Apple's Jonathan Ive: How did a British polytechnic graduate become its design genius?

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By Rob Waugh Last updated at 1:56 AM on 20th March 2011

Rob Waugh reports on the rise to near-mythical status of Jonathan Ive, the remarkable man from Chingford

Jonathan Ive (left) has helped turn Apple into the second biggest company in the world, with a higher turnover than Google or Microsoft Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. Its considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet to be bettered by modern science. Japanese smiths work through the night (better to judge the heat of metal by eye) hammering, melting and forging by hand to produce the finest blades in the world. The steel is folded and refolded thousands of times to create a hard outer layer and a softer inner core resulting in a singular blade: terrifyingly sharp but far less prone to breaking than any sword forged in the West. Once the blade is complete it is polished to a mirror finish, an elaborate procedure that

itself can take weeks. The long and laborious process pushes metal to its absolute limit which is precisely why Jonathan Ive wanted to see it first hand.

Ive endlessly seeks crucial knowledge that can help him to make the thinnest computing devices in the world, so it surprised no one at Apple that their obsessive design genius would take a 14-hour flight for a meeting with one of Japans leading makers of katana. Afterwards Ive, shaven-headed, heavily muscled, in his trademark T-shirt and jeans, watched intently as the man went about his nocturnal labour. This month Apple, the fabulously successful technology company indeed, now the worlds biggest, having surpassed Microsoft launched its latest piece of technology, the iPad 2. The machine was the result of this sort of research, and Ives preferred process of making the same product over and over again; in this case, carving metal and silicon until the product was one-third thinner and 0.2lb lighter than its predecessor.

Jonathan Ive surrounded by his creations Ive could be defined by his devotion to detail. When Apple boss Steve Jobs asked him in the late Nineties to create colourful, cheap cathode-ray-tube computers what would become the first iMac Ive spent hours in a sweet factory to get inspiration for

the colours that would tell the world this wasnt just a machine for work: it was for fun, too. And so it has been for nearly 14 years the time Ive has been Apples star designer, a fact little known and less publicised in his native Britain due to the obsessive culture of secrecy at Apple. (His laboratory remains sealed off even from the rest of Apples leafy corporate campus in San Francisco.) The impact of the 44-year-old, Essex-born, Staffordshire-raised graduate of Newcastle Polytechnic has been incalculable. He is worth hundreds of millions of pounds to the company, which is itself currently valued at a staggering 200 billion. The last decade has belonged to him: his designs for the Californian company have revolutionised everything from music and television to mobile phones and hand-held computers. By designing that first iMac in 1998 and its ever more sleek successors, then the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Ive has helped turn Apple Inc from an also-ran popular chiefly with designers into the second biggest company in the world, with a higher turnover than Google or Microsoft. He will receive 15 million in Apple shares alone next year. It is hard to know what is the greater intrigue: recent conjecture that he is preparing to walk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somerset so his children can be educated in the UK (false he is not, and the property is now standing empty); that he will step out of the shadows and assume Steve Jobs role when the great man stands down (highly doubtful); or what or perhaps more accurately who propelled him to leave for the U.S. in the first place and deny Britain the talents of one of the most influential designers of the modern age. The first

multicoloured iMac G3 range (left) and the ubiquitous iPad (right)

I often joke that my tombstone will say, The Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive, says Robert Brunner, Apples former chief of industrial design. He was a consummate designer on all levels, especially around form, detail, materials and refinement and how that extends into manufacturing. That man today leaves wife Heather and twin sons at their hilltop home in San Francisco and takes the short drive to Apple in his Bentley Brooklands. His demeanour is serene. He looks like a big skinhead thug but hes the nicest, politest guy you ever met and very softly spoken, says Leander Kahney, editor of the Cult Of Mac website. Once inside his lab, Ive and his hand-picked team of a dozen designers set to work (to music chosen by one of Ives celebrity friends, house DJ Jon Digweed) with some of their most important pieces of technology: the very latest in rapid prototyping machines, which build 3D models of the companys iconic products. Ive is renowned for having an alchemical sense for engineering, and the limits of what one can do with metal. As design expert Stephen Bayley puts it: He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence. Ives lab is Apples inner sanctum. Here, touch screens control the glass-sided machines in which new products take form. Desks are bare bar the aluminium sheets that slot together to form the familiar lines of iconic products such as the MacBook Air. Collectively, the designers obsess over each product, stripping away non-essential parts, reworking tiny details such as LED indicators on the sides of laptops and phones. Ive once spent months working solely on the stand for Apples desktop iMac; he was searching for the sort of organic perfection found in sunflower stalks. That final design used a combination of forged and polished steels and expensive laser welding to create an elegant, beautiful stem that was barely even noticed in the finished

Apple CEO Steve Jobs makes a surprise appearance at the launch of the iPad 2

product. Ive loathes shape-making for its own sake (Bayley says hes known to use arbitrary as a term of abuse). His most fevered creations never even make it out of the lab. He works by a process of evolution, and failures simply die on the workbench. One Apple senior executive remembers his first visit there: The creations they were working on were all over the map, crazy stuff. It was always very experimental, material that the world is not quite ready for. Even within Apple, the design team is very secretive. On the rare occasions Ive speaks in public his conversation is strictly limited to design topics. I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apples tell-tale white earbuds, he says. But Im constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better? Guiding everything he does is his unlikely relationship with Jobs. Its an amazing synergy. Its about the leader of a company valuing design and the leader of design valuing the company, says Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked in Ives design team for three years. Fellow designer Sir James Dyson is also a fan of Ives approach, which puts the user first. But he laments the fact that Britain lost his talent to the Americans. Britain has a strong tradition of design and engineering, he says. But after weve trained brilliant minds, we need to keep them in Britain. Then the designs being exported to the world can create wealth here. The manner of his departure for the U.S. is particularly galling to Clive Grinyer, who first hired Ive after he came to work with him on a placement from Newcastle Polytechnic. It came after a presentation of an Ive design to a bathroom-fittings company in Hull. We lost a great talent, says Grinyer. We virtually created our own consultancy, Tangerine, just so that we could employ Jony (as Ive prefers to be called). And if I had to put my finger on why and where we lost him it would have to have been one day at Ideal Standard in Hull. 'Tangerine had a consultancy contract with the bathroom-fittings company to design a toilet. I was there when Jony made an excellent presentation to this guy who was

wearing a red nose because it was Comic Relief day. This clown then decided to throw his weight around and pulled apart Jonys design. It was ridiculous. Britain lost Jony Ive then and there. Tangerine had also been hired to do some work for Apple, and Ives visits to California offered him an escape route. One day Jonathan asked to stay out for some California sunshine, even though it was the winter over there. When he came back he had a smile on his face and I knew they had made him a job offer. He hasnt got where he is Jonathan Ive at the Goodwood Festival of Speed because of his ego. They just realised he was completely in tune with Apples DNA. They work bloody hard. So does he. It is not about the hours. Its the weeks and months that they work on projects. Which makes it all the more compelling that when Ive left for Apple, he would not become a guru overnight. Rather, his first years in California would prove so difficult that he almost never made it at all. As well as both being famous British exports, Jonathan Paul Ive and David Beckham have something else in common: they both went to Chingford foundation school (eight years apart). Ive was born in Chingford in 1967, but his family moved from Essex to Staffordshire in the early Eighties, when his ambitious father swapped his job as a design and technology teacher to become a schools inspector. His fathers expertise clearly rubbed off on Ive, because by the time he had enrolled in Walton High School on the fringes of Stafford teachers could see he was a skilled draughtsman and design technician. He was a determined character he settled in straight away, recalls retired teacher John Haddon. Ive met his future wife there: Heather Pegg, who was also the child of a local schools inspector, was one year below Ive and they married in 1987. Fellow pupils remember a chubby, dark-haired, modest teenager who made the most of his abilities, be they as a rugby player or a frustrated musician. Jony was a big Roger Waters fan, recalls Walton old boy Chris Kimberley. He was

drummer in a band called Whiteraven. The other band members were much older than him. They all met through an evangelical church called the Wildwood Fellowship. They used to play mellow rock in church halls. Alan Saunders was his captain in the school rugby team: He was a gentle giant. He was very unassuming but he did somehow have a big presence about him, and complete commitment. He played prop forward and I never once saw him shy away from a challenge. Ive went to Londons Central St Martins Art School with an initial passion to design cars, but switched to an industrial design course at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic. His attitude to work was incredibly thorough, remembers lecturer Neil Smith. Whatever he did was never quite enough; he was always looking to improve the design. He was exceptionally perceptive and diligent as a student. It was never a case of just going through the motions. Smith says that Ive still has contact with what is now Northumbria University as a visiting professor. He is incredibly self-effacing and makes it Jonathan Ive (circled) as a sixth former at Walton High clear that Apples success is not just about School, Stafford him but his team. He runs the project almost to the point of manufacture. Its sad that companies in the UK were not interested in looking forward when Jonathan was here. That has changed now and design is no longer the pariah of industry. And I think that is, in part, thanks to the influence of Apple and Ive. His career at Apple had a relatively inauspicious start. Leander Kahney says, Apple took him out to California and told him things would be great. But the company was tanking and he ended up working on his own in a basement office. He was cranking out weird stuff and filled the space with hundreds of prototypes. None of them were getting made and no one was paying any attention to him or to his work. He was very frustrated.

For the first three years Jony was having a pretty miserable time designing Newton PDAs and printer trays, says Clive Grinyer. It was a bad existence. The design team was eventually forced to surrender the Cray supercomputer it used for simulating new gadgets. Even the designs that did get built were met with a lukewarm reception. Ives Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was one of the first computers to have a flat LCD screen but it was saddled with a strangely squashed appearance and a massive price tag. Originally priced at $9,000, it was selling for under $2,000 by the time it was pulled from shelves less than a year later. But just as Ive was considering a return to England, his luck changed. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple after an absence of 12 years. He purged the company, dropping most of its products and dispensing with staff. Eventually, Jobs took a tour of the design department, then based across the street from Apples main campus. Jobs comes in, looks at all Ives amazing prototypes and says, My God, what have we got here? says Kahney. Jobs swiftly brought Ive in from the cold, moving the designers into a building on campus and investing in the latest rapid-prototyping equipment. He also beefed up Apples security, locking down the design studio to prevent leaks and installing a private kitchen so designers wouldnt talk shop in public.

Jonathan Ive leaving his San Francisco home in a Bentley Brooklands Ive responded by delivering the iMac, a curvy, semi-transparent desktop computer that looked utterly different from anything else on the market. Although it was an immediate hit with users, Ives iMac did not quite meet Jobs standards of perfection. Its translucent mouse was clumsy and the choice of new USB connection technology caused problems.

Jonathan took his share of beatings early on, reveals Valarie Sobolewski, a software engineer who worked at Apple for over a decade. To be in Steves world, youve got to be willing to take a buffeting. But by the time the first iPod music player launched in 2001, Ive and Jobs had finally clicked and the sleek, minimalist Apple vibe of today was born. The iPod showed customers that we were thinking about things completely differently. It had no features really - just play, up and down but for the first time you could enjoy the experience of simply getting your music on and off your computer, says Thomas Meyerhoffer. Ive and Apple refined the iPod, brought out smaller, slimmer and coloured versions, and eventually added video and games. With the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, they single-handedly created a market for countless smartphone apps.

Jonathan Ive's Grade II listed mansion in Somerset Ive understands that it is the usefulness of a product that counts, not technological speeds and features, says Mike Martucci, a former director of marketing at Apple. Design drives the technology, not the other way around. Ive soaked up the pressure, refusing to hire more designers and continuing to experiment. One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong, he has said.

Its the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. Its about being excited to be wrong because then youve discovered something new. Although sometimes he was just plain wrong. Ives G4 Cube computer was discontinued after its case cracked. A rectangular Mac Mini did not sell well. But perhaps it says more about Ives recent success that weve come to expect perfection. Today, with Jobs on an extended leave of absence and Apples debt to Ive so immense, speculation has mounted Ive could even replace him as CEO. Those with any knowledge of the tech industry, however, know that current acting CEO Tim Cook, the business genius who streamlined Apples supply chain, is a far more likely bet were Jobs to step down. Speculation that Ive would leave Apple to return to the UK is also false, says a former colleague: Im not sure there is any truth he wants to come back. My last conversations with him were that he was planning to sell his house in the UK. But Ives personal desires could be irrelevant. What would the designer of iPad be worth to Samsung, or Microsoft, or Sony? Far too much, many think, for him to ever be let go. For now, Apple is at the crest of a wave, and Ive is the most successful designer on the planet.

STEPHEN BAYLEY ...ON JONATHAN IVE, THE DESIGNERS' DESIGNER

Who is the most valuable Englishman on earth? Wayne Rooney? Colin Firth? Neither gets near Jonathan Ive, the boy from Chingford who is now senior vicepresident of industrial design at Apple. Ive has given style to a family of machines that has changed the way the world thinks. Transient, global, instantaneous, intelligent, wireless connectivity is a bigger idea than the French Revolution. More than any other individual, Ive has decided what this idea should look like. And it looks beautiful, desirable. In the nearly 20 years since he joined Apple (which dropped the word 'Computer' from its corporate name in 2001), sales have increased ten times. In 1992 Apple Computer made $530 million profit from selling a lacklustre and

directionless range of boring products the colour of tinned mushroom soup with excitement to match. Last year, Apple's profits were $14 billion selling gorgeous entertainment products that cause consumers to form enormous queues and camp out overnight. Sometimes, they riot.

The iMac G4, with its stand based on a sunflower stem AAPL, as it is known on the New York Stock Exchange, was recently valued at $324 billion - that's more than 200 billion. If market capitalisation is your measure, Apple is the second biggest company on Earth after Exxon-Mobil. It is not yet 40 years old. Not all of this extraordinary accumulation of value can be attributed to Ive's fastidious, yet utterly seductive, design. But this wealth would not have been created without him and his unerring hand and eye. We forget it now, but MP3 audio data compression technology was around before the iPod appeared in 2001. The problem was the machines that used it were about as attractive as a car battery. And about as amusing to carry around. In the iPod Ive created a package that was lucid and easy-to-use. He applied a very strong draught of meditative intelligence to understanding what the technology offered and then exploited every known design artifice to make that apparent. Simplify, then exaggerate is the key to successful communications. That's what Ive did with Apple products. They elegantly and unambiguously communicate a

cleanlined, status-rich sense of purpose. And the amazing thing is, in achieving this, Ive has proved that the consumer is not a penny-pinching moron nor a brute philistine. On the contrary, Apple's persuasive financials show that the consumer is a sophisticated aesthete who will cheerfully pay a premium price to own products that flatter by their pristine beauty and sparkly intelligence. So, just as the gobby John Galliano calamitously destroyed value at Dior, the quietly spoken and self-deprecating Jonathan Ive creates it in spades at Apple. Galliano's wince-making dgringolade also showed the public is fatigued by trashluxe; discipline and restraint are more appropriate to our age. Forget dressing-up, dressing-down is what we want. So Ive's austere aesthetic that turns plastic and metal into gold is absolutely right for this historic moment. That is why he is so very valuable.

The ultra-thin MacBook Air Ive is not like other product designers, who too often trade in slick superficialities and press releases. Ive prefers to be engrossed in fundamentals and has very little interest in personal publicity. To him, the way a thing is made is fundamental to its character: his mind occupies a workshop, not an artist's atelier. With an Ive product, it is impossible to say where the engineering ends and the 'design' begins. It's a continuum. He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence. It's what Ive calls 'effort and care beyond the usual'. He has very few distractions. As soon as Ive had the budget, he bought advanced machine-tools for modelmaking in Apple's design studio. This is what he spends time doing: a continuous process of testing, testing, testing. With the MacBook Air, he told me it's, metallurgically speaking, about as far as you can actually go with aluminium before you start disrupting molecules. A calm and engaging personal manner becomes almost excitable when he describes the outer limits of transforming stainless steel. This Zen-like obsession with materials, with getting to what he calls the 'local maximum', is what gives Apple products their

extreme appearance. If, Ive argues, you understand how something is made, you understand everything about it. And he does. When Apple's founder, the exigent Steve Jobs, decided he did not like exposed screwheads, Ive's engineering knowledge (with an added dash of intuitive genius) found a way to avoid them: Apple uses magnets to hold components together. And it is because Ive fully understands the arcana of bonding, coating and abstruse areas of plastic technology that an iPod Nano looks and feels the way it does. It is the very opposite of slick, superficial design: it is the inevitable result of his working methods. Ive detests shape-making for its own sake and uses 'arbitrary' as a term of abuse. Ive has the ability to put meaningful form onto what before was indeterminate. Chief among his influences is Jobs himself, who disproves Scott Fitzgerald's mournful line about there being no second acts in American lives. Ive joined Apple five years before Jobs' resurrection-like comeback in 1997. With a hard-nosed zealotry that seems at odds with his enthusiasm for oriental religion, Jobs purged Apple's demoralised staff, axed its muddled range and insisted on excitement. He considered hiring Giorgetto Giugiaro, the maestro of Italian car design, to rejuvenate the company, but instead promoted the then obscure in-house Jonathan Ive. His iMac made desktop computers a pleasurable, almost edible, delight. The iPod was covetable jewellery. The iPhone democratised portable computing while the iPad reminds me of Arthur C Clarke's remark that 'any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic'. I mentioned this to Jony and he told me they were thinking exactly that when the iPad was going through the studio. Beauty, pleasure, democracy and magic are, it seems, a winning combination. Strange no one got there before. This is a wonderful story, the best ever 'design' story, but I wonder whether it might be coming to an end. There are some strange contradictions at Apple. So far from being a macrobiotic commune of haikuchanting techno-hippies, it is an ever more secretive and controlling mega-corporation. Someone said of Jobs: 'Steve's a Buddhist. Imagination how aggressive he would be otherwise.' It is like the Pentagon, but the uniform is faded blue jeans, New Balance trainers and charcoal, monk-like Issey Miyake turtlenecks. In this context, Ive has even more to offer Apple than a genius for the design

process: a human face. With Jobs increasingly sidelined by health, people mutter about succession. Would the world's most valuable Englishman and the world's most influential designer want to stay at Apple when it is run by investor-facing professional managers and not the maddeningly idiosyncratic and demanding, but inspirational, Jobs? Now the draft of a psycho-thriller comes to mind. What if Jonathan Ive wanted to leave Silicon Valley? What might Apple do to stop him ? He has, actually and metaphorically, a place in the sun, and he tells me he couldn't be happier, as he is free to spend the entire working day on design. But sometimes I wonder if he might be trapped in a gilded cage.

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