Welcome to our weekend Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed this week in a handy bite-sized summary. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a cup of coffee or tea in the morning, but it’s cool if you want to read it during lunch or dinner hours as well.
Design by committee
Former Apple design chief Sir Jonathan Ive made headlines this week after it was announced that he had designed the red nose for this year’s Comic Relief charity event in the UK. If this sounds like a descent for the guy behind many of this century’s most iconic products, take a look at the horrible noses Comic Relief has sold in the past. It was an urgent order.
Nonetheless, Ive’s extracurricular activities will likely spark a sense of “what could have been” among seasoned Apple watchers. Officially, his tenure as head of the Cupertino design studio ended in 2019 with a consultancy deal that continued until last year, but his involvement in the work is widely believed to have ended. day-to-day design decreased significantly when he was given the title of Chief Design Officer. in 2015. It’s hard not to imagine the direction some Apple products might have taken in recent years if Chingford’s best still had their hands on the helm.
Ive, obsessed with details, would it have, for example, supported the Apple Pencil support of the 10th generation iPad? With no dominant voice in mind – Tim Cook doesn’t seem one to leverage design decisions, while Ive’s successor Evans Hankey has nothing to do with the same weight – it’s suspected the solution has been found through a committee. A team member will have championed the adoption of USB-C; another will have insisted on an economical design with no room for a magnetic charging connector; and a third will have explained why the Apple Pencil 3 option was not feasible. And while each individual contribution made sense in isolation, the result was a wacky dongle and dozens of unimpressed reviewers.
What I brought to Apple was a consistent personal vision. That doesn’t mean Apple’s designs on its Watch have always been perfect, of course; there were a lot of missteps. In broader terms, his arch-minimalism could be frustrating for those who wanted more physical controls, and it’s suspected his departure was a big factor in the Apple Watch finally being granted a much-loved extra button and the Mac Studio is facing forward. harbors. But having a strong personality at the helm of the design team meant that Apple was better equipped to take risks, and more likely to create products with its own cultural imprint. The Action button is nice, but it’s also the kind of thing almost any tech company would do.
Perhaps Apple is no longer a company that focuses on individual personality, or even thinking differently. This week we also learned that Ive’s replacement will not be replaced, with a core of 20 designers reporting directly to the COO, who is no stranger to design and likely has his own ideas. If design by committee was the de facto approach for four years, it is now formalized.
Committees tend not to make mistakes – it takes a strong leader to really mess something up – but they have an instinct for unsatisfactory compromises. Or for the refusal to make a strong choice, which is perhaps why we’ve seen so many similar iPhones and iPads over the past few years, so many Macs with revolutionary components and designs resting on laurels. It remains to be seen which of these categories, caution or compromise, will apply to the key launches we expect this year and in 2024. Will Apple finally make a foldable device, when it knows that foldable devices mean higher prices, new designs, and the risk of physical malfunctions? And is the impending AR headset a bundle of compromises? I hope not.
Foundry
Trending: Top stories of the week
Apple’s financial results are out, and the bottom is the top: iPhone collapsesthe iPad is soaring and a huge quarter is too small.
forget one new HomePodApple needs a truly intelligent assistant.
A former employee claimed that Facebook apps could deliberately drain your iphone battery.
THE HomePod 2 is a good speaker that should have been a killer soundbar.
Even with the M2 ProMac gaming is as bad as it’s ever been.
Samsung’s Galaxy S23 phones are so boring there’s nothing to steal for Apple.
If you rely on Apple to to do workyou better go alone.
According to the NLRB, Apple’s wish to punish fugitives violates workers’ rights.
The rumor mill
THE Foldable iPad will be the Apple Watch Ultra of tablets, believes Macalope.
A respected analyst is “positive” Apple is launching a foldable iPad next year.
Everyone will want to buy an iPhone 15 Ultra this fall. Are there features it won’t have?
THE Apple Watch Ultra is again rumored to get a next-gen microLED display.
Here’s everything we heard about the Apple Watch Series 9.
Podcast of the week
The rumor mill generates speculation about just about every product in Apple’s lineup, so we thought we’d review some of them on the show.
You can watch every igamesnews podcast episode on Spotify, Soundcloud, Podcasts app or our own site.
Software updates, bugs and issues
Security researchers have warned of a new Google malware scam that could infect your mac.
And with that, we’re done for this week. If you want to receive regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Twitter or on Facebook to discuss the latest news from Apple. See you next Saturday, enjoy the rest of your weekend and stay Appley.
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