Jony Ive - page 8

Every year Apple introduces a new iPhone, and every year I get my hopes up that this will finally be the model that can go two or three days without needing to be recharged. But according to a lithium-ion battery expert, the odds of Apple adding a power source capable of boosting iPhone battery life like that are practically zero.

Dee Strand, chief scientific officer at battery research firm Wildcat Discovery Technology, says the throughput on smartphone batteries is rapidly improving every year. The problem is, new features are bogging them down.

A joke in Zoolander 2 pokes fun at the ’90s craze for tiny cellphones, something which today seems as retro as flannel shirts and Pulp Fiction posters in your dorm room.

With the upcoming iPhone 7, Apple is apparently showing us the next iteration of that ideal by bringing us a smartphone so thin — just 6.1 mm thick — that even Victoria’s Secret models would advise it to eat a sandwich.

But are super-slim iPhones what users really want, or have Jony Ive and Apple’s design team taken things too far?

Jony Ive and Tim Cook graced the pages of fashion bible Vogue this week in a brief and slightly odd interview talking about everything from the new spaceship campus destined to open at the end of the year, to the iPhone-maker’s new status as a fashion icon.

“In what we do,” Tim Cook observed, “design is crucial, as it is in fashion.”

Apple’s been steering its ship deeper into the water of the fashion world ever by launching the Apple Watch and hiring a bevy of fashion house talent, and based on Jony Ive’s remarks, it sounds like Apple plans to dive much deeper into wearable tech.

The stakes couldn’t be higher today for Apple’s first earnings report of 2016.

Depending on how well Apple’s holiday season went, the company could set new records for the most profits in a quarter by any company ever as well as total number of iPhones sold in any quarter.

Jony Ive is apparently not pleased with progress on the secret Apple car project.

Apple has more than 1,000 employees working on its electric car, dubbed Project Titan, but the company reportedly has put a hiring freeze in place after a post-holiday progress review revealed the Apple car isn’t on the right track.

‘Tis the season to be jolly — or, if you’re a tech writer hoping to score enough clicks to help pay off the post-Christmas credit card, ’tis the season to label this the worst year for Apple since records began.

From Gizmodo’s restrained “Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked,” to The Verge calling this the year Apple spent in beta, to Bloomberg banging the “lemon of the year” gong for the Apple Watch, pundits aren’t exactly being kind to Cupertino as 2015 draws to a close.

But, you know what? They’re dead wrong. This was the most important year for Apple since 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.

60 Minutes host Charlie Rose took a deep dive into all things Apple in an episode that aired Sunday.

Featuring interviews with Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, Angela Ahrendts and others, the show explored everything from the iPhone’s inner workings and Apple’s manufacturing in China to Cook dancing around the question of whether Apple is building a car.

Check out our 10 takeaways below.

This feature is adapted from my book, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. It offers a rare look inside one of Apple’s most secretive institutions: the Industrial Design studio.

Where do Apple’s great products come from?

For the last 18 years — since Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997 — most of them have come out of Apple’s Industrial Design studio, a small and secretive group of creatives headed up by celebrated British designer Sir Jony Ive.

Very few outsiders have been inside Apple’s Industrial Design Studio, the amazingly creative product lab behind the company’s blockbuster hardware.

That may change this weekend, when 60 Minutes broadcasts a tour of the design lab. Apple’s lead designer, Jony Ive, gave journalist Charlie Rose a peek at the facility earlier this year — and his report airs this Sunday.

But you can take a tour of Apple’s secret Industrial Design studio right now. A virtual one, anyway.

60 Minutes viewers will get an early Christmas present this Sunday, as presenter Charlie Rose gets a rare peak inside Jony Ive’s design studio, while also receiving a tour of “Apple’s store of the future” from retail guru Angela Ahrendts.

The Apple Watch is the first major product to be launched without any involvement from Steve Jobs, but according to one of his long-time associates, the Apple cofounder was well aware that Jony Ive was working on a timepiece.

On Thursday at Glance Conf in San Francisco — the first Apple Watch conference ever — Tim Bajarin who had an on-and-off relationship with Jobs for over three decades, said Jobs had at least been told about the watch before he passed.

Apple’s new Smart Battery Case is the ugliest product to come out of Cupertino since apps with leather stiching. 

The new case came as a surprise this morning, offering iPhone 6s owners some extra juice and protection, but its weird hump has drawn the attention and ire of fans, leading many to wonder, ‘did Jony Ive really approve this thing?’

Not only is the case so ugly it looks like Quasimodo had sex with a camel. It’s not even that functional. It can’t recharge the iPhone 6s from 0 to 100 percent. The only LED indicator is on the inside of the case. And you can’t decide when to have the case charge your iPhone.

It’s so awful I’d almost swear Scott Forstall snuck into the design lab and is pranking us. It’s ironic Apple’s obsession with sacrificing battery life to make the iPhone thinner has put the company in a corner, causing it to innovate its way into making a big bulky battery case.

We’re not the only ones that hate the new case. Apple fans went crazy on Twitter in disbelief over the Smart Battery Case. Check out some of the best reactions:

A recent weird patent filing suggested Apple might be making a color 3-D printer. Now, the best Apple concept designer in the business, Martin Hajek, has come along and imagined the device in a set of beautiful renderings.

Jony Ive memorably (allegedly) described Swiss watchmakers as “f**ked” due to the then-impending launch of the launch of the Apple Watch, and one year later — like some kind of creepy, well-dressed soothsayer in an Apple-centric episode of The Twilight Zone — it seems he may have been correct.

Swiss watch exports suffered their biggest decline in six years in October, with sales dropping 12 percent to $2 billion. Jon Cox, an analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux in Zurich, describes 2015 as a year “to forget” for watchmakers.

Unless their name is Apple, of course.

Popular U.K. talk show host Jonathan Ross (possibly best known to U.S. readers as the husband of Kick-Ass screenwriter Jane Goldman) recently gave an interview about technology as part of the IAB Digital Upfronts 2015 conference.

In addition to touching on Apple Watch and a variety of other tech topics, the most interesting anecdote came when “Wossy” talked about getting on the Apple free products guest list — including receiving an iPod shuffle months before it was publicly available.

How? Apparently it pays to be nice to students. Particularly if one of them turns out to be the future Sir Jony Ive.

Given that Apple Pencil critics love to whip out Steve Jobs’ quote about how, “If you see a stylus [on the iPad], they blew it,” it was always going to take a require a good reason for Apple to adopt the stylus, as it did for the iPad Pro.

In a new interview for design journal Wallpaper, Jony Ive lays out some of his thought process on the decision — which, from the sound of things, Apple didn’t exactly take lightly.

In what seems to be less of a rare occurrence these days, Chief Design Officer of Apple Jony Ive gave an interview  about the iPad Pro for launch day. Specifically, he talks about the infamous optional accessory called the Apple Pencil. Being that most people at first glance will see this as an overpriced, $100 stylus, it’s fair that Ive wanted to state his case.

A company that specializes in making Lego-ized versions of tech-world giants is offering minifigures based on Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, current CEO Tim Cook, and some people who work for other companies, if you want to be all diverse about it.

The figures won’t even set you back that much, really. Depending on how much you value plastic that looks like people.

Apple plans to make a big splash in the fashion world next year by sponsoring the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big Costume Institute exhibit. Few details about the project are known, but Apple design guru Jony Ive teased what visitors might be able to expect in a new interview about the intersection of technology and fashion.

Apple is taking its next step into the fashion world by sponsoring the 2016 Met Gala, the annual star-studded event held in New York to benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute.

The theme of next year’s event — set to take place on May 2 — is “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.” Jony Ive will represent Apple as co-chair of the event, alongside other luminaries including Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, and Anna Wintour.

Apple’s Chief Design Officer Jony Ive said in an interview that he has a “primal fear” over the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, and particularly the possibility that the movie could portray his former boss and friend in a negative light. He did say he hasn’t seen the film, but remains skeptical.

“I’ve talked at length with friends of Steve and of me who have seen the film,” Ive said, before later adding that there are “sons, daughters, widows and very close friends who are completely bemused and completely upset.”

After the opening of the redesigned, tree-filled Apple Store in Brussels, Apple’s flagship Regent Street store in London is the next to get the Jony Ive treatment.

Working with Foster & Partners, the architectural firm responsible for the Gherkin skyscraper, Apple’s plans call for it to transform what it refers to as the “tired and outdated” look of the Regent Street Apple Store — even removing the instantly-recognizable four giant Apple logos outside the store entrance.

We know Jony Ive can design computers large and small. So why not the space where the devices are sold?

The world caught a glimpse of a new Ive-designed Apple Store in Brussels this week and the common theme seems to be: wood.

iOS 9 won’t shock you with a bunch of whiz-bang new features or a drastic new look, but in many ways, Apple’s latest mobile operating system is more important than its two immediate predecessors. While iOS 7 and iOS 8 laid a foundation that embraced the future of mobile design, iOS 9 is making all those changes worth a damn.

Apple drops iOS 9 today, bringing a more intelligent UI, better built-in apps, a smarter Siri and much more. Our iOS 9 review shows how the new software makes everything you do on your iPhone or iPad easier — and far faster — than ever before.

With his soothing British accent, love of flowery design terms, and immediately recognizable pronunciation of “aluminium,” few people in tech are as widely parodied as Jony Ive.

Impressions of Ive have become a tech industry trope in their own right, but last week an Ive-centric joke debuted online, which Apple’s design guru apparently found so offensive that he had Apple’s legal team contact the creators to take it down.