Day: 2 July 2019

Apple Sans Ive ⇥ techcrunch.com

Whenever a public-facing executive leaves their job, there will inevitably be a series of stories — typically in business publications — which try to ascertain why they left. Such stories are full of anecdotes and rumours, and it’s sometimes hard to know what to trust or who is grinding what axe.

So, I assume, many of you did the same thing I did for part of this weekend by catching up on a flurry of stories ostensibly giving some background to why Jony Ive is leaving Apple — Mark Gurman and Tripp Mickle wrote the two high-profile pieces, and I also read responses to try to get a handle on their accuracy.

After all that, I was left with the feeling that neither story was entirely convincing. Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch has written a particularly good piece distilling what he’s heard independently, as well as reflecting on Ive’s legacy:

Even though Jony is a ‘unicorn’ designer, Apple has always thrived on small teams with decision makers, and they’re not all one person. The structure of Apple, which does not rely on product managers, still leaves an enormous amount of power in the hands of the people actually doing the work. I’m not as concerned as a lot of people are that, with Jony leaving, there will suddenly be a slavish hewing to the needs of ‘ops over all’. It’s not in the DNA.

That doesn’t mean however, that there aren’t still question marks. Jony was an enormous force in this company. It is completely natural to be curious, excited and, hell yeah even worried about what his departure will do to the design focused Apple people love to love.

I have intentionally held off on posting much about Ive’s announced departure for the aforementioned reasons, but this is worth reading.

Update: I also think MG Siegler’s piece is wise.

Update: John Siracusa’s take is typically thoughtful and worth your time. This, in particular, bears worth repeating:

As the leader of design at Apple, Ive inevitably receives acclaim for work done by other people on his team. This is what it means to be the public face of a collaborative endeavor involving hundreds of people. Ive himself is the first to credit his team, always using the word “we” in his appearances in Apple’s design videos. One gets the impression that Ive has historically used “we” to refer to the design team at Apple, rather than Apple as a whole, but he certainly never meant it to refer to himself.

While I think it’s been fairly clear that design at Apple is a huge team endeavour — and though many of the pieces published after last week’s news acknowledge that Ive has taken a reduced role in the day-to-day activity of designing for several years — it remains odd to me that the single arbiter of product taste at the company is now Jeff Williams. Nothing against the guy, but it’s strange for Apple that it’s an MBA in that role.

Xiaomi Introduces Familiar-Looking Mimoji ⇥ theverge.com

Nick Statt, the Verge:

Now, Apple doesn’t own the concept of virtual avatars. It also doesn’t even own the trademark for Memoji. So it’s not fair to say Xiaomi is stomping all over the iPhone maker’s intellectual property; as VentureBeat notes, the concept behind and the use of the phrase memoji existed prior to Apple’s introduction of it into iMessage last summer at WWDC. Additionally, Samsung beat both companies to cartoon AR avatars with its slightly more horrifying Galaxy S9 AR Emoji feature back in February of last year.

There is a lot of prior art here, but it’s pretty clear what Xiaomi is aping with Mimoji. The Ripoff Express seems to keep chugging through Xiaomi’s station. It’s kind of their thing.

A Deep Deconstruction of a Surveillance Feature in One Email Client ⇥ mikeindustries.com

Mike Davidson wrote about the widespread implications of the sender-controlled read receipts that are enabled by default in Superhuman:

What I see in Superhuman though is a company that has mistaken taking advantage of people for good design. They’ve identified a feature that provides value to some of their customers (i.e. seeing if someone has opened your email yet) and they’ve trampled the privacy of every single person they send email to in order to achieve that. Superhuman never asks the person on the other end if they are OK with sending a read receipt (complete with timestamp and geolocation). Superhuman never offers a way to opt out. Just as troublingly, Superhuman teaches its user to surveil by default. I imagine many users sign up for this, see the feature, and say to themselves “Cool! Read receipts! I guess that’s one of the things my $30 a month buys me.”

When products are introduced into the market with behaviors like this, customers are trained to think they are not just legal but also ethical. They don’t always take the next step and ask themselves “wait, should I be doing this?” It’s kind of like if you walked by someone’s window at night and saw them naked. You could do one of two things: a) look away and get out of there, realizing you saw something that person wouldn’t want you to see, or b) keep staring, because if they really didn’t want anyone to see them, they should have closed their blinds. It’s two ways of looking at the world, and Superhuman is not just allowing for option B but actively causing it to happen. It’s almost as if Superhuman is aiming a motion-sensitive camera outside people’s windows and sending alerts when there is motion. It’s automated and designed to capture info when your family, your friend, your co-worker, or your victim is not aware. You may think “victim” is too harsh of a word to use here, but remember, we aren’t talking about you. We are talking about anyone who might use Superhuman.

This piece is fantastic. It’s not just about read receipts in one not-very-popular email app; it’s about how the ethical decisions that are made early in a company’s life impact its ongoing commitments.

Anyway, always disable images in your email client.

Update: Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra says that read receipts will now be disabled by default. I think this response is terrific, but as Nilay Patel points out, this mess wouldn’t exist for Superhuman — nor any other app that may be less willing or quick to course-correct — with strong user-centric privacy legislation.