Apple's Jonathan Ive: How did a British polytechnic graduatebecome its design genius? | Mail Online

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, theremarkable man from Chingford

Jonathan Ive (left) has helped turn Apple into the second biggest company in theworld, with a higher turnover than Google or Microsoft

Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. It’sconsidered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet to bebettered by modern science. Japanese smiths work through the night (better to judgethe heat of metal by eye) hammering, melting and forging by hand to produce thefinest blades in the world.

The steel is folded and refolded thousands of times to create a hard outer layer and asofter inner core resulting in a singular blade: terrifyingly sharp but far less prone tobreaking 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 thinnestcomputing devices in the world, so it surprised no one at Apple that their obsessivedesign genius would take a 14-hour flight for a meeting with one of Japan’s leadingmakers 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 theworld’s biggest, having surpassed Microsoft – launched its latest piece of technology,the iPad 2. The machine was the result of this sort of research, and Ive’s preferredprocess of making the same product over and over again; in this case, carving metaland silicon until the product was one-third thinner and 0.2lb lighter than itspredecessor.

Jonathan Ive surrounded by his creations

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

the colours that would tell the world this wasn’t just a machine for work: it was forfun, too.

And so it has been for nearly 14 years – the time Ive has been Apple’s star designer, afact little known and less publicised in his native Britain due to the obsessive cultureof secrecy at Apple. (His laboratory remains sealed off even from the rest of Apple’sleafy 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 currentlyvalued at a staggering £200 billion. The last decade has belonged to him: his designsfor the Californian company have revolutionised everything from music and televisionto 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 withdesigners into the second biggest company in the world, with a higher turnover thanGoogle 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 towalk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somersetso his children can be educated in the UK (false – he is not, and the property is nowstanding empty); that he will step out of the shadows and assume Steve Jobs’ rolewhen the great man stands down (highly doubtful); or what – or perhaps moreaccurately who – propelled him to leave for the U.S. in the first place and deny Britainthe talents of one of the most influential designers of the modern age.

Thefirst

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

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

‘I often joke that my tombstone will say, “The Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive”,’ saysRobert Brunner, Apple’s former chief of industrial design.

‘He was a consummate designer on all levels, especially around form, detail, materialsand refinement and how that extends into manufacturing.’

That man today leaves wife Heather and twin sons at their hilltop home in SanFrancisco and takes the short drive to Apple in his Bentley Brooklands. Hisdemeanour is serene.

‘He looks like a big skinhead thug but he’s the nicest, politest guy you ever met andvery 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 (tomusic chosen by one of Ive’s celebrity friends, house DJ Jon Digweed) with some oftheir most important pieces of technology: the very latest in rapid prototypingmachines, which build 3D models of the company’s iconic products.

Ive is renowned for having an ‘alchemical’ sense for engineering, and the limits ofwhat one can do with metal. As design expert Stephen Bayley puts it: ‘He thinks andthinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence.’

Ive’s lab is Apple’s inner sanctum. Here,touch screens control the glass-sidedmachines in which new products take form.Desks are bare bar the aluminium sheets thatslot together to form the familiar lines oficonic products such as the MacBook Air.

Collectively, the designers obsess over eachproduct, stripping away non-essential parts,reworking tiny details such as LED indicatorson the sides of laptops and phones. Ive oncespent months working solely on the stand forApple’s desktop iMac; he was searching forthe sort of organic perfection found insunflower stalks.

That final design used a combination offorged and polished steels and expensive laserwelding to create an elegant, beautiful stemthat was barely even noticed in the finished

product. Ive loathes shape-making for its ownsake (Bayley says he’s 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 ofevolution, and failures simply die on the workbench. One Apple senior executiveremembers his first visit there: ‘The creations they were working on were all over themap, crazy stuff. It was always very experimental, material that the world is not quiteready for. Even within Apple, the design team is very secretive.’

On the rare occasions Ive speaks in public his conversation is strictly limited to designtopics.

‘I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple’s tell-talewhite earbuds,’ he says. ‘But I’m constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it goodenough? Is there any way we could have made it better?’

Guiding everything he does is his unlikely relationship with Jobs.

‘It’s an amazing synergy. It’s about the leader of a company valuing design and theleader of design valuing the company,’ says Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked in Ive’sdesign team for three years.

Fellow designer Sir James Dyson is also a fan of Ive’s approach, which ‘puts the userfirst’. 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 we’vetrained brilliant minds, we need to keep them in Britain. Then the designs beingexported to the world can create wealth here.’

The manner of his departure for the U.S. is particularly galling to Clive Grinyer, whofirst hired Ive after he came to work with him on a placement from NewcastlePolytechnic. It came after a presentation of an Ive design to a bathroom-fittingscompany 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 hadto put my finger on why and where we lost him it would have to have been one dayat Ideal Standard in Hull.

'Tangerine had a consultancy contract withthe bathroom-fittings company to design atoilet. I was there when Jony made anexcellent presentation to this guy who was

Jonathan Ive at the Goodwood Festival of Speed

wearing a red nose because it was ComicRelief day. This clown then decided to throwhis weight around and pulled apart Jony’sdesign. It was ridiculous. Britain lost Jony Ivethen and there.’

Tangerine had also been hired to do somework for Apple, and Ive’s visits to Californiaoffered him an escape route.

‘One day Jonathan asked to stay out for someCalifornia sunshine, even though it was thewinter over there. When he came back he hada smile on his face and I knew they had madehim a job offer. He hasn’t got where he isbecause of his ego. They just realised he wascompletely in tune with Apple’s DNA. They work bloody hard. So does he. It is notabout the hours. It’s the weeks and months that they work on projects.’

Which makes it all the more compelling that when Ive left for Apple, he would notbecome a guru overnight. Rather, his first years in California would prove so difficultthat he almost never made it at all.

As well as both being famous British exports, Jonathan Paul Ive and David Beckhamhave something else in common: they both went to Chingford foundation school (eightyears apart). Ive was born in Chingford in 1967, but his family moved from Essex toStaffordshire in the early Eighties, when his ambitious father swapped his job as adesign and technology teacher to become a schools inspector.

His father’s expertise clearly rubbed off on Ive, because by the time he had enrolled inWalton High School on the fringes of Stafford teachers could see he was a skilleddraughtsman and design technician.

‘He was a determined character – he settled in straight away,’ recalls retired teacherJohn Haddon.

Ive met his future wife there: Heather Pegg, who was also the child of a local schoolsinspector, was one year below Ive and they married in 1987.

Fellow pupils remember a chubby, dark-haired, modest teenager who made the mostof 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

Jonathan Ive (circled) as a sixth former at Walton HighSchool, Stafford

drummer in a band called Whiteraven. The other band members were much olderthan him. They all met through an evangelical church called the WildwoodFellowship. They used to play mellow rock in church halls.’

Alan Saunders was his captain in the school rugby team: ‘He was a gentle giant. Hewas very unassuming but he did somehow have a big presence about him, andcomplete commitment. He played prop forward and I never once saw him shy awayfrom a challenge.’

Ive went to London’s Central St Martins ArtSchool with an initial passion to design cars,but switched to an industrial design course atwhat was then Newcastle Polytechnic.

‘His attitude to work was incrediblythorough,’ remembers lecturer Neil Smith.

‘Whatever he did was never quite enough; hewas always looking to improve the design. Hewas exceptionally perceptive and diligent as astudent. It was never a case of just goingthrough the motions.’

Smith says that Ive still has contact with whatis now Northumbria University as a visitingprofessor.

‘He is incredibly self-effacing and makes itclear that Apple’s success is not just abouthim but his team. He runs the project almostto the point of manufacture. It’s sad that companies in the UK were not interested inlooking forward when Jonathan was here. That has changed now and design is nolonger the pariah of industry. And I think that is, in part, thanks to the influence ofApple 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 begreat. But the company was tanking and he ended up working on his own in abasement office. He was cranking out weird stuff and filled the space with hundredsof prototypes. None of them were getting made and no one was paying any attentionto him or to his work. He was very frustrated.’

‘For the first three years Jony was having a pretty miserable time designing NewtonPDAs and printer trays,’ says Clive Grinyer. ‘It was a bad existence.’

The design team was eventually forced to surrender the Cray supercomputer it usedfor simulating new gadgets. Even the designs that did get built were met with alukewarm reception. Ive’s Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was one of the firstcomputers to have a flat LCD screen but it was saddled with a strangely squashedappearance and a massive price tag. Originally priced at $9,000, it was selling forunder $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, SteveJobs returned to Apple after an absence of 12 years. He purged the company, droppingmost of its products and dispensing with staff. Eventually, Jobs took a tour of thedesign department, then based across the street from Apple’s main campus.

‘Jobs comes in, looks at all Ive’s amazing prototypes and says, “My God, what havewe got here?”’ says Kahney.

Jobs swiftly brought Ive in from the cold, moving the designers into a building oncampus and investing in the latest rapid-prototyping equipment. He also beefed upApple’s security, locking down the design studio to prevent leaks and installing aprivate kitchen so designers wouldn’t 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 computerthat looked utterly different from anything else on the market. Although it was animmediate hit with users, Ive’s iMac did not quite meet Jobs’ standards of perfection.Its translucent mouse was clumsy and the choice of new USB connection technologycaused problems.

‘Jonathan took his share of beatings early on,’ reveals Valarie Sobolewski, a softwareengineer who worked at Apple for over a decade.

‘To be in Steve’s world, you’ve got to be willing to take a buffeting.’

But by the time the first iPod music player launched in 2001, Ive and Jobs had finallyclicked and the sleek, minimalist Apple vibe of today was born.

‘The iPod showed customers that we were thinking about things completelydifferently. It had no features really - just play, up and down – but for the first timeyou could enjoy the experience of simply getting your music on and off yourcomputer,’ 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, theysingle-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 technologicalspeeds 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 toexperiment.

‘One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong,’ he has said.

‘It’s the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It’s about being excited to be wrongbecause then you’ve discovered something new.’

Although sometimes he was just plain wrong. Ive’s G4 Cube computer wasdiscontinued after its case cracked. A rectangular Mac Mini did not sell well. Butperhaps it says more about Ive’s recent success that we’ve come to expect perfection.

Today, with Jobs on an extended leave of absence and Apple’s debt to Ive so immense,speculation has mounted Ive could even replace him as CEO. Those with anyknowledge of the tech industry, however, know that current acting CEO Tim Cook,the business genius who streamlined Apple’s supply chain, is a far more likely betwere Jobs to step down.

Speculation that Ive would leave Apple to return to the UK is also false, says a formercolleague: ‘I’m not sure there is any truth he wants to come back. My lastconversations with him were that he was planning to sell his house in the UK.’

But Ive’s personal desires could be irrelevant. What would the designer of iPad beworth to Samsung, or Microsoft, or Sony? Far too much, many think, for him to everbe let go.

For now, Apple is at the crest of a wave, and Ive is the most successful designer on theplanet.

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 vice-president of industrial design at Apple. Ive has given style to a family of machinesthat has changed the way the world thinks.

Transient, global, instantaneous, intelligent, wireless connectivity is a bigger ideathan the French Revolution. More than any other individual, Ive has decided whatthis 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 withexcitement to match. Last year, Apple's profits were $14 billion selling gorgeousentertainment products that cause consumers to form enormous queues and campout 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 $324billion - 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 40years old.

Not all of this extraordinary accumulation of value can be attributed to Ive'sfastidious, yet utterly seductive, design. But this wealth would not have beencreated without him and his unerring hand and eye. We forget it now, but MP3audio 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 verystrong draught of meditative intelligence to understanding what the technologyoffered and then exploited every known design artifice to make that apparent.Simplify, then exaggerate is the key to successful communications. That's what Ivedid 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 nota penny-pinching moron nor a brute philistine. On the contrary, Apple's persuasivefinancials show that the consumer is a sophisticated aesthete who will cheerfullypay a premium price to own products that flatter by their pristine beauty andsparkly intelligence. So, just as the gobby John Galliano calamitously destroyedvalue at Dior, the quietly spoken and self-deprecating Jonathan Ive creates it inspades at Apple.

Galliano's wince-making dégringolade also showed the public is fatigued by trash-luxe; 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 andmetal into gold is absolutely right for this historic moment. That is why he is sovery valuable.

The ultra-thin MacBook Air

Ive is not like other product designers, who too often trade in slick superficialitiesand press releases. Ive prefers to be engrossed in fundamentals and has very littleinterest in personal publicity. To him, the way a thing is made is fundamental to itscharacter: 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 shouldbe and then worries it into existence. It's what Ive calls 'effort and care beyond theusual'. He has very few distractions.

As soon as Ive had the budget, he bought advanced machine-tools for model-making in Apple's design studio. This is what he spends time doing: a continuousprocess of testing, testing, testing.

With the MacBook Air, he told me it's, metallurgically speaking, about as far as youcan actually go with aluminium before you start disrupting molecules. A calm andengaging personal manner becomes almost excitable when he describes the outerlimits of transforming stainless steel. This Zen-like obsession with materials, withgetting 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 everythingabout it. And he does. When Apple's founder, the exigent Steve Jobs, decided he didnot like exposed screwheads, Ive's engineering knowledge (with an added dash ofintuitive genius) found a way to avoid them: Apple uses magnets to holdcomponents together.

And it is because Ive fully understands the arcana of bonding, coating and abstruseareas of plastic technology that an iPod Nano looks and feels the way it does. It isthe very opposite of slick, superficial design: it is the inevitable result of hisworking methods. Ive detests shape-making for its own sake and uses 'arbitrary' asa 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'smournful line about there being no second acts in American lives. Ive joined Applefive years before Jobs' resurrection-like comeback in 1997. With a hard-nosedzealotry that seems at odds with his enthusiasm for oriental religion, Jobs purgedApple's demoralised staff, axed its muddled range and insisted on excitement.

He considered hiring Giorgetto Giugiaro, the maestro of Italian car design, torejuvenate the company, but instead promoted the then obscure in-house JonathanIve.

His iMac made desktop computers a pleasurable, almost edible, delight. The iPodwas covetable jewellery. The iPhone democratised portable computing while theiPad reminds me of Arthur C Clarke's remark that 'any technology sufficientlyadvanced is indistinguishable from magic'. I mentioned this to Jony and he told methey were thinking exactly that when the iPad was going through the studio. Beauty,pleasure, democracy and magic are, it seems, a winning combination. Strange noone got there before.

This is a wonderful story, the best ever 'design' story, but I wonder whether it mightbe coming to an end. There are some strange contradictions at Apple. So far frombeing a macrobiotic commune of haikuchanting techno-hippies, it is an ever moresecretive and controlling mega-corporation. Someone said of Jobs: 'Steve's aBuddhist. Imagination how aggressive he would be otherwise.' It is like thePentagon, 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

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process: a human face. With Jobs increasingly sidelined by health, people mutterabout succession. Would the world's most valuable Englishman and the world'smost influential designer want to stay at Apple when it is run by investor-facingprofessional managers and not the maddeningly idiosyncratic and demanding, butinspirational, Jobs?

Now the draft of a psycho-thriller comes to mind. What if Jonathan Ive wanted toleave Silicon Valley?

What might Apple do to stop him ? He has, actually and metaphorically, a place inthe sun, and he tells me he couldn't be happier, as he is free to spend the entireworking day on design. But sometimes I wonder if he might be trapped in a gildedcage.