Has Apple stopped innovating? Superstar designer Jony Ive seems to think so, at least according to his earlier promise to leave Apple and go it alone if the company ever stopped innovating.
Late on Wednesday evening, Apple announced that Ive would be leaving the company to start up his own design firm. Buried in an interview about product design from 2014 with UK paper The Times, Ive claimed that he would only ever leave the company if Apple stopped innovating, as that was the reason he stayed.
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“Yes. I’d stop. I’d make things for myself, for my friends at home instead. The bar needs to be high,” said Ive, when queried about this. Back in 2014, he added “I don’t think that will happen, We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed. When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in the future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit. It’s still so, so new.”
There’s no word on what finally made him decide “Ive got to go”, but it could be the atrocious cheesegrater stylings of the Mac Pro, or the fact he’s spent the last few years designing furniture for Apple’s Headquarters.
Still, if he is genuinely disheartened at Apple, you wouldn’t know it. Ive’s next adventure is a creative agency called LoveFrom, which will launch in 2020 and have Apple as its very first client.
However, if you could claim that Apple was having trouble innovating with Ive, it’ll have a much harder time without him. As the designer behind the iPod, iPod Mini, iPhone, iPad and a few things that don’t have an i in the title, he’s become synonymous with Apple’s remarkable feats of design.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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