Apple’s Marc Newson is one of the best designers in the industry. His plane-inspired Lockheed Lounge chair was reflective, smooth and looked incredibly uncomfortable. And we’re still enjoying the look and feel of our Apple Watches, even if the other night a drunk girl at a bar made fun of me for wearing mine in public. And that was hurtful.

But Newson isn’t just about shiny devices and even shinier chairs. He’s recently teamed up with luxury accessory designer Montblanc to create the Montblanc M, a classic fountain pen that looks like it came from the future.

It’s an open secret that Apple is poised to take on the auto industry with its rumored electric car project, and according to Apple design guru Marc Newson, the automotive industry is stalled.

In a new interview, the Apple designer touches on a number of topics, ranging from his love of fountain pens to his current design pet peeve: boring cars.

Given how secretive Apple is, it’s no surprise that we know relatively little about the role of Jony Ive’s designer BFF Marc Newson, who works on so-called “special projects” for the company.

In a recent interview, however, Newson spilled a few beans about his work at Apple — including the fact that it consumes about 60 percent of his time, and is a job he hopes to hold “indefinitely.”

Who can blame him?

Looking for a gorgeous chair to sit in while you get to grips with your brand new Apple Watch?

If you happen to have a spare seven-figure sum lying around, you could have snapped up this riveted aluminum and fiberglass beauty when it came up at auction yesterday — designed by none other than Jony Ive’s BFF and sometimes-Apple designer Marc Newson.

Jony Ive and his BFF Marc Newson launched Apple into the luxury market this week with the Apple Watch, which expertly straddles the line between gadget and fashion accessory.

Apple’s dynamic designing duo sat down with Vogue’s Suzy Meeks this week to talk about their first foray into the fashion world — as well as what inspired them to create the Apple Watch. We rounded up the top 8 revelations from the pair’s appearance earlier this week, but Vogue just made the full interview available online, and it’s full of juicy insights into Jony and Marc’s thought processes.

Watch the full interview below:

Customers in Italy will be able to preorder the Apple Watch from May 8, according to an internal source speaking to Italian Apple website iSpazio.

If true, this will kick off the second wave of Apple Watch launches, with the first beginning in the United States and nine other countries earlier this month.

Apple is diving into the luxury market for the first time ever with the exorbitantly expensive gold Apple Watch Edition. The pricey new timepiece has been met with criticism from Apple fans and haters a like, but according to Condé Nast, Apple is now a powerful player in the luxury industry and wants Jony Ive and Marc Newson to tell them all about it.

Jony Ive and Marc Newson will open the first ever Conde Nast Luxury Conference in Florence Italy in April 2015. The design duo will appear with event host, Vogue International editor Suzy Menkes, to discuss “21st century definition of luxury and their collaborative work to date.”

If there’s one thing today’s New Yorker profile of Jony Ive hammers home, it’s how important the Apple Watch is to Apple’s design guru. The 16,000-word story reveals how Ive pushed the Apple Watch as a project, shortly after Steve Jobs’ death, when Apple was under pressure to come up with its next insanely great idea.

Here’s all the ways

Apple has set up a top-secret automobile R&D lab and is recruiting experts to possibly build a car, the Financial Times reports.

The lab is in a secret location away from Apple’s HQ. Apple recently hired the head of Mercedes-Benz’s Silicon Valley R&D unit, and has staffed the new lab with “experienced managers from its iPhone unit,” the Times says.

“Three months ago I would have said it was CarPlay,” said one of FT‘s sources. “Today I think it’s a car.”

As rumors that Apple is making a self-driving car rev up, a peek under the hood of the company’s famed Industrial Design studio reveals a crew of talented automobile designers.

An interest in futuristic cars is embedded deep within the DNA of Apple’s vaunted design team. Working under Jony Ive, Apple employs designers who worked on several fantastic concept cars, including a fabric-covered BMW that shifts shape depending on speed.

Ive has long been obsessed by cars. (He has quite a stable.) As a teenager, Ive wanted to be a car designer. He visited a U.K. design school that specialized in automotives with a view to studying there, but he found the other students too weird. They were making “vroom vroom” noises as they sketched. Instead, he went to Newcastle Polytechnic (which has since been renamed Northumbria University).

A look at other key members of Apple’s design team, and at a super-secret research-and-development facility planned for the company’s new campus, offers a few clues about how Cupertino might go about producing innovative and unconventional cars.