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Image credits appear here.
ISBN 978-1-10161484-6
Version_1
To my wife, Traci, and our kids—Nadine, Milo, Olin and Lyle.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Chapter 1
School Days
Chapter 2
A British Design Education
Chapter 3
Life in London
Chapter 4
Early Days at Apple
Chapter 5
Jobs Returns to Apple
Chapter 6
A String of Hits
Chapter 7
The Design Studio Behind the Iron Curtain
Chapter 8
Design of the iPod
Chapter 9
Manufacturing, Materials and Other Matters
Chapter 10
The iPhone
Chapter 11
The iPad
Chapter 12
Unibody Everywhere
Chapter 13
Apple’s MVP
PHOTOGRAPHS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SECRECY AND SOURCES
NOTES
INDEX
PHOTO CREDITS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The first time I met Jony Ive, he carried my backpack around all night.
Our paths crossed at an early-evening party at Macworld Expo in 2003. As a
journeyman reporter hustling for Wired.com, I knew exactly who he was:
Jonathan Paul Ive was on the cusp of becoming the world’s most famous
designer.
I was surprised he was willing to chat with me.
We discovered a shared love of beer and a sense of culture shock, too, both
of us being expat Brits living in San Francisco. Together with Jony’s wife,
Heather, we reminisced about British pubs, the great newspapers and how much
we missed British music (electronic house music in particular). After a few pints,
though, I leapt up, realizing I was late for an appointment. I hurried off, leaving
without my laptop bag.
Well after midnight I ran into Jony again, at a hotel bar across town. With
great surprise, I saw he was carrying my backpack, slung over his shoulder.
That the world’s most celebrated designer carried a forgetful reporter’s bag
around all night flabbergasted me. Today, though, I understand that such
behavior is characteristic of Jony Ive. He focuses on his team, his collaborators
and, most of all, on Apple. For Jony, it’s all about the work—but when talking
about his work, he replaces I with we.
A few months after our first encounter, I ran into him again at Apple’s
Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2003. He stood to one side as Steve
Jobs introduced the Power Mac G5, a powerful tower computer in a stunning
aluminum case. Jony chatted with a couple of officious-looking women from
Apple’s PR department. After Jobs’s speech, I walked over to where Jony stood.
He beamed at me and said, “So nice to see you again.”
We shook hands, and he asked in the nicest way, “How are you?”
I was too embarrassed to mention the backpack.
Eventually, I got around to asking, “Can I get a couple of quotes from you?”
The PR reps standing by shook their heads in unison—Apple has always been
famously secretive—but Jony replied, “Of course.”
He led me over to a display model on a nearby pedestal. I just wanted a
sound bite, but he launched into a passionate, twenty-minute soliloquy about his
latest work. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He couldn’t help himself:
Design is his passion.
Made from a huge slab of aluminum, the Power Mac G5 looked like a stealth
bomber in bare gray metal. The quasi-military aspect suited the times: Those
were the days of the megahertz wars, when Apple was pitted against Intel in a
race for the fastest chips. Makers marketed computers on raw computing power,
and Apple boasted their new machine was the most powerful of all. Yet Jony
didn’t talk about power.
“This one was really hard,” he said. He began telling me how keeping things
simple was the overall design philosophy for the machine. “We wanted to get rid
of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don’t see that
effort.
“We kept going back to the beginning again and again. Do we need that part?
Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts? It became an
exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for
people to work with.”
Reduce and simplify? This wasn’t typical tech industry happy talk. In
releasing new products, companies tended to add more bells and whistles, not
take them away, but here Jony was saying the opposite. Not that simplifying was
a new approach; it’s Design School 101. But it didn’t seem like Real World
2003. Only later did I realize that, on that June morning in San Francisco, Jony
Ive handed me a gigantic clue to the secret of Apple’s innovation, to the
underlying philosophy that would enable the company to achieve its
breakthroughs and become one of the world’s dominant corporations.
Content to stand aside as Steve Jobs sold the public on their collaborations—
including the iconic iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad—Ive’s way of thinking and
designing has led to immense breakthroughs. As senior vice president of
industrial design at Apple, he has become an unequaled force in shaping our
information-based society, redefining the ways in which we work, entertain
ourselves and communicate with one another.
So how did an English art-school grad with dyslexia become the world’s
leading technology innovator? In the pages that follow, we’ll meet a brilliant but
unassuming man, obsessed with design, whose immense and influential insights
have, no doubt, altered the pattern of your life.
CHAPTER 1
School Days
Its hydraulics were so well put together, that it folded
out almost with a sigh. I could see the incipient talent
that was coming out of Jonathan.
—RALPH TABBERER
According to legend, Chingford is the birthplace of sirloin steak. After a banquet
at a local manor house late in the seventeenth century, King Charles II took such
delight in his meal that he is said to have knighted a large hunk of meat Sir Loin.
Another product of Chingford, Jonathan Paul Ive, entered the world much
later, on February 27, 1967.
Like its latter-day son, Chingford is quiet and unassuming. A well-to-do
bedroom community on the northeast edge of London, the borough borders the
rural county of Essex, just south of Epping Forest. Chingford votes
Conservative, as the constituency of Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the
Conservative Party, who holds a seat famously occupied by Sir Winston
Churchill.
Jony Ive’s childhood circumstances were comfortable but modest. His father,
Michael John Ive, was a silversmith, his mother, Pamela Mary Ive, a
psychotherapist. They had a second child, daughter Alison, two years after their
son’s birth.
Jony attended Chingford Foundation School, later to be the alma mater of
David Beckham, the famous soccer star (Beckham attended eight years after
Jony). While at school, Jony was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia
(a condition he shared with a fellow left-brained colleague, Steve Jobs).
As a young boy, Jony exhibited a curiosity about the workings of things. He
became fascinated by how objects were put together, carefully dismantling
radios and cassette recorders, intrigued with how they were assembled, how the
pieces fit. Though he tried to put the equipment back together again, he didn’t
always succeed.
“I remember always being interested in made objects,” he recalled in a 2003
interview conducted at London’s Design Museum. “As a kid, I remember taking
apart whatever I could get my hands on. Later, this developed into more of an
interest in how they were made, how they worked, their form and material.”1
Mike Ive encouraged his son’s interest, constantly engaging the youngster in
conversations about design. Although Jony didn’t always see the larger context
implied by his playthings (“The fact they had been designed was not obvious or
even interesting to me initially,” he told the London crowd in 2003), his father
nurtured an engagement with design throughout Jony’s childhood.
