Investor’s Business Daily takes a look at Apple’s design honcho, Jonathan Ive:
“Ive found himself frustrated with PCs. For all their vaunted abilities, they weren’t easy for the uninitiated to understand. Ive felt technically inept,” Ken Spencer Brown writes for Investor’s Business Daily. “Then he encountered a Macintosh. He understood how it worked. It let him design on screen what he saw in his head. He fell in love. The more he learned about the company that made it, the more he wanted to join it. In 1992, Ive decided to make the jump from designing other products to designing one he truly believed in.”
“Jonathan Ive, Apple’s in-house product designer, reinvented the firm’s computer line with a revamp of its Macintosh line. How? Ive looked beyond the beige box that epitomized PC design at the time. With a curvy, candy-colored, translucent shell and all-in-one package, the machine was a stark departure from the cold, bland IBM clones that came before it. It was a risky gambit in an industry pushing ‘serious’ machines, but it paid off. Ive almost single-handedly saved the firm. In the process, he changed the computer industry with an aesthetic that quickly reached into other fields,” Brown writes.
Brown writes, “Apple has become a touchstone in PC design, garnering numerous awards and a fiercely loyal following. The 36-year-old, British-born Ive, recognized last year as one of Esquire magazine’s ‘best and brightest,’ has won kudos from Newsweek, Time, Popular Science and USA Today. Recently London’s Design Museum named him ‘designer of the year.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Okay, Ive “almost single-handedly saved the firm?” Nah. Steve Jobs did that. Still, it was right here on MacDailyNews that SteveJack predicted Ive was next in line for Apple’s CEO position writing, “Watch Ive in the Power Mac G5 intro video. Ive first appears about 40% in, at the 2:50 mark of the 6:33 minute video. Note that he is almost wearing a black mock turtleneck already. Contrast his presentation style and enthusiasm with the other Apple presenters. Can you sense the almost Jobsian, call it Junior Jobsian, aura? Ive has ‘it’ while all of the other Apple employees in the video are just nice people talking about a computer. And Ive should only get better with time. Could we be watching Steve Jobs’ successor, Apple’s future CEO, in the 31-year-old Ive? Watch and see if Ive begins to join Steve on stage during keynotes soon.”
After all, as often as “Jobs” looks wrong in a sentence, like a capitalized “jobs” (as in employment), so does “Ive” foul up the flow of a sentence with readers expecting “I’ve” or “Ives” (as in Burl).