Read Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products Online
Authors: Leander Kahney
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
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First published by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Leander Kahney
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To my wife, Traci, and our kids—Nadine, Milo, Olin and Lyle.
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.
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.”
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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.
Mike Ive’s influence reached well beyond the precocious child in his own household. For many years, he worked as a silversmith and teacher in Essex. Described by one colleague as a “gentle giant,” he was well liked and much admired for his workmanship.
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His skill at making things led to his initial decision to teach handicraft as a career, but a later rise in the educational hierarchy afforded him wider influence. Mike was among the distinguished teachers plucked from daily teaching by the Education Ministry and given the grand title of Her Majesty’s Inspector. He assumed responsibility for
monitoring the quality of teaching at schools in his district, focusing specifically on design and technology.
At the time, British schools were trying to improve vocational education. A widening chasm lay between academic subjects and hands-on subjects like design, and the latter classes in woodwork, metalwork and cooking—in effect, shop-class subjects—were accorded low status and limited resources. Worse yet, with no accepted standards of teaching, as one former teacher put it, the schools “were able practically to teach what they wanted.”
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Mike Ive took what came to be called design technology (DT) to a new level, establishing a place for the discipline as a part of the core curriculum in UK schools.
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In the forward-looking design and technology curriculum Mike helped devise, the emphasis shifted from shop skills to an integrated course that mixed academics with making things.
“He was way ahead of his time as an educator,” said Ralph Tabberer, a former colleague and schoolteacher, who would become the director general of schools in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in the new century. Mike helped write the mandatory curriculum that became the blueprint for all UK schools, as England and Wales became the first countries in the world to make design technology education available for all children between the ages of five and sixteen.
“Under his influence, DT went from being a marginal subject to something that occupied seven to ten percent of students’ time at school,” said Tabberer. Another of Mike Ive’s former colleagues, Malcolm Moss, characterized Mike’s contribution to the teaching of design technology: “Mike gained a reputation for being a compelling advocate for DT.”
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In practice, that meant Mike helped transform what was basically a goof-off class into a design tutorial and, in doing so, laid the groundwork for a generation of gifted British designers. His son would be among them.
Tabberer remembers Mike Ive talking about Jony’s progress in school and his growing passion for design. But Mike wasn’t a pushy stage dad, trying to turn his son into a prodigy like the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. “Mike’s influence on his son’s talent was purely nurturing,” said Tabberer. “He was constantly talking to Jonathan about design. If they were walking down the street together, Mike might point out different types of street lamps in various locations and ask Jonathan why he thought they were different: how the light would fall and what weather conditions might affect the choice of their designs. They were constantly keeping up a conversation about the built environment and what made-objects were all around them . . . and how they could be made better.”
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“Mike was a person who had a quiet strength about him and was relentlessly good at his job,” added Tabberer. “He was a very gentle character, very knowledgeable, very generous and courteous. He was a classic English gentleman.” These traits, of course, have also been ascribed to Jony.