Jonathan Ive
The design critic Stephen Bayley once asked people to name the most valuable Englishman on Earth. Wayne Rooney? Colin Firth? Neither of them, he argued, could touch Jonathan “Jony” Ive, chief design officer of Apple Inc. Age: 49; net worth: £100m — though, as the designer of the MacBook Pro, iMac, MacBook Air, Mac mini, iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, iPad Mini, Apple Watch and Apple’s entire iOS operating system (10th iteration out now!), his true value to the multinational technology company may be more accurately described as priceless. Apple is, as no one needs reminding, the world’s most successful company. Not just now, but ever.
Yes, Apple has had better years than this one — the first dip in iPhone sales since it launched in 2007, the sneaking suspicion no one’s bought an Apple Watch, the tax bill — but when your products are owned by 600m people around the world you’re still doing OK. Not just owned, but loved. Even people who dislike the company’s schtick, even Windows-centric Applephobes (you
fools!) have had their lives changed by Apple. Touch screens, digital music, apps, FaceTime, every photo in our pockets, swiping, curved edges, The Cloud, the very idea we can run our lives 24-7 through a 4.7in piece of aluminium and glass — Apple might not have done it first (though in many cases it did) but it did it best. Then everyone copied them. So you don’t have to be sleeping on a fold-down chair outside an Apple Store to be an Apple convert. We all are.
Jony Ive oversaw this revolution. Jony Ive from Newcastle Polytechnic! Jony Ive from Chingford! And no matter how big Apple gets for its boots, that feels good, right? You might think Steve Jobs was a nut, you might not like the look of Tim Cook. But the quiet, publicity-shy man-boy with the shaved head and the navy T-shirt — he’s someone we can all feel good about. That there is some corner of Apple Campus, One Infinite Loop, Cupertino that is forever England.
Ive has a gift for dreaming up beautiful-looking objects that are simple to use. His priority is the user not the gadget. As anyone with kids will tell you, his products are so instinctive that a two-year-old can use them (two-year-olds love to use them). “Making the solution seem so completely inevitable and obvious, so uncontrived and natural — it’s so hard,” he has said. Much like his products, Ive lives his life tastefully and unobtrusively. He is the best and most imitated product designer in the world, but he does not strut about like Philippe Starck nor wear ridiculous clothes like Karim Rashid. He lives quietly in San Francisco with his wife Heather, whom he met at school before he went on to study industrial design at Newcastle Poly (he was exceptional enough that part of his student portfolio was exhibited at London’s Design Museum), and their twin boys. He’s so backwards about coming forwards that his friend, the DJ John Digweed, had known him for ages before realising he didn’t just work for Apple’s design department, he ran it.
After working for a design consultancy in London, Ive joined Apple in 1992. He shared Steve Jobs’ vision of creating a digital hub that would hold everything we cared about in one place. Jobs was a hero to some, a villain to others, a complicated character, as they say. Ive, partly through being so lowkey, never inspired anything other than devotion. His products did the talking. But last year, he let The
New Yorker follow him about in the run-up to the launch of the Apple Watch. That profile ran to 17,000 words. It covered a lot of ground. But the Ive who emerged was as like you and me as we suspected (that is, as like you and me as someone who changed the world can be). There’s a Banksy picture in his office. His bookshelf features 100 Superlative
Rolex Watches. He loves cars (Apple’s ‘”Project Titan” is supposedly a car). Of course, none of these things makes you a world-class designer. But they do make you our kind of world-class designer.