Linked List: January 23, 2017

Monday, 23 January 2017

Former Apple UI Designer Bas Ording Now at Tesla ★

Thom Holwerda, writing for OS News back in June 2014:

After about 15 years at the company as User Interface Designer, he left about a year ago for unknown reasons - until now. Speaking at a conference here in The Netherlands, and noted by Emerce (via Tweakers), Ording explains that he decided to leave Apple because he was fed up with having to appear in court.

“Because my name is listed on patents, I increasingly had to appear in court cases versus HTC and Samsung,” he said, “That started to annoy me. I spent more time in court than designing. Aside from that, I missed the interaction with Steve Jobs. We discussed matters every fourteen days.”

In March 2015, Ording joined Tesla as a user interface designer. I missed this back when it happened, but now it’s starting to look like part of a trend. Tesla seems to be poaching more good people from Apple than Apple is from Tesla.

Here’s a good 2014 piece by Luke Dormehl at Cult of Mac on Ording’s role in the creation of iOS’s text selection and copy-paste interface.

Designer Matt Casebolt Leaves Apple for Tesla ★

In more two-week-old news, here’s Seth Weintraub, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Chris Lattner isn’t the only high profile Apple executive who departed for Tesla over the past month, rather than sticking around to work on Titan. 9to5mac has learned that Matt Casebolt, a high profile Senior Director of Design for Apple’s Mac lineup left the company last month for a role at Tesla as Sr. Director Engineering, Closures and Mechanisms. A job meant for a man named Casebolt …

Over the past two and a half years Casebolt led the development of the MacBook Pro with its standout and sometimes controversial Touch Bar feature. Before that, he led the team working on the iconic ‘trash can’ Mac Pro and was previously instrumental in the design of the first generations of MacBook Air. These are some of Apple’s most iconic Mac products over the past decade.

Xiaomi Stops Disclosing Phone Sales Figures ★

Jon Russell, reporting for TechCrunch two weeks ago:

Xiaomi has forgone its tradition of revealing how many smartphones it sold the previous year. The strategy yielded many headlines for the highly-regarded Chinese outfit, but today its CEO admitted that Xiaomi has been in transition after growing “too fast”.

The writing was on the cards, even as early as January 2016 when Xiaomi revealed it had sold “over 70 million” devices in 2015. An impressive number, for sure, given the backdrop of slowing smartphone sales worldwide, but it was short of the company’s public target of 80 million, which was reduced from an initial 100 million.

Which companies other than Apple still release their phone sales numbers? Samsung stopped way back in 2011, and as far as I can tell, never started again. Horace Dediu wrote in 2012 that most companies had stopped the practice, and makes the case that sales estimates from outside analysts aren’t accurate.

Speaking of Xiaomi, former Google executive Hugo Barra announced today that he’ll soon be stepping down as the Xiaomi executive in charge of international and English-language sales.

Samsung’s Illustrated Report on What Went Wrong With the Galaxy Note 7 ★

Spoiler: it was the batteries.