Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
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Jony’s challenge now is to keep Apple fresh and innovative. In the dark days before Jobs returned, the biggest risk was not being risky. If Apple hadn’t taken risks—some of which paid off big—it might have been out of the game. Today, as an immensely successful corporation with established territories and a dominant place in several markets, the danger has passed and, with each generation of Apple’s products, the generational leaps grow more incremental and pose fewer risks.
But Apple’s success—and the continuity that Jony has brought to the company—has come to mean that the customer can now almost anticipate what a product is going to look like; the shock of the new is gone. “Apple has created a very careful brand DNA, which has however become a noose around their necks, from which they cannot shift,” warned Professor Alex Milton. “Apple has gone from being the alternative to the mainstream.”31
Milton sees this as a tension for Jony, given that more recent graduates of the sort of design schools he attended are now rejecting that aesthetic. “Ive is the establishment,” asserted Milton. “The challenge for Ive is, can he reinvent himself, or is he stuck in time?
“Apple has to find a new language, and the challenge is, what is, that going to be? I have confidence that Jony Ive has the wherewithal to drive the next step for Apple, but this is by far the most difficult point.”
Jony Ive (circled) as a student at Walton High School in Stafford, UK.
A concept sketch for an electronic pen that wrote in different line widths and patterns.
Jony’s Zebra TX2 pen had a special mechanism at the top just for its owners to fiddle with. A tactile fiddle factor would be an ongoing motif in Jony’s work.
One of Jony’s projects at Newcastle reimagined the landline telephone. He called it the Orator.
These are some of Jony’s initial sketches for a power drill for UK manufacturer Kango.
Jony’s first major project at Apple was the redesigned Lindy MessagePad 110, which won him a bunch of design awards—but the product never really took off.
Like a lot of prototypes, Jony’s Lindy MessagePad was made in clear acrylic to check its thermal heat-dissipation.
This Baby Mac from frog design is the precursor to the iMac, and a good example of the Snow White design language. Steve Jobs was working on it when he quit/was fired from Apple in 1985.
Frog design’s Snow White aesthetic was so influential it set the design language for a generation of computers.
When Jony Ive joined Apple in 1992, the design team was slowly trying to move away from Snow White which had dominated the ‘80s.
The Domesticated Mac was one of Jony Ive’s first speculative designs for Apple. It was an attempt to design a computer for the home, not an office environment.
Another of Jony’s early major projects, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac was Apple’s first flatscreen computer. It was also designed for the home, not the office, but bungled pricing and marketing doomed it.
The eMate was Apple’s first translucent product. Jony felt that translucency made a product less mysterious and more accessible.
Jony Ive (left) with his former boss Jon Rubinstein, head of engineering, with some multicolored iMacs, the first product to bring fashion to computers.
Associated Press/Susan Ragan
Almost as soon as Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he formed a deep and productive bond with Jony. The pair shared a fascination with and delight in products and design.
This unusual transparent iBook reveals the complex internal metal frame Jony’s design team developed for the iBook, which was a smash success.
The distinctive Luxo Lamp iMac G4 was Jony’s second attempt at a flatscreen computer for the home.
For a joke, the IDg team designed the inside of the iMac G4’s box to look like male genitals.
An engineering prototype of the Power Mac G4 Cube. Jony and Jobs hoped it would be Apple’s ultimate computer, but it bombed.
An early engineering prototype of the G4 Cube, and an early design prototype.
The guts of the Power Mac Cube. The Cube was an attempt to cram the guts of a desktop computer into a much smaller space.
The Power Mac G5 was the first computer to feature an interior that was designed entirely by Jony Ive’s team to be aesthetically pleasing.
This early engineering prototype of the iPhone was built to test a lot of new components, like the custom-made ARM chip.
This iPhone prototype made in late 2006—just six months before the iPhone went on sale—featured a plastic screen. At the last minute it was switched to much more durable glass.
One of the hardest design challenges was fixing the gap between the glass screen and the stainless steel bezel. Jony’s team kept getting their designer stubble caught in the gap.
The prototype iPhone was tested with an early beta version of iOS, which had little of the fit and finish of the ultimate product.
This iPhone prototype is running a beta version of iOS.
This prototype iPad has two dock connectors: one on the bottom and one on the side.
Jony is joined by some of his design team at San Francisco’s Apple store, including Daniele De Iuliis (far left), and Danny Coster and Peter Russell-Clarke (right). They are celebrating the first day of iPad sales, which designer Chris Stringer described as a “very special day.”
Associated Press/Paul Sakuma
Along with Jony, Chris Stringer (left) and Richard Howarth (right) are said to be the core members of Apple’s industrial design team.
Sir Jonathan Ive after getting his knighthood with his good friend, designer Marc Newson (who received a CBE for services to design).
Jony joins Steve Jobs in a product demonstration shortly before Jobs’s untimely death.
Associated Press/Paul Sakuma
The MacBook Air was one of the first Apple products to utilize a Unibody design, a major breakthough that reduces a complex computer case to a single hunk of finely machined metal.
Apple’s industrial design team, after receiving a D&AD Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
Associated Press/Rex Features
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I’d like to thank my literary agent, Ted Weinstein, for pushing me to do this book. The team at Portfolio, including the boss, Adrian Zackheim, have been great. Natalie Horbachevsky and Brooke Carey did an excellent job editing, and Hugh Howard performed a postproduction miracle editing the manuscript and shaping the narrative.
Jose Garcia Fermoso and my brother, Alex Kahney, provided invaluable help finding, contacting and interviewing sources.
I’d like to thank John Brownlee for helping me with the writing and running of the Cult of Mac blog in my many long absences. Thanks also to my colleagues on the blog: Charlie, Buster, Killian, Alex, Rob and Erfon, for minding the shop and doing a great job.
The book has benefitted greatly from the reporting of others, in particular Paul Kunkel’s AppleDesign, Luke Dormehl’s The Apple Revolution and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.
SECRECY AND SOURCES
There’s a T-shirt you can buy at the Company Store on Apple’s campus. It says, “I visited the Apple campus. But that’s all I’m allowed to say.” That just about sums it up when reporting on Apple.
Trying to persuade people to talk about the company isn’t easy. Apple people don’t talk, even about things that happened thirty years ago. The company is so secretive, that divulging anything—anything at all—is a firing offense. Everyone associated with the company—employees, contractors, partners—has signed a stack of nondisclosure agreements, which threaten not just termination but prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. Employees are mum about current product plans, which is understandable, but they won’t talk about old projects either. The secrecy extends to every single thing Apple does, but especially applies to its internal p
rocesses, which it considers industrial trade secrets. Apparently, knowing how Apple conducts meetings, for example, could give competitors a leg up.
Apple is the ultimate need-to-know culture. It operates like a spy organization. Staffers are told the absolute bare minimum to do their (highly specialized) jobs. Only a handful of executives and senior VPs have the whole picture, and often they don’t know what happened in other departments outside their own, or what happened in the rank and file.
Secrecy is so steeply embedded in Apple’s culture, keeping mum is as natural as breathing. Apple employees live in an Apple bubble. They do not attend conferences or give talks, and they barely circulate in Silicon Valley’s professional or social circles. Friends of employees know not to ask their Apple friends about work. If the subject comes up, it’s met with an apologetic smile. They won’t even share with their spouses. One female designer interviewed for this book said she and her husband are especially careful not to talk about work because everyone expects them to; they work extra hard not to.
We contacted more than two hundred people for this book, mostly current Apple staffers or those who had recently left the company. Some were willing to talk on the record, but many wanted to keep their names out of print. Apple did not respond to several requests for comment.
Nonetheless, my research partners and I did get a number of people to talk, on and off the record, about Apple, Jony Ive and their unique work culture. Notably, we got some major players, including some who have worked closely with Jony for decades. They took us inside the studio and inside the minds behind Apple, in an unprecedented manner. The information they provided, and the details they were able to reveal about the company over many years, were immeasurably useful.
Thanks to their interviews, coupled with extensive research, and the available videos, transcripts, launch archives, books, articles and the Apple product output itself, we offer the fullest picture available of the true events behind Jony Ive’s career and influence at Apple.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
School Days
1. London Design Museum, interview with Jonathan Ive, http://designmuseum.org/design/jonathan-ive, last modified 2007.
2. Interview with Ralph Tabberer, January 2013.
3. Ibid.
4. Design and technology curriculum of UK schools, http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/toolsandinitiatives/a0077337/design-and-technology-dt, updated November 25, 2011.
5. Interview with Malcolm Moss, January 2013.
6. Interview with Ralph Tabberer, January 2013.
7. Rob Waugh, “How Did a British Polytechnic Graduate Become the Design Genius Behind £200 Billion Apple?” Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Apples-Jonathan-Ive-How-did-British-polytechnic-graduate-design-genius.html, last modified 3/19/13.
8. John Coll and David Allen (Eds.), BBC Microcomputer System User Guide. http://regregex.bbcmicro.net/BPlusUserGuide-1.07.pdf
9. Waugh, “How did a British polytechnic graduate become the design genius behind £200 billion Apple?”
10. Shane Richmond, “Jonathan Ive Interview: Apple’s Design Genius Is British to the Core,” Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283486/Jonathan-Ive-interview-Apples-design-genius-is-British-to-the-core.html, May 23, 2013.
11. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), Kindle edition.
12. Paul Kunkel, AppleDesign, (New York: Graphis Inc., 1997), p. 253.
13. David Barlex, “Questioning the Design and Technology Paradigm,” Design & Technology Association International Research Conference, April 12–14, 2002, pp. 1–10, https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/3167/1/Questioning%20the%20design%20and%20technology%20paradigm%20.pdf.
14. Mike Ive OBE, keynote address 1, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” NAAIDT Conference 2003 Wales, Developing Design and Technology Through Partnerships, archive.naaidt.org.uk/news/docs/conf2003/MikeIve/naaidt-03.ppt.
15. E-mail from a former schoolmate, October 2012.
16. Interview with Craig Mounsey, March 2013.
17. Interview with Dave Whiting, September 2012.
18. Interview with Phil Gray, January 2013.
19. Ibid.
20. “Provisional GCE or Applied GCE A and AS and Equivalent Examination Results in England,” http://www.education.gov.uk/researchandstatistics/datasets/a00198407/a-as-and-equivalent-exam-reults-2010-11.
21. John Arlidge, “Father of Invention,” The Observer, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1111276,00.html, December 21, 2003.
CHAPTER 2
A British Design Education
1. Northumbria University, About Us page, http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/scd/aboutus/.
2. Interview with David Tonge, January 2013.
3. Interview with Paul Rodgers, October 2012.
4. Interview with Craig Mounsey, March 2013.
5. Design for Industry, BA (Hons), Course Information, 2013 entry, http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/?view=CourseDetail&code=UUSDEI1.
6. Industrial Placement Information Handbook, Northumbria University School of Design, Placement Office, 2011–2012, http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/despdf/school/placementhandbook.pdf.
7. Octavia Nicholson, “Young British Artists,” from Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.moma.org/collection/theme.php?theme_id=10220.
8. Interview with Penny Sparke, September 2012.
9. Interview with Alex Milton, October 2012.
10. Ibid.
11. Carl Swanson, “Mac Daddy,” Details, February 2002, volume 20, issue 4.
12. Nick Carson, first published in Issue 5 of TEN4: Jonathan Ive: http://ncarson.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/jonathan-ive/, Jonathan Ive in conversation with Dylan Jones, editor of British GQ, following his award of honorary doctor at the University of the Arts London, November 16, 2006.
13. Ibid.
14. Rob Waugh, “How Did a British Polytechnic Graduate Become the Design Genius Behind £200 Billion Apple?” Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Apples-Jonathan-Ive-How-did-British-polytechnic-graduate-design-genius.html, last modified, March 19, 2013.
15. Clive Grinyer, History, http://www.clivegrinyer.com/history.html.
16. Luke Dormehl, The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counter Culture and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World (Random House, 2012), Kindle edition.
17. Interview with Clive Gryiner, January 2013.
18. Interview with Peter Phillips, January 2013.
19. Interview with Phil Gray, January 2013.
20. Dormehl, The Apple Revolution, Kindle edition.
21. Ibid.
22. Peter Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?” Businessweek, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-09-24/who-is-jonathan-ive, Septermber 26, 2006.
23. Dormehl, The Apple Revolution, Kindle edition.
24. Jonathan Ive, Travel and attachment report, http://www.thersa.org/about-us/history-and-archive/archive/archive-search/archive/r31382, 1987–1988, 1988–1989.
25. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, History, http://www.thersa.org/about-us/history-and-archive.
26. Interview with Craig Mounsey, March 2013.
27. Interview with Barry Weaver, January 2013.
28. Ibid.
29. Interview with David Tonge, January 2013.
30. The Design Council Collection, The Design Council/The Manchester Metropolitan University, Design Council, Design Centre, Haymarket, London. Young Designers Centre Exhibition 1989. Radio hearing aid designed by Jonathan Ive of Newcastle Polytechnic. http://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=114262&sos=0.
31. Burrows, “Who is Jonathan Ive?”
32. Dormehl, The Apple Revolution, Kindle edition.
33. Me
lanie Andrews, “Jonathan Ive & the RSA’s Student Design Awards” RSA’s Design and Society blog, http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/category/design-society/page/3/, May 25, 2012.
34. London Design Museum, interview with Jonathan Ive, http://designmuseum.org/design/jonathan-ive, last modified 2007.
35. Ibid.
CHAPTER 3
Life in London
1. Robert Brunner Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/robertbrunnerdesigner/info.
2. Interview with Robert Brunner, March 2013.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Melanie Andrews, “Jonathan Ive & the RSA’s Student Design Awards” RSA’s Design and Society blog, http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/category/design-society/page/3/, May 25, 2012.
6. Interview and e-mails with Barrie Weaver, January 14, 2013.
7. Interview with Phil Gray, January 2013.
8. Ibid.
9. Interview and e-mails with Barrie Weaver, January 2013
10. Interview with Clive Grinyer, January 2012.