Tripp Mickle, a technology reporter who recently moved out Wall Street Journal to New York Timesis releasing a new book about Apple this week titled “After Steve: How Apple Becomes a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul,” and a custom excerpt of the book was shared today that gives a look at the tensions between Tim Cook and Jony Ive, which eventually led to Ive’s departure.
The main anecdotes in the play focus on the Apple Watch, which I wanted to be a fashionable accessory that was launched with all the glimmer of a runway show complete with a white tent of $ 25 million. Apple’s marketing team questioned the cost and weight of fashion and preferred a more traditional introduction focusing on Apple Watch’s capabilities.
While Cook ultimately sided with Ive’s page on the fashion-oriented introduction, sources interviewed for the book suggest that it was the beginning of the end for Ive’s time at Apple.
For many present, Mr. Cook’s approval as a victory for Mr. Ive. But the designer would later rework it as a Pyrrhic victory. He wanted to tell colleagues that the debate over the event and the bigger battle over the watch’s marketing were among the first moments when he felt unsupported at Apple.
When the Apple Watch was turned into a fitness-oriented device with wide retail distribution, I reportedly started gnawing at the “emergence of operational leaders” in the company and a growing emphasis on services rather than hardware, and eventually he went out of Apple founded its own design company, Lovefrom.
The play goes into more detail about Ives’ early days at Apple, his relationship with Steve Jobs and further anecdotes about Ives’ development after Jobs’ death.
Without Mr Jobs, he would have taken on much of the responsibility for product design and marketing. People close to Mr. Ive said he had found it draining to fight with his colleagues for promotion and had been overwhelmed by leading a staff that stretched into hundreds, multiples of the 20-person design team he ran for years.
Cook and Ive eventually agreed on a new Chief Design Officer role for Ive, which would see him hand over the day-to-day management of the design team and switch to a part-time role with laser-focused product development.
Ive’s participation and presence diminished with his new role, where I reportedly have often gone weeks without weighting the work going on in the team. The report contains an anecdote from the iPhone X development process when Ive convened an important product review meeting, which he ended up being almost three hours late for and ultimately concluded without making any final decisions.
In Ive’s absence, Apple continued to turn more towards services, while Cook’s eye for operational efficiency further developed the company. When Apple Park was essentially finished in mid-2019, I decided it was time to move on.
Few knew the full extent of Mr. Ives matches. Few were aware of his clash with Apple’s finance team. Few understood how draining he found it to be fighting for the marketing of the watch, a product that had increased sales over time and become the core of the company’s $ 38 billion wearables business. Still, many could recognize the boredom of updating the company’s iPhones, iPads, and Macs annually.
A review of After Steve by New York Times commends it for Mickle’s thorough efforts to interview over 200 past and present employees and advisors. However, it does take a problem with Mickle’s epilogue, which blames Cook for being “remote and unrecognizable, a bad partner for Ive” and mainly responsible for Apple’s failure to launch another product the size of “iPhone”. The review claims that iPhone was a unique opportunity, as evidenced by the fact that the Jobs-Ive partnership never yielded anything else on that scale, neither before nor after.
“After Steve” debuts Tuesday, May 3 in the US and is available from Amazon and other retailers.