The one thing people seem to ignore when talking about Ive as some sort of problem was the impact Jobs had on his work.

Ive is undoubtedly one of the greatest product designers to have ever lived and will be mentioned as such for centuries to come, but his penchant for aesthetics was tempered by Jobs' need for usefulness. Take the 1st gen Macbook: it looked gorgeous (especially the black one) but it also had Magsafe, all the ports in a neat row, those 'wings' they used to put on the power brick for winding the cable up, an external LED battery level monitor on the removable battery and easy access to RAM and HDD removal for user-upgrades.

I imagine there weren't many in Apple who would question Ive because of his seniority and mythical status but Jobs most certainly would have been one of those people to just tell him if something was crap.

Once Jobs sadly passed, Ive was promoted and had nobody to rein in his excesses. Thus we had the butterfly keys, the removal of all ports, donglegate and all sorts of misfires amongst some very sexy-looking hardware. Nobody was telling him these were terrible ideas; they just indulged him. It wasn't all misses: the Apple Watch was brilliant and solved some long-standing problems (ever tried changing the strap on an old watch?)

Ive leaves and all of a sudden we have things like SD card readers and Magsafe back but his cult lives on because the DNA running through their entire product line is the stone-cold classic design of the iPhone 4.