cue:
Just as Ive was the driving force behind Apple’s hardware, Cue – whose official job title is senior vice president of internet software and services – is now the driving force behind all the services from Apple Music and Maps to the new Apple credit card and Apple TV+, its new Netflix-rival streaming service set to launch this autumn in more than 100 countries.
Cue, on the rumor that Tim Cook posted notes on scripts, on the order of “Don’t be so mean”:
“I saw the comments that myself and Tim were writing notes on the scripts and whatever,” says Cue. “There’s never been one note passed from us on scripts, that I can assure you. We leave the folks [alone] who know they’re doing.”
So Cook didn’t give that particular note?
“I can assure you that was 100 per cent false. He didn’t say, ‘Don’t be so mean.’ He didn’t say anything about a script.”
And:
What would be an example of a show that’s not family friendly?
“The Reese Witherspoon-Jennifer Aniston show [The Morning Show is a workplace drama set behind the scenes of breakfast TV]. It’s a show about women in the workplace and some of the issues that happen to them are definitely not appropriate for you to watch with an eight-year-old.”
And:
Cue says he didn’t realise it at the time – “I was young” – but that one of the greatest things to happen to Apple was Jobs getting fired in 1985 by then-CEO John Sculley.
“Because when he came back, one of the things that he wanted to do is create a company that would outlast him and could live for hundreds of years.”
He was really thinking in terms of centuries?
“He absolutely was. And he put people in place and created a culture that he thought would do that. But obviously he was taken way too early. I figured I’d be walking out of Apple the same day he was walking out of Apple.”
There’s a lot more to the interview. Lots of interesting tidbits.
Apple today announced Up Next Live, a series of intimate performances from past and present Apple Music Up Next artists including Bad Bunny, Daniel Caesar, Khalid, Ashley McBryde, King Princess, Lewis Capaldi and Jessie Reyez. Each artist will perform for fans in one city, for one night only.
The shows will be held at Apple Stores around the world, one artist per show, one show per store. Here’s the current schedule:
July 9 — Bad Bunny at Apple Piazza Liberty, Milan
July 19 — Jessie Reyez at Apple Union Square, San Francisco
July 25 — King Princess at Apple Williamsburg, Brooklyn
July 31 — Lewis Capaldi at Apple Champs-Élysées, Paris
August 9 — Daniel Caesar at Apple Covent Garden, London
August 16 — Ashley McBryde at Apple Michigan Avenue, Chicago
August 23 — Khalid at Apple Carnegie Library, Washington, D.C.
Want to go? Visit Apple’s Up Next Live page and click the show you want to attend to apply for tickets.
Me? I’ve applied for tickets to see Khalid at Apple Carnegie Library. Fingers crossed!
This is a lovely bit of video (albeit low resolution) that’s been flying around the internet since Apple announced Jony Ive’s departure. It’s from a Hardware Roadmap session at WWDC 1997.
Striking how young everyone is.
Though the whole video is wonderful to watch, for the purposes of this post, jump to 30:21, where Phil makes a joke about giving everyone a free PowerBook, then goes on to introduce Director of Design Jonathan Ive.
The headline link is behind a paywall. Here’s a link to the article on Apple News that should work if you don’t have a WSJ subscription.
Tripp Mickle, Wall Street Journal:
For nearly three hours on that afternoon in January 2017, the group of about 20 designers stood around waiting for Mr. Ive to show, according to people familiar with the episode. After he arrived and listened to the presentations, he left without ruling on their key questions, leaving attendees frustrated.
“Many of us were thinking: How did it come to this?” said a person at the meeting. There was a sense “Jony was gone but reluctant to hand over the reins.”
The episode was emblematic of a widening disconnect at the top of Apple that, invisible outside the company, was eroding the product magic created by Mr. Ive and the late Steve Jobs that helped turn Apple into America’s pre-eminent corporation.
And:
Mr. Ive, 52, withdrew from routine management of Apple’s elite design team, leaving it rudderless, increasingly inefficient, and ultimately weakened by a string of departures, people close to the company say.
The internal drama explains a lot about Apple’s dilemma. Its one major new product of the post-Jobs era, the Apple Watch, made its debut five years ago.
And:
His departure from the company cements the triumph of operations over design at Apple, a fundamental shift from a business driven by hardware wizardry to one focused on maintaining profit margins and leveraging Apple’s past hardware success to sell software and services.
This is not a flattering portrayal. As usual with these sorts of articles, I take every anecdote with a grain of salt. Personally, I see iOS 13 and the continually impressive series of ARM chips as but two examples of major Apple products. True, iOS 13 is in early beta, but it is incredibly impressive.
But that last comment highlights a core issue for Apple. When they were smaller, it was easy to let genius lead. But with explosive growth comes the need for more dependence on operational expertise to inform the product pipeline. Less reliance on one visionary, more design by committee.
That’s the reality brought on by Apple’s exponential growth. It take a different set of hands to guide a single race car than a complex fleet of vehicles.
The article ends with:
Mr. Ive’s old design team—a group of aesthetes once thought of as gods inside Apple—will report to COO Jeff Williams, a mechanical engineer with an M.B.A.
I’d soften that statement with the belief that Apple is still chock full of visionaries, geniuses, and plenty of cash to continue their product pursuits.
The app that made it so easy to play music on your Mac that it transformed the entire music industry is going away, but the legacy lives on. As Apple scraps the omnibus iTunes app and breaks it up into multiple parts, AppleInsider looks at what went so right —and then so wrong.
Interesting look back. Success breeds expectations. The team behind a successful app inevitably feels pressure to add new features, to keep the app growing. What starts out simple, grows impossibly complex over time.
Microsoft Word, one of the most successful products of all time, started off as a simple, easy to use word processor. It evolved, over time, into an explosion of features, both incredibly powerful and as complex enough to require books and classes to truly master.
It was a natural path for iTunes to follow. I credit Apple with recognizing the need to go back to the drawing board, break the app into pieces. Could they have done it sooner? Sure. But that’s in the past. We’ll never know all the pressure points that made this move difficult. I’m glad we got here.
This video does an excellent job walking through the process of pairing the PS4 DualShock and Xbox One controllers to your favorite iOS device running iOS 13.
Note that the Xbox One’s original controller does not have the Bluetooth tech needed to pair with iOS. You’ll need one that shipped with an Xbox One S or Xbox One X.
Also, the real beauty of these controllers paired with iOS is support for iOS games compatible with Bluetooth controllers.
Amazing to me how low the latency has gotten. Gameplay seems perfect.
As announced at WWDC, Apple is bringing live radio stations from several online providers for Siri users on iPhone, iPad and HomePod. Although marketed as a fall iOS 13 feature, Siri live radio is already partly working on the HomePod, and for iPhones and iPads running the iOS 13 beta.
And:
In addition to current HomePod OS software, this also works on iOS 13 devices. The radio playback is controllable through the Music app, and you can search for stations by name in the Music app’s search tab. Played stations appear as items in Recently Played section of the Music app, though, if you want to find them again quickly.
The trick is getting Siri to find your local stations. I suspect as iOS 13 gets closer to final, a process for finding and marking your favorite stations will emerge.
Can’t help but think this will breathe some new life into terrestrial radio. A win-win.
Apple is manufacturing its new Mac Pro computer in China, according to people familiar with its plans, shifting abroad production of what had been its only major device assembled in the U.S. as trade tensions escalate between the Trump administration and Beijing.
The tech giant has tapped Taiwanese contractor Quanta Computer Inc. to manufacture the $6,000 desktop computer and is ramping up production at a factory near Shanghai, the people said. Apple can save on shipping costs for components given the proximity of many of its suppliers to Shanghai, rather than having to supply a factory in the U.S.
Not a huge surprise. Apple is weighing the tradeoffs of potential further tariffs against the cost of shipping components to the US for assembly.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of when the Super Soaker story truly began to take shape. Though it was conceived in 1982 and wouldn’t hit the market until 1990, it was in February 1989 when NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson first met with the toy company Larami to pitch his idea for a revolutionary new water gun.
In honour of the Canada Day Long Weekend, I post this story about the greatest backyard toy ever invented.
Here at The Verge, we’ve decided to collect the most important Ive videos over the years, tied to pivotal Apple product launches. And just for good fun, we’ve ranked them using aluminium ingots, of course. So take a trip down memory lane with Ive and see how his style has evolved over the years.
Apple today announced that Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, will depart the company as an employee later this year to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients.
And with those words, the Internet went insane. I can understand how people feel about Jony’s announcement—he’s an icon in the design world and helped make some of Apple’s most iconic products. He will be missed, but I think this has been a long time coming.
The way this announcement was made is one of the most skilled plays that Apple has done in a long time. They got the news out but limited the effects by keeping a connection with Jony.
A few years ago, Jony moved away from product design to focus solely on Apple Park. I think Jony has wanted to work on other projects for a while now, but Apple needed to keep him where he was. To make that happen, the company did whatever needed to be done.
Apple hired his friend Marc Newson, who is opening the new company with Jony. They elevated Jony’s position to Chief Design Officer, a position that Apple has never had before. I think Apple did everything they could to keep Jony a part of Apple, but ultimately his desire to work on other projects became too much for him to ignore.
With Apple as a client of LoveFrom, Jony gets to keep his finger on the pulse of what the company is doing, and can continue to help direct design decisions moving forward. More importantly, it gives Jony the freedom he has been seeking to work on other projects.
For Apple, being a client of LoveFrom gives them the tie with Jony that it needs.
The news of Jony leaving Apple would have been devastating a decade ago—today, I think, we kind of saw the writing on the wall. It’s still not the best news I’ve heard, but I think Apple and Jony reached an agreement that allowed both to get what they needed moving forward.
Dave and I talked about some fun topics today including battery life in Apple products and counterfeit products at Amazon, but we went off topic a lot and just had a blast talking about everything.
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Somewhat lost in the news of Jony Ive’s imminent departure comes news of a new addition to the executive team.
From Apple’s press release:
Apple today announced that Sabih Khan, a 24-year Apple veteran, has been named to the company’s executive team as senior vice president of Operations. Khan has played an important role in delivering each of Apple’s innovative products to market since the late 1990s, leading key product operations and supply chain functions. He continues to report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer.
In his new role, Khan will be in charge of Apple’s global supply chain, ensuring product quality and overseeing planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics and product fulfillment functions, as well as Apple’s supplier responsibility programs that protect and educate workers at production facilities around the world.
If you connect to Apple in any way, this news has to hit hard. The Apple blogs and Twitter feeds were filled to bursting last night when the news broke.
Personally, this feels like a friendly but still quite painful divorce or, as John Gruber put it:
My gut sense for years has been that Ive without Jobs has been like McCartney without Lennon. Or Lennon without McCartney — take whichever analogical pairing you prefer. My point here is only that the fruit of their collaborations were, seemingly magically, far greater than the sums of the duos’ talents and tastes.
This is the last vestige of a magical period at Apple, when Steve Jobs and Jony Ive changed the world, cycle after cycle.
Apple today announced that Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, will depart the company as an employee later this year to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients. While he pursues personal projects, Ive in his new company will continue to work closely and on a range of projects with Apple.
Jony’s new company, said to be called LoveFrom and in partnership with long time collaborator Marc Newson, will launch next year.
Design team leaders Evans Hankey, vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. Both Dye and Hankey have played key leadership roles on Apple’s design team for many years. Williams has led the development of Apple Watch since its inception and will spend more of his time working with the design team in their studio.
Jony Ive’s status on Apple’s official leadership page remains unchanged. Makes sense, since Ive won’t be leaving until the end of the year.
Gruber’s Lennon and McCartney comment really resonates. In Steve Jobs’ second time with Apple, his iMac/iPod/iPhone/iPad period, Jobs and Ive felt like equals, partners, reporting to each other, sharing an incredible vision. Together.
Wrap-up from Gruber’s piece (if you only read one piece on Jony Ive leaving, that’s the one):
I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced.
My Apple world feels a bit ripped apart this morning.
Jony Ive is leaving Apple after more than two decades in which his iconic designs for the Mac, iPod and iPhone turned one of Silicon Valley’s faded giants into the world’s most valuable company and defined a generation of consumer products.
Sir Jonathan is setting up his own new venture, a creative business called LoveFrom, with Apple as its first client. The transition will begin later this year, with LoveFrom launching fully in 2020.
Apple is making some positive changes in Apple Music. There are still a few little problems that crop up for me, but overall the service is doing very well.
On days when everything runs smoothly, taking public transit is one of the best ways to get around town. Not only is it cost-effective and efficient, but it also lets you stay hands free so you can sit back, relax and maybe even read a few chapters of your favorite book. But unexpected delays or overcrowded vehicles can quickly turn your ride from enjoyable to stressful. Starting today, Google Maps is rolling out two new features to help you better plan for your transit ride and stay more comfortable along the way.
I can certainly see how these would be useful features for those that rely on public transportation.
Sidecar, a new feature in Apple’s iOS and macOS operating systems, allows you to use your iPad as a second display with your Mac. It’s a great addition to the ecosystem and if you have the betas installed you can try it out. Bryan Wolfe gives you a rundown and how to get it setup.
If you are on the fence, deciding between PowerBeats Pro or AirPods, this is a solid review.
The one thing I think Marques missed was the impact on background noise. The in-ear-canal design of the PowerBeats Pro means you’ll get much less background noise than AirPods.
On the plus side, that’s a real benefit on an airplane or in a space with a lot of ambient sound. On the down side, I find I am much more aware of my environment, better able to have conversations with people with AirPods in my ear.
Apple is bringing Xbox and PlayStation 4 controller support to the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV this fall. It’s a big change from the select MFi Bluetooth controllers that were supported before, and it means you can now easily connect any PS4 or Xbox One controller to your device to play games on the go.
Big fan of this move by Apple.
I’ve been trying out an Xbox One S controller (with Bluetooth support) on my iPad Pro running the new public beta, and I’m convinced this is a big step toward using an iPad as a portable game console.
A step, because you are still depending on the console. Read the article for all the details on playing console games on your iPad, with the controller connected via Bluetooth.
All good. But makes me wonder, will Apple ship Apple Arcade games compatible with the PS4 and Xbox One controllers? If so, I think that would help make Apple a very important player in this space. Grab your iPad and favorite controller and play, with consoles or without.
Korean news sites are reporting today that Samsung Electronics is preparing to launch a text messaging service that can be used on the new Galaxy Note 10, PCs and laptops during the Galaxy Note 10 event early in August. The feature is noted in the reports as being similar to Apple’s iMessage.
To enable users to use text messaging services across different devices, Samsung will join forces with Microsoft to integrate their phone mirroring service Your Phone into the upcoming Galaxy Note 10, according to business newspaper the Korean Economic Daily.
OK, so far so good. But:
The app, which was first launched in March as a beta service, enables multiple cross-device experience by mirroring what appears on the smartphone screen to PCs with Bluetooth connectivity.
Wait, what? This is both confusing and seems a poor substitute for cloud syncing so all devices get all info. This strikes me as a hack.
Am I misunderstanding the description? Or is this a limitation driven by the Samsung/Android/Microsoft architecture?
