1. Jony Ive's role is expanded from Industrial Design to Industrial Design AND Human Interface. In other words, Ive is the new Design chief for hardware and software. This is huge.

2. Scott Forstall is out (after an interim advising role to Tim Cook). iOS goes to Craig Federighi who already oversees Mac OS. So, now iOS and Mac OS are overseen by the same person.

3. Eddy Cue's role is expanded (he previously was in charge of iTunes, App Store, iBookStore, iCloud). He now also oversees Siri and Maps.

4. Bob Mansfield will lead a new group called Technologies (wireless and semiconductor).

5. John Browett of retail is out.

Overall, I view this move as extremely positive.

Tim Cook just elevated his most reliable and capable SVPs to assume more leadership role.

John Ive, Eddy Cue, Mansfield and Federighi have all proven to be pretty spectacular. Ive with industrial design, Cue with iTunes/AppStore/iCloud, Mansfield with hardware and Federighi with Mac OS.

Further, Tim Cook gets rid of his problem SVPs - namely Browett who didn't match the culture of Apple... and Scott Forstall (who advanced iOS in huge ways) but reportedly had problems with getting along with other SVPs and also who disappointed users with iOS6/Maps (and also in my opinion poorly designed and implemented Apple apps... appstore reviews for Apple apps have gone significantly down the last year or two).

Cook will probably give Forstall a good severance package with an agreement that Forstall doesn't go to a mobile OS competitor.

I'm actually more optimistic on Apple with this bold management shakeup. Tim Cook is showing the moves of a bold leader... and it's exactly what Apple needs.

Important to mention (you did already, but just to emphasize) that Scott Forstall will be "advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim". Interim meaning more specifically 6 months, till April 2013.

This should allow him to cash in some thousands of stock options, which will serve as a natural non-competitive package. Which would be very fair, given his role in re-shaping Apple over all these years.

Recent news out of Apple regarding "cutbacks" at retail suggested he was nudging them in the same direction. Given that he got his first stock disbursement last week and was due $58 million over the next few years if he hung around, I'm guessing he was pushed. Great decision from Cook if that was the case.

I agree, the one thing that irks me though, is that I remember reading the guy was able to convert a sizable part of his Apple stock options only a few weeks ago. That's a quick & cool few million $$$ he made in one year at Apple without any apparent positive contribution :-/

Apple can afford to lose the three mil. They'll make that back in a few days once somebody who actually gets Apple's retail concept is running the show again. Somebody who respects the model that brought Apple top-of-the-charts customer service ratings. Somebody who respects that if you're making more money per square foot than any other retail store in the world, you might be doing something right.

Apple retail head is one of the most desirable executive positions on the planet. Why couldn't they recruit a true superstar?

I'm a little confused and worried ...

I think the problem is identifying the superstar in the first place. Quite frankly, there is no company whose retail comes close to Apple, and so there isn't anyone who has a track record of being able to do the SVP Retail job.

In addition, the Apple SVP Retail job is different from head of retail at other companies (e.g. s/he doesn't have control over inventory [1]), and so when it comes down to the end of the day, it's really hard to find someone who has done a similar job in the past, let alone done that job well.

In all likelihood, Tim Cook had some idea of the downfalls of hiring Browett, but decided to bet on it. I would also guess that given the worries around that time that Cook wouldn't be able to handle the CEO job also made the hiring rather more urgent that it should have been.

[1]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/25/how-apple-works-insid...

I'd look towards fashion - for example the Japanese clothing store Uniqlo [1]. Their stores are quite similar to Apple's in terms of layout and space, the way that they encourage you to come in and look around, and they always have helpful service on hand. The problem is Tadashi Yanai [2] is too rich and successful to leave his current post.

I see a parallel with Apple making (subjectively) luxurious electronic devices available at prices for the masses the way Uniqlo makes (subjectively) luxurious fashion available at prices for the masses. I grabbed a bunch of French linen shirts in Tokyo for ~25 AUD each (though the AUD was doing well against the JPY at the time).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniqlo [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadashi_Yanai

The only UK retail brands which don't seem horrible are high-end department stores (Selfridges, etc.) and grocery stores, and neither really seems like a good background for running Apple retail.

There were two main kinds of stores -- pale imitations of Best Buy, Circuit City, and Microcenter (out in the suburbs/small towns) (which is ironic since those businesses have had serious problems in the US market now, too, 10 years later), and urban small stores. The smaller chain stores (Dixons high street locations) had very limited product selection and you had to wait in a queue to get a salesperson to handle your purchase, rather than staff out on the floor to push products (often on commission) and then take the purchase to the registers. The big stores mainly had cookers and other white goods/appliances, with really limited selection of anything tech. This was 2000-2002. EU stores were a lot better in my limited experience (NL and DE). The only way to actually buy computer parts was to go to fairly sketchy flea market type buildings or fairs, mail order, or a small number of independent shops (at least in London; never found anything outside London).

Staff were even less educated on products than at a Best Buy in the US today, terrifying. Even getting people to take a model number and look it up in their inventory system was a minor production.

I do however agree on some of your other points, such as poor selection and useless staff.

Price is set by willingness to pay. full stop. Cost for goods is almost always worked to, backwards, from price targets. Exchange rates don't enter into it, except as pertains to costs.

GBP prices remain 'close' to numeric USD, because people still buy products at those prices. Looking into why they do, leads to interesting questions and analysis about disposable income, taxes, psychology, etc - but it's largely irrelevant.

It is that way because it works.

Completely irrelevant to the discussion

You get it in the US. I remember it in every store. Initially I thought it was intimidating because I was not used to it. But after a few months and some great experiences I really enjoyed it.

You don't get it in the UK. High street stores, especially noticeable in places like shoe stores where you need service to complete a transaction. You could easily wait 10 minutes until someone was available to help you. And it could take another 10 minutes per pair of shoes you wanted to try on. So painful.

They rebranded all their high street stores to Currys.digital, and although store numbers have been declining, they are still a regular fixture on high streets.

Every time I go into one of those shops, it's because I need something immediately, to take away. They never have it in stock, and ask if I'd like to order it. If I wanted to order it, I'd do it myself, online.

Granted they provide convenience and the ability for customers to use products in store before purchase, but I can't believe people still pay the price premium.

I've only stepped foot in their stores twice in the last couple of years; once to try out the new Retina MacBook Pro and once to inspect televisions before buying one online for ~£400 less than their price.

Cook hired him, which many commentators pointed out was a mistake in the first place.

Unless you can hire someone you 100% know will never make a mistake, you should be interested in how they deal with them when they do.

Cook seems to have given him enough time to prove himself (or as it seems otherwise) and has then taken steps to right his mistake.

> Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company

And thus ended the reign of skeuomorphism at Apple. Or, at least, the reign of hyper-realism and hyper-whimsy in UI design. Jobs or Forstall always seemed to favour it, but could you imagine Jony Ive signing off on a Podcasts app where half the screen is a reel-to-reel tape that bounces when you pause?

The skeuomorphic look of Podcasts was based on a physical product design by Ive's legendary design influence, Dieter Rams:

http://www.cultofmac.com/176008/heres-the-braun-tape-recorde...

In retrospect, the tension inherent in this odd compromise seems palpable. It's like listening to the last album a band releases before they break up.

And having such a prominent °F/°C switch is just baffling. This is not a function used regularly by the vast majority of users.

The spinner dial may not be functional, but it could be and should be, because weather conditions change incrementally and (more or less) predictably. If it's humid and cloudy and the barometric pressure is falling, then it would make sense for the spinner dial to move slowly between "cloudy" and "raining" positions, for instance.

And maybe the author of the app is an advocate of the metric system and wants to encourage users to treat the °F/°C switch as a prominent educational feature. Like I said, I don't know anything about it, but the amount of negativity being aimed at the app seems difficult to justify.

Don’t fight patents with cheap lies. There are plenty of reasons why patents are bad, bad, bad, no need to resort to untruths.

If copying is wrong it is wrong regardless of how long ago the original was made. Or is there some magical cut-off date by which copying suddenly is ok? Why 14 years? Why not 13 or 10 or 50? It strikes me as pretty arbitrary. For a company to go all out in accusing others of copying I think they should be above all that and come up with entirely original designs. Why take a 30 year old tape recorder and mimic that, is that really the mark of originality that Apple stands for? It seems quite hypocritical to me.

Don’t argue over ridiculous stuff like that. There is no need for these cheap polemics.

That's never been the philosophical basis of copyright. Copyright is a limited, artificial monopoly designed to encourage creation. It's not that copying is "bad", it's that limiting copying for a short time might encourage people to create new works.

A paper that argues that the economically ideal copyright length is 14 years (which is exactly what the original term of copyright was in the US): http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optima...

Thomas Jefferson articulates this reasoning, talking about patents:

>If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. -- http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....

1. That Braun thing was produced decades ago, and probably they haven't sold a single one of them in the last decade or so.

2. A podcasts app on an iPad, is in no way competing to an ancient cassette player.

3. They're in different categories. It's like if I "copy" a Mercedes logo for a window. Though I'm not particularly in favor of Apple/Samsung case ruling, it's clearly different to copy an element for a competing product (a tablet) or another product that's a whole different beast and is no longer for sale.

You are either woefully naive or being disingenuous to assume that the two are the same.

Braun, if they wished, could have done so. Of course, I'm sure in that case, Apple would have probably licensed the patents or worked around them.

Even worse than maps, which are a huge ongoing problem.

What Apple loves is irrelevant (if one is willing to ascribe emotional states to corporations). Daimler-Benz loved steering tillers. Ford loved hand throttles.

Think about the way in which the interfaces of automobiles changed over the first forty years as they went from horseless carriages to widespread adoption. That's what we're seeing in computer interfaces.

Protruding buttons are merely a user interface choice. They were never a functional requirement.

This is a slippery slope. There's no hard boundary between skeumorphism and visual affordance, even though you'd like there to be.

The difference between skeumorphism and visual affordance is the difference between "intuitive" and intuitive. One makes a reference to past experience, and is built on natural affordances. The other is not.

That said, I think what you're getting at is it might be impossible to completely eliminate skeumorphism. I agree with that. There's going to be at least a sliver left in almost any interface. That's just one of the byproducts of our having a culture.

An image of a tape reel is to recording audio as an icon of a floppy disk is to saving documents — a lazy visual shortcut, requiring a non-trivial semantic context. What is the percentage of humans alive today who have used a tape reel recorder?

The boundary between affordances and skeuomorphs is perfectly clear. Just ask yourself — does the form of the design element in question follow its function?

And flat background colors represent a uniformly lit smooth surface. I don't think that mimicking some basic material properties is really skeumorphic.

It's more when that's taken to the point of looking/acting like a specific physical object (like Game Center's pool table felt) that I'd apply the term.

I also don’t think there will be radical changes. Remember how OS X looked before Corinthian leather arrived? That’s what I see more off in the future. Probably with an updated look (like the new iTunes?), but not much more.

If you want to know how that looks on iOS I would maybe look at something like the editing interface of iMovie, Safari, or Mail.

That would be my guess.

But over the long haul, I don't see how Apple can stick with an increasingly dated and arbitrary visual paradigm. How many people have actually been around real to real tape decks or owned a leather desk calendar? And as digital devices like smartphones become more ubiquitous, fewer and fewer people will.

Yes. Absolutely. After a year of the longer 4" screen I fully expect Apple to significantly revise the UI to take advantage of this extra room.

Don't expect a radical change that throws out everything Apple has already achieved, but do expect new widgets that make 4" screens better.

This is good news.

Even better news is Browett's ouster. The business with his cutting operational corners in retail was a very, very bad omen. If they'd left him in, he might have poisoned a very important well for the company. Hopefully his replacement is closer to Ron Johnson's set of retail and service values.

N'bad, Tim.

Not sure why this is downvoted. At least Apple's competitors allow me to buy their music as Linux user.

http://allthingsd.com/20120803/apples-eddy-cue-saw-market-fo...

I wonder if the scope of Human Interfaces extends to the Apple Store. If Apple is taking a holistic approach to coordinating its products, it's worth considering that the store is one of the most important aspects for human interaction and industrial design. Maybe Jony will take some level of control in terms of design and leave the management and promotional aspects to the retail SVP?

Forstall led development of the fastest-growing, most popular computing platform of the past decade or so with, to be sure, a few notable screw-ups, but mostly incredible innovation and efficiency. While his departure does sound like the result of a power struggle that needed to be resolved, I really believe we're shortchanging his incredible achievements. Forstall's departure is not unequivocally or even clearly a victory for those who are firm believers in iOS and its ecosystem going forward. The only reasonable reaction is that we'll have to wait and see.

Apple has succeeded in the mobile market largely because of their excellent hardware and their app ecosystem. But iOS itself is a little disappointing. It's due for a major evolution, not just more incremental tweaking.

Is it that he had to take a more active role now, and not just be a Jobs man?

Is it that Jobs could bring talented people together and keep them there and Tim Cook is failing to do that?

I'm almost certain it's neither of those, but they serve to illustrate the point: when people think of iOS, Scott Forstall is not even close to the first person they think of giving credit to.

I do disagree with your last point, though —— I've watched every keynote for the past 6-7 years and Forstall has rocked the iOS presentations. Perhaps I'm biased, but I very deeply associate him with the greatness of iOS, particularly Apple's ability to steadily pick off the "low-hanging fruit" features (e.g. 3rd party apps in 2.0, copy-and-paste, PC-free) with regularity and elegance.

As a side note, I do hope iOS will become more open under a new leadership.

I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt. They had some kind of problem with Google Maps, and wanted to build their own capability, which was never going to be easy.

He might have been fired if he cheated, by creating a well curated Valley dataset to prove to the other execs what a great job he'd done. That would annoy people.

I've heard rumors that he was seen as "better managing up than down" (impressing his boss, at the expense of results), and that doesn't strike me as something Tim Cook would like very much (both from his reported management style, and the number of stock options he has). I can see that being a last straw from Tim - "You screwed up, now own up to it. Or else."

It would be because he over promised and under delivered.

Sure, it was embarrassing to Apple to release a half-assed Maps app, but even more so to tout it just a few weeks earlier as being soooo good.

And alledgedly refused to own up to it.

Was he pushed to do Maps, and he told everyone it was going to be a nightmare, and then made the best of a bad situation?

The problem is that they released that first attempt. iPhone and iPad weren't their first attempts at phones and tablet computers, they were simply the first ones good enough to take to market.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/papermaster_damn_antenna

It possible that he though he did no wrong. Or maybe he thought he was above the fray. But if he wanted to save his job, owning the wrong is the best way. People forgive when the apology is genuine.

It does not surprise that he's being fired for this or that his departure is going to be transitional since he's so intricately involved with so many central aspects and initiatives at the company.

(also no internal knowledge)

The reason Apple screwed up maps is because of one reason and one reason only. Licensing. The app itself is great. The 3D maps are great. The data is the problem.

Apple chose not to license data from many of the key players they should have to at least be competitive. My guess is Apple arrogantly thought they could get enough feedback from users to fix up the problem themselves.

What map applications have you authored? Any links?

But like taligent said, it's data that's the real problem. Mapping data tends to be dirty and heterogeneous. Do you have a point, or a polygon? You're in trouble if you just have a street address (geocoding can be very hit and miss). Metadata (like the projection) can be missing. Locations can be slightly wrong, and you'll draw a highway running through a shopping mall, or connect streets which don't quite connect, or have gaps in a street because it changes street names and there's a tiny gap between the two streets (which doesn't exist in the real world). How do you normalise the field names? How do you even get the data? Once you've got everything into your database, you move onto the next city / state / country.

All of which is a roundabout way of contradicting? yourself.

That is the real hard part. Trying to obtain all that data. Because every mistake is potentially one person complaining loudly on the internet.

Much like machine translation and teledildonics, once you start to try to scale globally, mapping is actually one of the hardest problems that is remotely viable at our current technological level. There's a tiny handful of companies that can do a barely usable job, and everything else is worthless garbage.

In Japan, at least, Apple has gone from the former to the latter with iOS 6. (Maps.app did work great last week on a business trip to Austin, TX, however.)

It's easy to blame Forstall for a crappy product. But if someone else was responsible for mandating the change, assigning him the project, and pushing an impossible deadline, maybe it's more their fault.

"Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."

It's an irritation for Jobs, but it's an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.

"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.

"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...

That's my synthesis of the analysis of a bunch of Apple watchers, so take it with a bowl of salt. But it makes sense to me.

It seemed obvious that his back-to-back failures with Siri + Maps and the fact that lots of people inside Apple hated him were the reason for this, but it was impossible to know for certain without somebody inside taking a risk and saying that.

Care to speculate on who would be next in line to be CEO now? That was presumably Forstall. Now it would be Cue or Ive or...?

1) Forstall apparently wants to be CEO, and run the company. That puts him at odds with Cook (the CEO), and Ive (who wants to drive Apple's design decisions).

2) He's divisive. There's claims that neither Jonny Ive nor Bob Mansfield would talk to him without Tim Cook mediating. There's also claims that he "managed up" (showed off to the boss) better than he "managed down", and stole credit while deflecting critisism.

3) He was the guy in charge of Siri and Maps.

4) He was probably the one driving the post-Jobs war with Google.

Siri and Maps are Apple's way of fighting Google. Siri competes with Google Search, and Maps competes with Google Maps. There are reasons why Apple wants to spite Google, but the whole strategy could also be Scot Forstall's way of creating his own empire in Apple. Going head to head with Google requires lots of resources, which would all be under Forstall's command.

I don't think it's a good gamble for Apple. Google doesn't really hate Apple. I bet they'll port everything they can to iOS, as long as they can keep pushing their ads. Nexus might see Apple as a competitor, but Nexus isn't worth as much as adwords. As Eric Schmidt said in an interview - "It's their call".

If Apple goes down the path Forstall wants, they'll be going head to head with Google in the things Google is best at. If they stop trying to turn into a data / AI company, they can focus on what they do best - making easy to use devices which sell like hotcakes, and command a fat profit margin.

Android will hurt them, but as long as they focus on their core strengths (hardware, marketing, industrial design, interface design, and integration) they'll continue to do pretty well. They milked the iPod for a decade, despite there being plenty of better value competitors. They can do the same with the iPhone. They can do the same with whatever the next big thing is. I'd say going to war with Google will be at best a waste of time, and most likely a string of humiliating losses.

I hope this marks a low for Apple. All things considered, they could do a lot worse. Hopefully they will only keep improving.

If Google was a hardware company (not a search company) I could see why they would screw over the iPad by not porting their apps. But Google is not a hardware company, most of their revenue comes from search. They want Google search (or the next generation, interfaced with their Siri clone) on every phone and tablet. That's why they make Android open source.

Apple can try to screw over Google, by blocking Google apps (or just not cooperating with Google on integration). They can offer their own search and maps, but they'll do a crap job, and end up screwing their customers. It might hurt Google, but it will also hurt Apple (as Android will have a big advantage).

The best thing for both companies is cooperating to get Google features on the iPhone. Sure, Apple may resent Android, but they are just going to have to suck it up. If it weren't for Android, Microsoft would be making the leading iOS substitute, and I can't see either Apple or Google loving that.

The latest Podcasts App from iTunes is a skeuomorphic mess. It has a superfluous animation of a reel-to-reel player of course. But it utterly fails at its most basic task: playing a goddamn podcast. But don't take my word for it, it has a 1.5 star rating on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/podcasts/id525463029

Not to mention crashes... Apple used to make jokes about the Windows blue screen of death. Well, that's my new day-to-day experience with iOS apps. I'm constantly restarting crashed apps over and over.

Honestly, this is good news if Forstall really is the driving force behind the deteriorating user experience of many apps.

Trade away the lyric and podcast show info displays for kitsch wood veneer? And a reel-to-reel tape recorder simulator? Move seek controls to weird locations? Replace the easy-to-spot seek knob with a radio needle? Why? So many small steps backward, even if no single one was a deal breaker... negative trajectory is negative trajectory.

If this means they walk some of that silliness back, it's the best Apple news in ages. It started to look like designers who didn't actually use the apps were taking over.

There's a good reason that its a bad idea to roll a system UI replacement the vast majority of the time. The next time it comes up in conversation, I now have a perfect example of why in my pocket.

I also totally agree about the "designers who didn't use the apps" bit, and would go a bit further - they really need to do a better job testing real-world network conditions too. Designing stuff designed around cell reception doesn't fare so well outside apple campus where it's not blanketed with reliable, high-speed, low-latency network connections. iTunes Match... it brings back memories of realplayer. It's a cost of secrecy, but seeing that the supply chain had already failed them there, best embrace reality and use it to improve stuff before launch.

I had many situations in which the auto-hidden scrollbars made it impossible to tell that there was more to discover in a scroll view. The CAPS SIDEBAR HEADERS have no triangle indicator anymore, it is impossible to tell without hovering if a section is closed or open & empty. The monochrome sidebars made Finder and iTunes noticeably less efficient in my usage. Many new-style toolbars like Xcode's are not customizable anymore. etc...

And all these things are in line with Apple's hardware design (where I enjoy the simplicity a lot more).

All kinds of things are broken left and right in OSX but I guess that's just how it is. Mail hangs constantly and silently, you're just not receiving anything anymore. You can't close it (and force quit is not an option anymore?), you have to kill it from command line. The new calendar is brown faux leather all of a sudden, completely different than everything else. And you can't easily select which account you're viewing and setting events for.

It is interesting to note that software functionality and polish above a certain mediocre level just can not be reached.

Sure, sometimes it's understandable that stuff is totally rewritten from scratch since some fundamental new technology made it necessary, and you have to go to a state of more brokenness. But even when that is not the case, it seems software can't go beyond "90% complete" or so, at best it just reaches an asymptotic level where stuff is broken at the same rate as it is repaired.

After the major and hard stuff is done, what the heck are all the engineers and testers working on? If you're not in a hurry to create those big features any more, you could concentrate on at least doing the few new small features very well. But it feels as if OSX UI has taken as many steps backwards as it has gone forward from Snow Leopard.

This happens in other software too. For example Xnview and XFLR5 have both been developed for a long time and have had their ups and downs, and at the moment might be below 50% of their historical level of "perfection". But they're cheap/free mostly one man operations, multiplatform and have had massive rewrites and feature expansions. Often the developer might not even have some supported platform to test platform specific issues on, and it's a surprise they work as well as they do.

(I also listen to a lot of podcasts and have been disappointed by the Apple Podcast app).

Podcasts.app is crap, but there are Instacast and Downcast (I alternate between those) and probably other good choices that cost less than a half gallon of gas.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/08/quickpick-update-in-limbo-for...

http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/02/apple_yanks_widget...

EDIT: fixed first link

It was a bit cumbersome to learn (tap to show position/scrubbing bar) but it works well for my news podcasts as well as my podrunner casts.

I often find streaming works fine instead of downloading the episode... couldn't do that before easily in the iPod/Music app.

I think it was evident he lost the power struggle and it killed his enthusiasm. His heart just wasn't in it anymore.

Apple has more than 939 million shares, maintaining $1.00 in share price is nearly a billion dollars in shareholder value.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57425920-37/apple-exec-sco...

    Although a major sell-off can sometimes mean an executive 
    is leaving a company, that might not be the case with Forstall.

"Forstall has made it abundantly clear inside Cupertino that he would like to eventually be Apple's chief executive, adding that "he wears his ambition in plainer view than the typical Apple executive.""

The former is just a matter of aesthetic preference. Where skeuomorphism gets dangerous is in the latter case.

A perfect example is the horrible address book in OS X. It looks like a book, and therefore the user expects it to function like a book. Yet, it doesn't. It's this area of interaction design that has run afoul at Apple.

Neither form of skeuomorphism is inherently bad, but it's easier to shoot yourself in the foot and ruin the UX when you move from decorative to functional.

If you can render the next page faster, then why fake a 'page turn' that takes time to animate.

It's the very definition of skeuomorphism.

Speaking personally, the iBooks page curl is one of my favorite features of any iOS app, period.

Maybe this is one example of skueomorphism done right, at least from my point of view. An anachronism that helps to make the user feel comfortable with the application, even though it isn't strictly necessary.

Ala swipe to unlock, or elastic scroll-ending. Use affordances, rather than limiting real world analogies.

    Skeuomorphism is when a product imitates design elements
    functionally necessary in the original product design, but that
    becomes ornamental in the new product design

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

Take for instance some of the apps on iOS. The have book bindings, rings, shadows, etc.

To me it's one of the worst designs on the iPad. The buttons are way too tiny, they are arranged differently for every game, and each game seems to compete for the least intuitive layout and labeling.

In other words: The metaphor is fine but the execution is lacking.

It's best we all get used to it. It'll be repeated again and again from now on :)

Edit: This is what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interface

> Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for _Human Interface_ in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

It's still a non-word, but will be an (oft-used) word soon enough (like that damn skeumorphism thing).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini

Maybe MMI is a mistranslation from other languages? This Danish site [1] uses it, and I know the used French term is "Interaction Homme Machine", which I can easily imagine being translated to Man-Machine Interaction

[1]: http://www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects/mmi/intro.php#0

Edit: It doesn't matter if you're an iOS/OS X developer or not. Even if you're a web designer, you should really read Apple's HIGs carefully and thoroughly. They're (by any definition of the word), "great".

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UserEx...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/userexperience/Con...

As both a fan and shareholder of Apple, I'm very pleased to hear Browett is out. The stories that came out a couple months ago about the changes in Apple Retail did fill me with admiration for his management style.

Also, given how Forstall is described in a Business Week profile[1], and that Bob Mansfield is not only sticking around, but heading up a new team, I wonder if Mansfield laid out an ultimatum to Tim Cook about 'him or me'.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc...

Then Cook convinced Mansfield to "unretire" and become an advisor: http://gigaom.com/apple/shedding-light-on-apple-exec-drama-w...

And now, Mansfield heads up a huge new group called Technologies (wireless, semiconductor, etc).

What a roller coaster for Mansfield... but not just him, the entire management team because they're all working together and dependent on each other.

And this new section, I think, could be really important.

Apple has been really innovating in silicon and wireless technologies, and they're at a point where this will increasingly be the source of key competitive advantages.

I suspect Mansfield's job is to integrate this division, get it whipped into shape and then recruit a replacement to lead it.

One of the biggest questions about Tim Cook was whether he could keep the management team together. Now one of the longest serving and most importance pieces of that unit is leaving. Whether or not it was a good decision, the market is going to interpret this negatively and they'll be scared there will be more of this.

If this were good news this is the last time Apple would have released it...

If Apple had come out 3 months before iPhone5 and said "Look, we really need to divorce ourselves from Google Maps as we can't be relying on an arch-competitor for such an important service, but please be aware that our new Maps app will have issues for several months as we work out the kinks based on customer feedback", and reinforced that message several times, the issue would have been close to a non-issue - and I think most people would have understood.

Instead they came out and said "new Maps is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" (paraphrasing) which was downright wrong and people rightly felt let down.

In a couple years, it won't matter what happened with the Maps launch. It'll be great by then. And nobody will be talking about it - just like 0 "average consumers" talk about antennagate.

I agree that in the long term Maps will be great and people will have forgotten the ill-planned launch - except perhaps Scott Forstall.

I do miss Scott Forstall on stage, he was a good presenter.

Getting Jony Ive to oversee both industrial and software design, could lead to something very exciting, that provides the innovation, the software, has been lacking.

I have full confidence, in Eddy Cue, Craig, and Bob their new roles, and hope this means Bob will stay on longer.

As per the direct no apology firing of Browett.. Sweet! I was actually hoping for that. I was insane to gamble with the Apple stores reputation and service for a litle more margin. Having now seen a Dixons, I have no idea, why he was hired

I wonder how this will affect iOS. Forstall has been in charge from the beginning (afaik) so we might see some big changes and even better integration with OS X now that Craig Federighi is in charge of both teams.

Edit:

I wonder if Forstall's departure has anything to do with Mansfield staying on?

[1] He seems to certainly not be a bad CEO if we're talking about the set {All CEOs}. But you'd have to be really really good to not look awful if you're following Jobs.

(http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc...)

That could turn out great or horrible. (I'm not sure whether obviously great hardware designers can also be great UI designers.) I'm optimistic for now. Hopefully that means bye bye overt skeumorphism.

(I do think Apple's UIs have in the past always been above average, sometimes excellent. Their fashion choices, however, have at times been horrible. It would be great if Apple could change the second, not necessarily the first part.)

I don't use iCal or Address Book much, so I don't hate that stupid skeumorphism like the rest of the world (I like it though when it's used sparingly and isn't just keep getting in your way)...

That was true of Jobs as well... but holy crap, have you seen his yacht?

Unfortunately, good aesthetic judgement in one area doesn't always carry over into other areas, even those that seem closely related. Human-machine interfaces have a functional aspect that can't be handled by dashing off yet another homage to Dieter Rams. Ive hasn't yet shown competence in this aspect of design.

On the other hand, have you seen the designs the approved for the future HQ?

It's the sort of place where I'd expect a zombie movie to finish up, not where I'd expect people to be inspired to create great things. It belongs in Pyongyang, not Cupertino.

Well said. Ive's aesthetic has certainly worked for the hardware line. Even if for nothing else than just the novelty of seeing what they'll put out, I'm delighted to see him take over all HI.

Toning down overt skeumorphism is just the start.

It's abused here on HN as short-hand for app decorations that people don't like, like the infamous leather treatment on the calendar.

But there are plenty of "skeuomorphic" aspects to iOS that I never see anyone complain about (and sometimes compliment), like inertial scrolling or sliding on/off switches.