Apple is a company with “a bunch of worrying individuals.”
Jony Ive shared this with a New Yorker TechFest audience Friday as an executive paid to shoulder more worries than most. The chief design officer at Apple doesn’t do many interviews, but he joined The New Yorker editor Dave Remnick onstage for a brief but insightful chat.
Ive hinted at his own worries, telling Remnick of a vigilance for finding design flaws. Missing them is an occupational hazard, he said.
“Every single object made testifies to the values and preoccupations of the people that got together to make it,” Ive said. “One of the defining characteristics of the design team is that we’re always hopelessly inquisitive.”
Ive’s remarks were pulled from The New Yorker’s live TechFest Twitter feed and the live blog from 9to5Mac.
Careless design, he said, comes from building to schedule or for an opportunistic end, rather than designing for people.
He is as hungry about new design as ever and says this nature comes from wanting to fix things.
Asked by Remnick what he detested, I’ve responded, “Most things, really.”
Ive said it broke his heart to watch Apple “drift into irrelevance” during a rocky period in the 1990s.
He and founder Steve Jobs “clicked” immediately when they first met, but Jobs was blunt, telling Ive he was ineffective at his job. Ive was not offended, he said, because Jobs was right.
“I had the most wonderful teacher in Steve Jobs,” he told Remnick. “I have never met anybody with his focus. Steve would say, ‘Jony, you have to understand there are measures of focus and one of them is how often you say no.’ It’s exhausting but necessary to sustain focus.”
Ive feels joy when a user writes him a letter and described Apple customers as “fabulous and not reticent about giving feedback.”
Remnick asked Ive if Apple can still be revolutionary. Ive said absolutely. Sometimes, good ideas have to wait for the technology to catch up, he said. He said much of the tech in the iPhone X was five years in the making.
Apple made many mistakes, he admitted, but he remains confident those didn’t happen because people were lazy.
Asked about his most interesting failure, Ive said, “What a good question. I’m not sure if failure was interesting.”
David Pierini is a former newspaper writer and long-time photographer. Considered a luddite by most of his friends, they did not believe him when he broke the news that he would be writing for a technology website. He is fascinated by human nature and would love to cultivate stories about the people driving the tech bus. Reach out to him at [email protected].
10 responses to “Jony Ive praises Apple’s ‘hopelessly inquisitive’ design team”
hows the inquisitive nature of the ugly notch in the phone….
Ive is another guy at Apple who is on autopilot and needs to be shown the door. Yes he is an iconic designer but he’s become far too big for his boots and some of the stuff out of Apple these days is ego driven rubbish.
I’ve had two iMacs smoke out on me in the last six months alone and both fatalities were related to cooling, or should I say the lack of it. Their replacements enclosures are even smaller, so doubtless they’ll keel over and die in jig time too. Macs used to be a lasting investment. How thin does a desktop like the iMac need to be anyway? Who benefits from these absurdly slim designs? Not the end user, that’s for sure. These machines shrink in inverse proportion to Ive’s expanding ego.
One wonders why you continue with iMacs then – maybe you believe in them and are just venting – just a guess. If that wasn’t the case surely you’d go buy something else? “Just sayin'” ;)
What else would you advise someone whose workflow since 1997 has been entirely Apple based to buy instead? Other than the iMac there’s nowhere to go. Unless of course you seriously consider Ive’s disastrous Trash Can Mac “Pro” an option.
Then maybe you should state constructive comments as to what aspects can be improved rather than open attack on individuals. I think you have problems but I won’t be participating in them any further. Have a cold hard THINK.
I don’t remember anyone asking you to participate to begin with. Constructive comment to Jony Re iMac: for goodness sake stop trying to jam 20KG into a 10KG container. Bye.
Ur a shell, a weak human.
Read what you just wrote, straight attacking people.
By the way – just to clear things up – I am sitting in front of 2 iMacs at this very moment – one is mid 2011 27 inch and the other is iMac Retina 5k (Late 2014). I have never experienced a single problem with either, a fact for which I am grateful to Apple.
So what? Who claimed you didn’t?
Notch so much.