New Delhi, Policenama online: “Designed by Apple in California”. When you read this on a newly-acquired iPhone, you should know that the man behind that iconic design and everything under the hood – Sir Jony Ive – was mulling to quit within months of joining the company. Destiny, however, had planned a bigger role for him at Apple.
When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the sinking company in 1997, he discovered a scruffy British designer toiling away at Apple’s headquarters, surrounded by hundreds of sketches and prototypes.
Jobs realised he had found a talent in Ive who could reverse Apple’s decline and become his “spiritual partner”.
According to journalist Leander Kahney, who has written extensively on Apple including “Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products”, the chief design officer’s collaboration with Jobs would produce some of the world’s most iconic technology products, including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and more.
“With the death of Jobs in 2011, Ive became the most important person at Apple. Some would argue he always was,” writes Kahney.
Born and raised in London, Ive studied design at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle and had his work displayed at the Design Museum. After graduation, he was hired by a start-up called Tangerine to work in their industrial design group.
Formally recruited to Apple as a full-time employee in September 1992, Ive was initially apprehensive about leaving Tangerine for Apple as he thought the move from Britain to California would take a toll on his family.
Initial design failures and lack of commercial success during the early 1990s prompted Ive to nearly quit on several occasions.
Jobs, who had been ousted by other Apple executives in 1985, staged a return in 1997 and went straight to Ive, recruiting him in taking the firm to a different direction.
Jobs made him senior vice president of industrial design and Ive went on to head the design team responsible for most of the company’s significant hardware products.
Ive’s first design assignment was iconic iMac in 1998 that helped pave the way for many other designs
such as the iPod and eventually the iPhone and the iPad.
“When we were looking at objects, what our eyes physically saw and what we came to perceive were exactly the same. And we would ask the same questions, have the same curiosity about things,” Ive once explained the close rapport he had with Jobs.