Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (27 page)

The day before Steve Jobs died, Cook debuted the iPhone 4s at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. There was an empty seat for Jobs marked “Reserved”; Jony was notably absent.

The iPhone 4s was Jony’s third-generation design, based on Richard
Howarth’s early Sandwich concepts, and the device was the most advanced iPhone yet. Though it shared the same physical appearance as its predecessor, the iPhone 4, it had much-improved guts, and was a marvel of engineering. When the new iPhone went on sale on October 14, some critics called it overhyped and more of the same, but to judge from sales, the public disagreed. The first weekend saw a record-breaking debut, with four million units sold, and the iPhone 4s quickly become the world’s best-selling smartphone.

The importance of Apple’s first successful post-Jobs product launch did not go unnoticed on Wall Street. Apple’s stock began to soar. A share of Apple’s stock sold for $407.61 on January 3, 2012, reflecting a balance sheet that contained over $100 billion in cash, a sum that grew by the day. By the end of January, a single share of Apple cost $447.61.

Apple was riding high, having surpassed ExxonMobil as the most valuable publicly held company in the world.

The year 2012 began auspiciously for Jony Ive, as it had for Apple, despite Jobs’s passing. Jony was named a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in the Queen’s New Year Honours List, for services to design and enterprise. It was the second time he had been recognized in the honors list, having been made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2005. The second highest order of chivalry, the KBE entitled its new bearer to style himself Sir Jonathan Ive.

Jony described the honor as “absolutely thrilling” and said he was “both humbled and sincerely grateful.” In a rare interview with the
Daily Telegraph
, he said he was “the product of a very British design education,” adding that, “even in high school, I was keenly aware of this remarkable tradition that the UK had of designing and making. It’s
important to remember that Britain was the first country to industrialize, so I think there’s a strong argument to say this is where my profession was founded.”
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Phil Gray, Jony’s first boss at Robert Weavers Group, met up with Jony during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. “When I asked Sir Jony what was it like being a knight of the realm, he replied: ‘You know what? Out in San Francisco it means absolutely nothing. But back in Britain it is a burden.’”
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Jony is referring to Britain’s strong class divisions. He’s no longer an everyman. He’s been elevated to a Knight of the Realm, and it embarrasses him.

Jony used his visit to London to talk to some design students from Northumbria, his alma mater. He arranged for the temporary closure of an Apple store in London, inviting the students in for a private talk. “Jony likes to get his opinions across; there is no question about that,” said a source. “But it is also important to him to give students some support. I guess that is his way of giving something back.”

As Northumbria’s most famous grad, Jony is regarded by his alma mater as a very valuable asset. Awarded the status of a visiting professor, he occasionally returns to give lectures. He features heavily in Northumbria’s marketing materials, but the college, protective of their special relationship, declined to talk about Jony or to release any information about his studies there.

He makes frequent visits to his homeland, staying in London three or four times a year. He has been seen at the London Fashion Week and attends the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed, a race meet for fans of fast, exotic cars. He’s served as a judge at Goodwood, where he’s been photographed with fellow designer Marc Newsom and composer Nick Wood, two of his best friends. The three often attend one another’s functions. Jony is also friends with Paul Smith, the British clothes designer, whom he presented with a giant pink iPod nano for his birthday.

Though design is sometimes thought of as a lonely, isolating process, Jony travels the world regularly. Although he will sometimes spend weeks with suppliers in Asia, on most trips, he’s in and out quickly. In 2013, he traveled to Amsterdam for a day, during which he went aboard Steve Jobs’s boat (designed by Philippe Starck and custom-built in Holland) and opened the new Apple store there.

In 2012, Jony and his wife and twin sons upgraded to a new San Francisco home, purchasing a seventeen-million-dollar spread on San Francisco’s “Gold Coast,” also known as Billionaire Row. Despite his image as a soft-spoken everyman in jeans and T-shirt, he’s often photographed at exclusive venues with other well-suited high rollers. When at home in San Francisco, he’s been known to attend the symphony and he socializes with the Silicon Valley elite. He’s been photographed at celebrity dinners with valley bigwigs such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and the CEOs of Yelp, Dropbox and Path.

Occasionally, Jony gets involved in side projects. He designed some striking Soundstick speakers for Harman Kardon, which are part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. In 2012, he designed on commission a one-shot camera for Leica, which was to be auctioned for charity. Jony and Jobs were both fans of the storied camera maker, and when announcing the iPhone 4, Jobs compared it to “a beautiful old Leica camera.”
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By all appearances, Jony remains committed to Apple, despite occasional rumors to the contrary. He’s also reportedly working on a monograph of his work at Apple.

Even without Steve Jobs at hand to challenge him, Jony in 2012 remained a busy and engaged man. In March, Apple announced the
third-generation iPad, called simply the “new iPad.” It would have the strongest launch of all previous iterations of the device, selling three million units over the first weekend.

The iPhone 5 was announced several months later, in September 2012. Redesigned with a bigger, four-inch retina display, the iPhone 5 was “the most beautiful consumer device that we’ve ever created,” said Phil Schiller. Preorders of the new phone topped two million in the first twenty-four hours after the announcement; upon its release on September 21, the phone set a new record with weekend sales of over five million units, and demand exceeded supply for several weeks.

One month after the iPhone 5, Apple announced the release of the second new iPad within the same year, along with its little cousin, the iPad mini, a tablet computer with a smaller, 7.9 inch display. In November, the two new tablets were released simultaneously in thirty-four countries and, between them, sold three million units in just three days. The surprise iPad was unusual because Apple’s normal release schedule didn’t shift significantly. Products came no quicker than they had before.

The new products proved a further boon to Apple’s stock. Within days after their release, Apple’s share price rose over 12 percent, from $505 to $568, and continued to climb thereafter.

Apple seemed to be gaining strength—there was no sign the company was suffering from the loss of Steve Jobs. On the contrary, it was a period of incredible financial and creative fecundity. But on October 29, 2012, Apple announced a surprise executive reshuffle.

In a press release that seemed calculated to obfuscate what was really going on behind the scenes, Apple announced a major shift of executive offices. To put it more bluntly than the Apple communications did, Scott Forstall was fired from his role as head of iOS and Jony was promoted to overall creative head.

Jony would maintain his position of senior vice president of ID, but henceforth would also “provide leadership and direction for Human Interface across the company.”
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In other words, Jony would be in charge of the all-important product interfaces in both hardware and software, a role previously fulfilled by Steve Jobs. “Jony has an incredible design aesthetic and has been the driving force behind the look and feel of our products for more than a decade,” said Cook in a follow-up e-mail to employees. “The face of many of our products is our software and the extension of Jony’s skills into this area will widen the gap between Apple and our competition.”
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When parsed carefully, Cook was saying, in short: The man who had long been responsible for setting the direction for Apple’s hardware would now be given the power to reimagine its software as well. Although Apple chose to neither confirm nor deny them, rumors had it that Forstall was ousted over fallout with Jony over user-interface design. The departure of Forstall and Jony’s increased responsibilities strongly suggested that Forstall lost a power struggle.

A key contention concerned Forstall’s fondness for skeuomorphic design; that is, graphic interfaces that resemble real-world objects. Apple’s user-interface conventions under Forstall tended to look like their real-life counterparts. Virtual wooden shelves were used to display eBooks in the iBookstore app; Apple’s Podcast app looked like a reel-to-reel tape recorder; iOS’s multiplayer gaming service, Game Center, was styled like a Vegas casino table. Faux leather and wood-grain patterns had found their way into many of Apple’s most popular apps.

Such skeuomorphic design allows neophyte users to be immediately familiar with an unfamiliar device, operating on the assumption that nothing is simpler than an interface that works exactly like objects do in the real world. The original Macintosh desktop computer, for example, was conceived as a skeuomorphic version of an office desktop as seen
from above. Because everybody knew how the items on a traditional desk were used in the physical world, that knowledge could be implicitly transferred to its digital counterpart.

More recently, however, Apple had heard loud criticisms concerning its use of “tacky” skeuomorphic elements. According to some, visual references to obsolescent office furniture and audio equipment were beginning to look dated and out of place. Forstall, after Jobs’s death, was reportedly Apple’s major champion of skeuomorphic design, which put him in the line of fire not only in the eyes of external critics but from some within Apple too.

Jony Ive was never a fan of skeuomorphism, according to one unnamed Apple designer speaking to the
New York Times
.
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In an interview with the UK’s
Telegraph
, Jony visibly “winced” when the subject came up, but refused to be drawn into a detailed discussion. “My focus is very much working with the other teams on the product ideas and then developing the hardware and so that’s our focus and that’s our responsibility,” he said. “In terms of those elements you’re talking about, I’m not really connected to that.”
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Cook’s reshuffle corrected that.

Apple’s management shake-up represented a major design shift in software and, by the time iOS 7 was released in 2013, most of Forstall’s skeuomorphic references were nowhere to be seen.

The mobile software was flat and modern looking. Gone were references to felt and leather, as well as 3-D effects like highlights and shadows. “No virtual cows were harmed in the making of this,” joked Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, as he showed off iOS 7’s calendar app during the launch event. He added that other apps were cleaner, too, because “We just completely ran out of green felt. And wood too. This has to be good for the environment.”
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The iOS 7 design was minimal, bearing a curious resemblance to the phony operating system that Jony’s group used when designing the
iPhone and iPad hardware in the mid-2000s. They had the same flat look, and some of the icons were very similar. The reversion back to the mock-up OS hinted at the animosity between Jony and Forstall, suggesting that Jony’s instincts for software design had been downplayed to Forstall’s for several years.

On the other side of the calculation, Jony’s overhaul of iOS was consistent with his approach to hardware. Jony’s hardware has always been about bare, utilitarian minimalism. He disdains decoration—as he says, every tiny screw is there for a reason—and his goal is to make design disappear. In contrast, skeuomorphism is about making software look like something it isn’t, like a roulette table or a yellow legal pad, and decoration is essential. Skeuomorphic software is the opposite of Jony’s minimalist hardware. One strips away everything that isn’t necessary; the other puts it back in.

This paradox within Apple ended with iOS 7. With the ornamentation taken out, Jony’s software was in sync with his hardware, stripped to their essentials. In addition, iOS 7 showed good design taste, especially in the use of typography. It featured a typeface called Helvetica Neue, a fine, detailed Swiss-designed typeface that’s enabled by the detailed retina displays of Apple’s latest devices. The entire operating system was infused with a deep appreciation for print-graphic design.

As Apple’s mobile devices mature, the shift to put Jony in charge of hardware and software is hugely significant. Jony and his design team will continue to improve the hardware, but changes are likely to be incremental, not fundamental. There are only so many ways a thin glass rectangle can evolve. These days, the design frontier is software, not hardware.

Sally Grisedale, the fellow Brit who worked with Jony in the mid-nineties, said Jony has always been adept at software. “[Jony and OS design] are a perfect fit,” she said. “It was always about the hardware
software integration. . . . This whole piece of hardware-software interaction is the most exciting arena and he has sort of been leading the way for years. This is not new for him; he has always thought that way and it was just a question of scale and scope. Perfect fit.”
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Larry Barbera, one of Jony’s old design colleagues, also thought Jony was well equipped to refresh Apple’s software. But he also pointed out the need for him to build relationships with programmers. Despite being immersed in the software side of the business for years, Barbera said, “Jony needs to evangelize the software folks by creating a vision for all to buy in to. I’m sure that half of Jony’s battles will be in winning over the hearts and minds of the software folks.”
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Jony’s appointment to software came at a crucial time. Apple’s competitors are catching up, as the Android continues to mature and attract the kind of user who likes more control and more choices. Microsoft’s Windows 8 won plaudits for its clean, ambitious touch interface. “This is a defining moment, where hardware fulfills its promise and simply gets out of the way,” wrote Alex Schleifer, design and creative director at Say Media, a San Francisco advertising company. “A shape of glass existing solely to contain an experience. The user interface will be how we remember a device, fondly or not. The way it looks and reacts. It will live in our cars and living rooms, become part of the architecture, cover our landscapes. It will affect the media we consume, the way we look at the world, and how we learn and communicate. Here’s to the age of the user interface.”
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In an interview published in
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
, Cook shed little light on the top-level changes and direction at Apple, beyond deflecting inquiries with some standard Cook-style remarks: “Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out. You know, small teams do amazing things together. Collaboration is essential for innovation.”

He did, however, go as far as to opine warmly that “I don’t think
there’s anybody in the world that has better taste than Jony Ive does.” Cook added, “Jony and I both love Apple. We both want Apple to do great things.”
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