The Jony Ive Obsessions That Built Apple
The British design guru was consumed by the drive for simplicity. His departure truly heralds the end of the Steve Jobs era.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Apple Inc. is arguably the most consequential company of the last 50 years. It is consequential by virtue of its reach and profitability, its products and daring, its unusual place – particularly for a corporation – in the zeitgeist, its role as a catalyst for seismic social change, and its mystique as the house that the late Steve Jobs built.
Apple also matters, of course, as a revolutionary design shop. Jobs was the original steward of the company’s aesthetic and its products were laced with all of the personal influences that shaped his design philosophy, including Bauhaus architecture, the Sony Corporation’s own product line, art, Zen Buddhism, and typography. Design informed everything at Jobs’ Apple, and it was tethered to a primary goal: Simplicity.
“Simple can be harder than complex,” Jobs once told Businessweek. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Jobs recruited a number of talented designers throughout the years with whom he shared fruitful partnerships. But it was his union with Jony Ive from 1997 until Jobs’s death in 2011 that proved to be the most momentous pairing. Together, the duo created and launched the iMac, the iPod, the iPad, the Apple Watch and that iconic disrupter, the iPhone. And Ive’s disclosure to the Financial Times on Thursday that he will resign as Apple’s design chief by the end of the year brings down the curtain – fully and finally – on the Jobs era. It’s also a moment to remember, before Ive shuffles off, not just the sleek, minimalist products produced by the Jobs-Ive partnership, but how the two men approached design.
At the most basic level, Ive and Jobs were obsessed with simplicity and they thought about it as a form of perfection.
“Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you,” Ive told the Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson several years ago. “Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep… You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”
Jobs and Ive wedded that profound product knowledge to what Ive – the British son of a silversmith who later taught design – liked to call “the idea of craft.” It was an old-fashioned, artisanal approach brought to bear on some of Silicon Valley’s most newfangled consumer products. And it was all done to bring beauty to the mass market.
Ive set up what was essentially an enormous craftman’s studio inside Apple where he and his team were walled off from other employees. He and Jobs would often wander the studio alone together, fiddling with works in progress, figuring out how to make them better, how to make them simpler.
"When we were looking at objects, what our eyes physically saw and what we came to perceive were exactly the same,” Ive once recalled of his connection to Jobs. “And we would ask the same questions, have the same curiosity about things.”
After Jobs’s death, Ive took on Apple’s creative mantle alone and was given new responsibilities that made him the most pivotal person at the company, in charge of the look and function of products and with control over launch dates. Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor as chief executive, reportedly went out of his way to accommodate Ive but the Brit began showing up less regularly at the company’s headquarters and product launches. Some of his duties were shifted to others.
As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Shira Ovide noted, Ive’s decision to leave Apple may be for the best. With iPhone mania plateauing, Apple needs to find new products and new sources of revenue. Most of that, she notes, will have to come from software innovations that are increasingly removed from all of that elegant hardware that Ive dreamed up. Apple, and everybody else in Silicon Valley, Ovide says, need to “move past the cult of the designer that Ive represented.”
It was a worthy cult, outdated or not, and Ive intends to continue practicing his obscure arts in a new design firm he’s opening called LoveFrom. Ive told the FT that his company’s name is inspired by advice that Jobs shared with employees at an Apple meeting years ago. Great design, Ive recalled Jobs saying, is an act of love and by “making something with care, you are expressing your gratitude.”
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He has been an editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. His books include “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.