Ive got a story to tell: Differing views on Apple’s exiting designer

Big news from ye olde iPhone shoppe last week as Apple announced that Jony Ive would be leaving the company to run his own design firm. Get ready to be sprayed in the face with a firehose full of hot takes.

First, let’s go to Vice, where Jason Koebler says “History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive.” (Tip o’ the antlers to SamT and @designheretic.) History and Jason Koebler.

And why is that?

He leaves a legacy of pushing [Apple’s] products toward disposability and unrepairability, a choice that has reverberated across the consumer electronics industry.

Koebler has a laundry list of complaints about Apple’s products, from the terrible MacBook Pro keyboard to AirPods, all of which are solely Jony Ive’s fault and…

What’s that?

The Macalope is just being informed by the birds that walk up and down his hairy back and pick off bugs that that we have late breaking news from The Wall Street Journal. Turns out Ive has hardly been involved with anything at Apple for years.

“Jony Ive Is Leaving Apple, but His Departure Started Long Ago.”

Few on the outside knew that for years, Mr. Ive had been growing more distant from Apple’s leadership, say people close to the company. …

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.

So, there you have it. Jony Ive is history’s greatest and laziest monster.

But, wait, we have even laterly breakingly news. Someone at Apple named “Tim Cook” (never heard of him) has shot back at The Journal’s report, calling it “absurd”.

So, Mr. Cook, it would seem, sides with “history’s greatest monster”, then. “Jony was there all the time designing all those devices that are destroying the world as we know it.” OK, good to know.

Look, Ive probably did push Apple’s design toward thinner and thinner devices which can certainly have a detrimental…