Jonathan Ive not leaving Apple for UK

15 years ago

Jonathan Ive “could be defined by his devotion to detail. When Apple boss Steve Jobs asked him in the late Nineties to create colourful, cheap cathode-ray-tube computers – what would 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 for fun, too,” Rob Waugh reports for The Mail Online.

“And so it has been for nearly 14 years – the time Ive has been Apple’s star designer, a fact little known and less publicised in his native Britain due to the obsessive culture of secrecy at Apple,” Waugh reports. “(His laboratory remains sealed off even from the rest of Apple’s leafy corporate ‘campus’ in San Francisco.) The impact of the 44-year-old, Essex-born, Staffordshire-raised graduate of Newcastle Polytechnic has been incalculable.”

Waugh reports, “He is worth hundreds of millions of pounds to the company, which is itself currently valued at a staggering £200 billion. The last decade has belonged to him: his designs for the Californian company have revolutionised everything from music and television to mobile phones and hand-held computers.”

“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 any knowledge 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 bet were Jobs to step down,” Waugh reports. “Speculation that Ive would leave Apple to return to the UK is also false, says a former colleague: ‘I’m not sure there is any truth he wants to come back. My last conversations with him were that he was planning to sell his house in the UK.’”