Re: Ive
> Ive needed someone like Jobs to hold his worst impulses in check
That's a touch simplistic thus, dare I say it, not as correct as it could be.
This 'worst implulses' theme has been common on forums for a while, usually in comments that betray a naivete about modern product design process in general and Apple's (and Sony's*) design history and structure in particular.
Removal of drives and ports from computers was a Jobs thing - iMac floppy disc drive (and hidden ports), Blue Ray 'a bag of hurt', hidden ports on original MacBook Air... All SJ.
(*Apple's and Sony's stories are interwoven. Esslinger worked at Wega, consulted for Jobs for Apple, Pixar and NeXt. His work inspired Teiyu Goto who designed generations of PlayStation and the VAIO brand and had his design team at Sony use Mac's. Apple's iPod filled a gap that Sony could easily have filled by didn't. Jobs suggested GPS photo tagging to Sony. OSX for Intel was first ported to a VAIO laptop. Etc etc. Bang and Olufsen should get a mention too, for integrated multiroom audio before it was cool, telephone scroll wheel, refinement of class D amllifiers and decades of data about just how much anodised aluminium rich people will have in their living rooms.)
What's interesting is the wider public perception of product design. It was on the ascendant before the blue iMac and then iPod made Ive famous - with names like Phillip Starck and Seymour Powell. Maybe Richard Sapper, though his lamp was in museums but not his Thinkpad for IBM.
It's actually quite hard to casually look at the 1990s in retrospect because many original print sources are hard to find online. There's so little about Teiyo Goto online, my source is Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center (first published 1999))
Biting the hand that feeds IT
