Who said what to whom and why so-and-so was shown the door makes for interesting scuttlebutt on tech websites, but that focus on office politics means very little to people who just want to have the best experience using their Mac, iPhone, or iPad. It's far more important to consider what Monday's maneuvers mean for the hardware, software, and services coming out of Cupertino.

While Apple's hardware in recent years has largely received rave reviews, the reaction has been more mixed for the company's software interfaces. Even as Apple's industrial design has veered more toward elegant combinations of aluminum and glass, the software user interfaces seem to have lost some of the consistency that was once their hallmark.

With Monday's announcement, the man responsible for much of Apple's hardware design since 1996, senior vice president Jonathan Ive, is now in charge of human interface--design of both software and hardware--for the company as a whole.

It's unclear what Ive, whose expertise is in industrial design, will bring to the software side of Apple. But as the late Steve Jobs once said "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."