Jony Ive - page 11

Jony Ive has designed someone of the worlds most iconic tech devices, but when it came time to revolutionizing the wrist watch, Ive says it was even more challenging to make than the iPhone.

Speaking to an audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Thursday night, Ive said that societal expectations for a wristwatch posed some serious challenges when creating the Apple Watch, but he believes with “every bone in his body” that Apple will usher in an entirely new computing device category.

Pity Jony Ive. The poor bastard just can’t catch a break.

Ive and his design team at Apple have just released a pair of exquisite iPads — the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 — and yet are getting grief because the iPads offer nothing “new.”

“New” being things like face-tracking cameras, heart-rate monitors or — god forbid — a stylus. These are the kinds of things that get called “innovation.”

Instead, the new iPads look a lot like last year’s models, and those from every year before. This makes many tech reviewers yawn.

“Largely unnecessary,” says The New York Times’ lukewarm review. “More of the same,” writes Business Insider. “You might think I’d be pretty excited about them — but I’m not,” says Walt Mossberg at Re/Code.

Indeed, instead of adding new hardware features, Ive’s team has even removed them. The mute/lock button is gone on the iPad Air 2. Who removes features?

Well, Jony Ive does.

For the last decade or so, Apple has made some of the most beautifully designed devices on the planet. But because those devices are technology, not furniture or art, they have an incredibly short half-life in our home. Yet these are still classic designs that, in any other context, we might keep around for decades.

That’s why I like this bench built by Klaus Geiger.

As someone who seems to care far more about the perfection of the beautiful objects he creates than about the trappings of celebrity, one word you’d be unlikely to associated with Apple’s design guru Jony Ive is “vain.”

According to a story told by Ive at yesterday’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit that’s exactly the accusation that was once levelled at him by Steve Jobs, however.

Here’s why:

While some may see Xiaomi, Samsung, and other players in the smartphone race as iPhone copycats, Jony Ive sees it as downright “theft.” That was the clear takeaway from Ive’s interview at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit today.

It’s no coincidence—your love for Apple and their pretty little gadgets was Steve Jobs’ master plan, and on our newest CultCast, we’ll tell you how did it. Plus: Bendgate might be overblown, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire; we love our iPhone 6 Pluses, but dear lord, they’re huge… And finally, Jony Ive gains a counterpart in Apple’s newest Industrial Designer.

Chuckle your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

Our thanks to Backblaze for supporting this episode! Backblaze online backup is Mac Native, unlmited, unthrottled, uncomplicated, and only 5 bucks a month. Try it totally free for two weeks at backblaze.com/cultcast.

Apple’s new design guru Marc Newson has barely been at Apple for nearly a month now, but that’s not going to stop him from also working on his own designs – like a fabulous new way to pour yourself a draft beer at home.

Marc unveiled his revolutionary new beer machine today in partnership with Heineken, but in an interview with Deezer, the famed designer also talked publicly for the first time about his new role at Apple, stating the position will only be part-time and he’ll still be based out of the U.K.

What Marc’s actually doing at Apple though is still a mystery. Apple’s PR handler wouldn’t let him comment on whether he had a hand in the Apple Watch’s design, and speculation on what he’s working on with Jony was quickly shot down. Whatever Apple does throw at him though, Marc said he can handle it, because “there isn’t really a big difference between designing a watch or a car or even a machine that pours beer.”

Check out the full interview transcript below:

Vogue’s new profile of Apple’s head of design is a great read, especially because of the details it includes about Jony Ive’s work and personal life. For instance, Ive is in love with the “k-chit” noise the Apple Watch band makes it when it clasps.

The interview took place in a white room on Apple’s campus, which is fitting considering that Ive is always shrouded in white during his product design videos. Touching on the company’s secretive design studio, Vogue notes, “Ive’s wife, Heather Pegg, has never been—he doesn’t even tell her what he’s working on—and his twin sons, like all but a few Apple employees, are not allowed in either.”

Apple’s Jony Ive and Marc Newson rubbed elbows with the fashion industry elite today at Colette, a high-end boutique in Paris. Famous fashion designers and members of the press flocked to Colette for a one-day event to see the Apple Watch in person.

This is the first time Apple has shown its upcoming Watch publicly since its media event in Cupertino earlier this month. The decision to partner with an upscale boutique during Paris Fashion Week shows that Apple is serious about wooing the fashion industry with its new product category.

Don’t expect to bump into Apple’s design guru on your next coach flight. When Jony Ive hits the skies he flies private.

In fact, according to an Apple profile by Business Week, Sir Jony Ive cuts through clouds in the very same Gulfstream jet owned by Steve Jobs during his last years at Apple.

The Apple Watch looks far more elegant than the rectangular smartwatches we’ve already seen from competing companies, but we couldn’t help noticing that some of its straps look a little… familiar.

In fact, several of Apple’s new strap designs look almost identical to straps from luxury watchmaker Ikepod, which not so coincidentally used to be run by Marc Newson, an Australian industrial designer who recently became a part of Apple’s design team.

CUPERTINO, Calif. — This is the first group photo of Apple’s new Industrial Design team — the men and women behind the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and a long string of other hit products.

The group is super-secretive and rarely appears in public together. In fact, they’ve only been pictured once before. This picture was taken at the end of Tuesday’s launch event, when many of the journalists had been ushered out. In the middle is Jony Ive and the team’s latest and highest-profile hire, star designer Marc Newson.

The Industrial Design team is Apple’s idea factory. This is where Apple’s innovation comes from. They design and develop all of Apple’s products, and many of them were working at Apple before Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

Jony Ive shared a bit of insight into the design process behind the Apple Watch during his interview with ABC News, following Tuesday’s keynote.

With Tim Cook looking on, Ive described how his team “worked extremely hard to make an object that, one, would be extremely desirable, but would also be personal because we don’t all want to wear the same watch.”

When asked how many Apple Watch variations will be available, Ive claimed that there are “millions and millions” of different configurations available, taking into account the different combinations that are possible.

“There are different materials for the actual case, there’s two different sizes, you can choose one of six different straps or bands,” he says, in addition to noting the different watch faces that can be chosen within the UI.

We’re in a frenzy of anticipation about Apple’s September 9 event. Just like you, we’re expecting big and bigger iPhones, the iWatch and something to take the stage of that immense box Apple has constructed outside the Flint Center auditorium.

As we tweet, liveblog and take you hands-on with new products from what may be the most important Apple event in years, you can play along with this awesome set of free bingo cards, courtesy mobile PR firm Appency.

Four years ago, Apple debuted the iPad with the first of what would soon become a widely parodied style of video, in which Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design Jony Ive said of Apple’s first tablet: “It’s true that when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical, and that’s exactly what the iPad is. It’s hard to see how something so simple, so thin, and so light, could possibly be so capable.”

As Apple knew it would, the video made a huge impact on people… so big an impact that it soon became a well-worn format for parody. Now, even Swedish furniture retailer Ikea is getting in on the game with their latest ad, which uses all the same beats and breathless rapture of Jony Ive talking about the iPad, but to promote the 2015 Ikea catalog instead. Well done.

See Apple’s original iPad introduction video below.

In his latest column for The New York Times, Nick Bilton drops an interesting tidbit about Jony Ive and the iWatch.

The mythical wearable, which is expected to finally see the light of day at next week’s Apple event, is something Ive has been bragging about around Apple HQ. He thinks it will be so good that even Swiss watchmakers won’t know what hit them.

Summer reading tends to lean towards the frothy or the ambitious. It looks like Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is definitely in the ambitious camp.

His summer reads, as shown on his desk, include a work by an economist about innovation, a tome on the power of the labor force, and, oh yeah, Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.

Want to improve your Monday by seeing how design guru Jony Ive lives? Over the weekend, Business Insider ran a gallery, showcasing Apple’s acclaimed design guru’s home on San Francisco’s “Gold Coast,” also known as “Billionaire’s Row.”

Facing the end of his long, dominant NBA career, Kobe Bryant is branching out into the business world with Kobe Inc., and while he’s picked the brains of people like Oprah, Hillary Swank and Arianna Huffington, it was a meeting with Jony Ive at Apple Campus earlier this summer that caught the web’s attention.

What could one of the greatest basketball players of all-time learn from the world’s most famous designer? According to an interview with Bloomberg, the Black Mamba simply wanted to know how Ive approaches design and how he manages to see the world differently than everyone that makes hardware.

An NBA superstar reaching out to the world’s tech designer for help sounds like an odd fit, but Bryant says building an iPhone isn’t too different from developing a world-class basketball game because like building products, you approach both sequentially, piece by piece, to make it unstoppable.

Here’s the full interview:

Apple relies heavily on caffeine. A recent company job listing advertised a role for an iCup technician, with the important task of providing “a fresh brew coffee to all Apple employees within their department.”

Jony Ive’s design team is especially obsessed with the black stuff: For years they kept a $3,000-plus Italian Grimac espresso machine, despite the fact that it leaked all the time. For a while in the 1990s, the design team was even mockingly dubbed “Espresso” for their unabashed love of caffeine culture.

Apple’s not alone in its coffee snob behavior. The rise of coffee shops — with seemingly hundreds of variations on the old coffee standards — have infiltrated every city across the United States: Americans spend $18 billion per year on specialty coffee alone.

But how much do we actually know about it?

The back of your iPhone is about to get a little more minimalist.

Thanks to a new bill introduced in the Senate, manufacturers may soon be allowed to use digital stamps on smartphones, laptops, and other gadgets, instead of using the strange symbols etched onto the back of your iPhone.

Design questions aside, the true mystery about Apple’s long-rumored iWatch lies in exactly what types of health-related sensors the wearable might include. A recent report claims the iWatch will sport an astonishing 10 different sensors, including one for sweat.

While pedometers, accelerometers, thermometers and every other o-meter Jony Ive can get his hands on might all make sense for a smartwatch, we’re wondering what Apple could do with a sweat sensor? Other than verify that, yes, your sweat glands are pouring out more fluid per minute than Niagara Falls during your jog?

It turns out that adding sweat sensors would do more than differentiate the iWatch from smartwatches by LG, Motorola and Samsung right out of the gate. It could make the iWatch the most “personal” device you’ve ever shackled yourself to, with surprising applications that go far beyond fitness and health.

Bono is a tireless promoter of his global AIDs and HIV nonprofit, (RED), but according to the U2 frontman (and, more ignobly, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark composer), Apple’s dropping the ball when it comes to charity: not in regards to giving enough money to charity, but in regards to promoting how much charitable work it does as a company.

Apple’s approach to design is just as healthy as it was under Steve Jobs, according to Jony Ive. Looking ahead, Apple is building upcoming products with “materials we haven’t worked in before.” Let your imagination run wild.

The New York Times has published a follow-up Q&A with Jony Ive following its big weekend profile of Tim Cook.

Ive was quoted in the Cook story, but in this second installment we get more insight into how he sees the current state of Apple. Points of discussion include how Ive approaches product design, working with Cook, the values Steve Jobs instilled in the company, and how Ive doesn’t think “anything’s changed” since Cook became CEO.