When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011 there was only one question on the minds of Apple fans and Wall Street: What will happen to Apple now? Steve Jobs was Apple and ever since he returned to take the helm, he had led the company through tough times and ultimately seen it become a global leader in the tech industry. Many feared that perhaps Apple would lose its soul and may not be able to produce an entirely new product. The Apple Watch was the company's way of showing the world that it could remain true to its innovative ways in the absence of Jobs.
Even as its design chief Jony Ive rallied the company to deliver this new product, his frustrations with how Apple was being run ultimately led to his decision to leave Apple in 2019. A new book by Tripp Mickle of the New York Times titled “After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul” sheds more light on Ive's frustration at seeing Apple lose its soul as a design-centric company.
Mickle adapts a part of his book in an article on the NYT that highlights the circumstances leading up to Ive's exit from Apple after almost three decades on designing products for the company.
Samsung takes the lead in hardware innovation
“In the wake of Mr. Jobs’s death, colleagues said, Mr. Ive fumed about corporate bloat, chafed at Mr. Cook’s egalitarian structure, lamented the rise of operational leaders and struggled with a shift in the company’s focus from making devices to developing services,” the article mentions.
It's no secret that Apple under Tim Cook has focused more on services than hardware. It's been great for the company's revenues as Apple's services businesses brought in over $72 billion last year. However, this came at the cost of Apple effectively abandoning leadership in pushing the envelope on hardware design.
Cook reportedly showed less interest in design compared to Jobs and made far fewer visits to the design studio when the Apple Watch was being created. The disconnect between Ive and Cook was apparent when decisions about the market positioning for the Apple Watch were being made.
Ive wanted it to be seen as a fashion accessory and viewed “a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” He had to push for the launch event to be held in a lavish white tent that would cost $25 million to put up to showcase the Apple Watch as a bona fide fashion accessory. Cook ultimately ended up accepting Ive's idea but the designer would feel that it was nothing more than a “Pyrrhic victory.”
The article goes into a lot more detail about how Apple's soul as a design-forward company has diminished and it has emerged as a company where one of the closest confidants of Steve Jobs felt that he no longer a place.
We've said before how Apple seems to have given up on innovation. It's no longer making the bold hardware moves that it did before. On the other hand, Samsung has significantly upped its game over the past few years, and the lead it has taken with foldable smartphones is proof enough that Samsung will always be there to push the industry forward, no matter what Apple decides to do.
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