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The first time I met Jony Ive, he carried my backpack around all night.
Our paths crossed at an early-evening party at Macworld Expo in 2003. As a journeyman reporter hustling for Wired.com, I knew exactly who he was: Jonathan Paul Ive was on the cusp of becoming the world’s most famous designer.
I was surprised he was willing to chat with me.
We discovered a shared love of beer and a sense of culture shock, too, both of us being expat Brits living in San Francisco. Together with Jony’s wife, Heather, we reminisced about British pubs, the great newspapers and how much we missed British music (electronic house music in particular). After a few pints, though, I leapt up, realizing I was late for an appointment. I hurried off, leaving without my laptop bag.
Well after midnight I ran into Jony again, at a hotel bar across town. With great surprise, I saw he was carrying my backpack, slung over his shoulder.
That the world’s most celebrated designer carried a forgetful reporter’s bag around all night flabbergasted me. Today, though, I understand that such behavior is characteristic of Jony Ive. He focuses on his team, his collaborators and, most of all, on Apple. For Jony, it’s all about the work—but when talking about his work, he replaces I with we.
A few months after our first encounter, I ran into him again at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2003. He stood to one side as Steve Jobs introduced the Power Mac G5, a powerful tower computer in a stunning aluminum case. Jony chatted with a couple of officious-looking women from Apple’s PR department. After Jobs’s speech, I walked over to where Jony stood.
He beamed at me and said, “So nice to see you again.”
We shook hands, and he asked in the nicest way, “How are you?”
I was too embarrassed to mention the backpack.
Eventually, I got around to asking, “Can I get a couple of quotes from you?” The PR reps standing by shook their heads in unison—Apple has always been famously secretive—but Jony replied, “Of course.”
He led me over to a display model on a nearby pedestal. I just wanted a sound bite, but he launched into a passionate, twenty-minute soliloquy about his latest work. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He couldn’t help himself: Design is his passion.
Made from a huge slab of aluminum, the Power Mac G5 looked like a stealth bomber in bare gray metal. The quasi-military aspect suited the times: Those were the days of the megahertz wars, when Apple was pitted against Intel in a race for the fastest chips. Makers marketed computers on raw computing power, and Apple boasted their new machine was the most powerful of all. Yet Jony didn’t talk about power.
“This one was really hard,” he said. He began telling me how keeping things simple was the overall design philosophy for the machine. “We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don’t see that effort.
“We kept going back to the beginning again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts? It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for people to work with.”
Reduce and simplify? This wasn’t typical tech industry happy talk. In releasing new products, companies tended to add more bells and whistles, not take them away, but here Jony was saying the opposite. Not that simplifying was a new approach; it’s Design School 101. But it didn’t seem like Real World 2003. Only later did I realize that, on that June morning in San Francisco, Jony Ive handed me a gigantic clue to the secret of Apple’s innovation, to the underlying philosophy that would enable the company to achieve its breakthroughs and become one of the world’s dominant corporations.
Content to stand aside as Steve Jobs sold the public on their collaborations—including the iconic iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad—Ive’s way of thinking and designing has led to immense breakthroughs. As senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, he has become an unequaled force in shaping our information-based society, redefining the ways in which we work, entertain ourselves and communicate with one another.
So how did an English art-school grad with dyslexia become the world’s leading technology innovator? In the pages that follow, we’ll meet a brilliant but unassuming man, obsessed with design, whose immense and influential insights have, no doubt, altered the pattern of your life.