The man behind the Apple Watch
[ 06.03.2016 ]
In 2014, Apple was the first company to be valued at $700bn. As it makes a bid to enter the luxury market with the 18ct gold Apple Watch, the brand’s British design visionary, Jony Ive, gives a rare interview to Nick Foulkes.
The Cupertino headquarters of Apple can only be described as an anticlimax. Perhaps it was a bit much to expect an American version of James Bond’s Q Branch, but the Apple “campus” is disappointingly… well… normal.
Once upon a time, when Steve Jobs was a lad, much of this patch of northern California was covered with orchards. Now it is where the future is made. And the avidly anticipated Apple Watch, promised next month, is Apple’s next bold bid to shape our tomorrows.
But the most futuristic thing about Apple HQ is its address: No 1 Infinite Loop. Rather like a medieval fortress, it is built around a central grass courtyard. Here people hold meetings, sit tapping away on Apple devices or sip from big paper beakers of fashionably complicated coffee. In short, it is the sort of scene you might encounter at your local artisan coffee shop, the customers hunched over MacBook Airs or iPads. Apple devices have woven themselves so seamlessly into the tapestries of our lives – doing things that until recently would have been the stuff of science fiction – that we take them for granted.
The hold Apple has on the popular imagination is one of the defining characteristics of life in the early 21st century. Its product launches are events of mass hysteria, and its reach can be compared to that of the Ford Motor Company during the days of the Model T, when half the cars in the world were Fords, inspiring Aldous Huxley to set his dystopian masterpiece Brave New World in the year AF (After Ford) 632 (ie, AD 2540, 632 years after the launch of the Model T).
As a relative newcomer to Apple devices, first using the telephone, then the tablet and finally – in preparation for meeting senior vice president of design Jonathan Ive (“Jony” to you and me, Sir Jonathan to the Queen) – getting to grips with the computer itself, I have been most struck by the way in which its products link up. Web pages consulted on the computer appear on the telephone; telephone calls can be answered on the computer; emails are commenced on one machine and completed on another. Hardware and software seem designed together in such a way that one cannot quite tell where the machine ends and the operating system begins. As a commercial strategy it is undeniably brilliant, quickly enveloping users in a world they do not want to leave. But it is the clairvoyant ingenuity of it all that makes me marvel.
Doubtless there are people in remote parts of the Amazon who are unaware of the iPhone… but then, mobile reception is probably not great where they live anyway. For the rest of us, Apple is just there – not merely physically, in the form of its products, but seeping into our culture: the use of the “i”.
One could easily forget that Apple did not invent the letter “i”, nor indeed the mobile phone or the computer. But it has appropriated them in a way that has made the brand the most valuable on earth. There is a story that movement in the Apple share price can influence the value of the dollar. Whatever the reality of that, towards the end of last year Apple became the first public company ever valued at $700bn.
In great part, that valuation rests on the shoulders of a 48-year-old Englishman. Yet as he lopes towards me down the corridor, in his comfortable suede shoes, bright-blue trousers and baggy, long-sleeved yellow top, his kindly features creased up in a welcoming grin, those broad shoulders seem remarkably unbowed.
Ive is arguably the most influential designer in the world, and yet he does that slightly disingenuous self-effacement thing characteristic of confident people who say they are just part of a team. There is a gentleness about him. He talks quietly and articulately in an accent unaffected by two decades in America. Even when he describes those who copy Apple as little better than thieves, it is with a smile and softness of tone that suggests he would far rather the unpleasant subject had never been brought up
http://howtospendit.ft.com/technology/77791-the-man-behind-the-apple-watch
The Cupertino headquarters of Apple can only be described as an anticlimax. Perhaps it was a bit much to expect an American version of James Bond’s Q Branch, but the Apple “campus” is disappointingly… well… normal.
Once upon a time, when Steve Jobs was a lad, much of this patch of northern California was covered with orchards. Now it is where the future is made. And the avidly anticipated Apple Watch, promised next month, is Apple’s next bold bid to shape our tomorrows.
But the most futuristic thing about Apple HQ is its address: No 1 Infinite Loop. Rather like a medieval fortress, it is built around a central grass courtyard. Here people hold meetings, sit tapping away on Apple devices or sip from big paper beakers of fashionably complicated coffee. In short, it is the sort of scene you might encounter at your local artisan coffee shop, the customers hunched over MacBook Airs or iPads. Apple devices have woven themselves so seamlessly into the tapestries of our lives – doing things that until recently would have been the stuff of science fiction – that we take them for granted.
The hold Apple has on the popular imagination is one of the defining characteristics of life in the early 21st century. Its product launches are events of mass hysteria, and its reach can be compared to that of the Ford Motor Company during the days of the Model T, when half the cars in the world were Fords, inspiring Aldous Huxley to set his dystopian masterpiece Brave New World in the year AF (After Ford) 632 (ie, AD 2540, 632 years after the launch of the Model T).
As a relative newcomer to Apple devices, first using the telephone, then the tablet and finally – in preparation for meeting senior vice president of design Jonathan Ive (“Jony” to you and me, Sir Jonathan to the Queen) – getting to grips with the computer itself, I have been most struck by the way in which its products link up. Web pages consulted on the computer appear on the telephone; telephone calls can be answered on the computer; emails are commenced on one machine and completed on another. Hardware and software seem designed together in such a way that one cannot quite tell where the machine ends and the operating system begins. As a commercial strategy it is undeniably brilliant, quickly enveloping users in a world they do not want to leave. But it is the clairvoyant ingenuity of it all that makes me marvel.
Doubtless there are people in remote parts of the Amazon who are unaware of the iPhone… but then, mobile reception is probably not great where they live anyway. For the rest of us, Apple is just there – not merely physically, in the form of its products, but seeping into our culture: the use of the “i”.
One could easily forget that Apple did not invent the letter “i”, nor indeed the mobile phone or the computer. But it has appropriated them in a way that has made the brand the most valuable on earth. There is a story that movement in the Apple share price can influence the value of the dollar. Whatever the reality of that, towards the end of last year Apple became the first public company ever valued at $700bn.
In great part, that valuation rests on the shoulders of a 48-year-old Englishman. Yet as he lopes towards me down the corridor, in his comfortable suede shoes, bright-blue trousers and baggy, long-sleeved yellow top, his kindly features creased up in a welcoming grin, those broad shoulders seem remarkably unbowed.
Ive is arguably the most influential designer in the world, and yet he does that slightly disingenuous self-effacement thing characteristic of confident people who say they are just part of a team. There is a gentleness about him. He talks quietly and articulately in an accent unaffected by two decades in America. Even when he describes those who copy Apple as little better than thieves, it is with a smile and softness of tone that suggests he would far rather the unpleasant subject had never been brought up
http://howtospendit.ft.com/technology/77791-the-man-behind-the-apple-watch