Apple product has improved since jony6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() It doesn’t even have a ‘hot shoe’ bracket on top to mount a flash gun”. There was a Leica Digital Rangefinder camera “which has the minimum number of buttons. “These are the objects we would really like to own ourselves,” Ive said at the time. The two men wanted to show off a collection of their favourite “stuff” that would be sold at auction, with the proceeds going to RED, the charity set up to raise awareness and funds to help eliminate HIV/AIDS in eight African countries. But what? The clue actually comes from Ive himself back in 2013, when I met him with his friend and right-hand man, Australian designer Marc Newson, who is also leaving Apple to join him at LoveFrom. Making things for himself is now what Ive is going to do. Just look at the slew of iPhone-alike models available in 2019 for a fraction of the original's cost (which understandably irks Ive so much). As smartphone, tablet and laptop markets reach maturity, just as with hi-fi and televisions before them, mid-market brands step in to offer design and functionality remarkably similar to the higher end players. Apple has not had a break-out hardware hit – at least by its high historic standards – since the iPad in 2010. Ive may have looked forward to a remarkable number of revolutionary products but, in reality, apart from the Watch, what followed was a stream of iterative redesigns and improvements, both big and small, to existing products. At Apple, there’s almost a joy in looking at your ignorance and realising, ‘Wow, we’re going to learn about this and, by the time we’re done, we’re going to really understand and do something great’.” So the best of Jony Ive, the best of Apple, is still to come, I pressed. “When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit. “We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed,” he said. No doubt he was looking forward to the reveal of the Apple Watch in 2015, perhaps the last major design coup for Ive and his team because, as with the iPhone, iPod and iPad before it, it completely invented a new product category. In my most recent interview with him in 2014, he was then full of optimism about Apple’s future. Indeed, his decision announced last week to set up LoveFrom came as a shock to most. Just figure out what’s next.” Jobs probably did not want Ive to figure out that the answer to ‘What’s next?’ was 'Quit Apple'. One reads: “If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Outside the corporation's meeting rooms Jobs’s sayings have been printed in huge letters on the wall. Jobs’ presence still looms large at Apple. And when the ideas didn’t come, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great. “Yes, he had a surgically precise opinion. “So much has been written about Steve, and I don’t recognise my friend in much of it,” Ive said. Stories abound of him humiliating underlings and even – perhaps especially – top executives, Ive included. Was Jobs as tough as people said he was, I once asked. Their creative abrasion seemed to bring the best out of each other. Ive's relationship with Jobs fascinates anyone who has even a passing interest in technology. It takes years of investment, years of pain.” “What’s copied isn’t just a design, it’s thousands and thousands of hours of struggle. That’s why he gets so angry when he sees his designs ripped off – the iPhone is the most copied invention of the modern era. It’s very hard to design something that you almost do not see because it just seems so obvious, natural and inevitable,” he told me. Something that is truly simple communicates what it is is in a very direct way. “People think simplicity is the absence of clutter. It is simplicity, rather than any other quality, and certainly any single object, that Ive finds the most gratifying – and infuriating – element of this work. Five-year-old children can pick up and use the iPad. The iPhone was so touchy-feely, it trashed the fiddly BlackBerry in a heartbeat. With just a small white box with a scroll wheel, the iPod put 1,000 songs in our pocket. The iMac banished complicated, hard-to-use beige boxy PCs from our desks, making computing easy and tasteful. They may be revolutionary, hi-tech boxes, but they look so elegantly simple that you know what they are for and how to use them the moment you first pick them up. Ive hates fuss and relishes the elegance of simplicity. For each interview with Ive, he has chosen pared-down meeting rooms with just a few props to enable him to illustrate his points. ![]()
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