Apple’s New Taste

That we know of on the outside, Apple has had four people highly influential in setting the company's taste during its golden era: Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Ron Johnson, and Scott Forestall. Singling out these folks alone is an oversimplification, but they certainly have had outsized influence.

Ive is now the design chief for both hardware and software, but Jobs, Johnson, and Forestall are gone. Ive certainly will continue on setting trends and direction, but he alone can’t do it for the whole company.  Tim Cook is generally known to be a numbers guy and not really a replacement for the taste making roles that Jobs and Forestall had.

The hire of Angela Ahrendts along with the Beats acquisition might be Cook’s way of injecting some new talent in that whole area. It feels odd to think about Apple turning over its chief taste makers all at once, but the old guys were around forever. Ive became an Apple employee in 1992, and Jobs and Forestall came in the NeXT deal in 1997. Johnson was the newbie, only coming on in 2000. The positions haven’t been open for a while (except Johnson’s retail head position, of course).

Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre joining Ive and Ahrendts as the company’s top taste executives makes as much sense as anything for the Beats acquisition. Cook’s internal letter talks as much about those two as it does Beats itself, and Beats as a brand is held in much higher regard than any of its products are.

Part of Apple’s corporate DNA is having a distinct sense of taste and style. With some of the most important people responsible for its past placement there gone, others have to step in. Iovine and Dre are just the latest two to do so.