Interview with Jonathan Ive

‘Ive moved to California to join Apple in 1992. “The anticipation was that I was joining the company that had produced the Mac,” he recalled. “But it was very different.” By then, Apple had lost the innovative spirit instilled by its co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The turning point was Jobs’s return in 1997. He and Ive worked together on the iMac’s launch the following year, and forged a relationship that has been central to Apple’s success.

‘”It’s a shocking statement for a CEO to say publicly, as Steve has, that the goal of a company isn’t to make money, it’s to make great products,” Ive said. “We’ve been a long way through product development programs and canceled them because we had that sinking feeling that they weren’t good enough. That courage testifies that the product is at the heart of everything we do.”‘

Ive also talks about what he sees as his mission at Apple:

“A huge amount of what we try to do is simplification, solving very complex problems without making the complexity evident,” he said. “In so many products you see the designer wagging his or her tail in your face. Our obsession is being very, very pure and inevitable, in some cases getting design out of the way.”