“The chief of design at Apple, Ive was Steve Jobs’ closest confidant, and now, at 50 years old, six years after Jobs’ death, he’s one of the two most important people at the world’s most valuable company, the other being CEO Tim Cook,” Rick Tetzeli writes for Smithsonian Magazine. “Ive’s mark is on everything Apple builds, from the airy, minimalist chic of its 497 retail stores to seminal devices like the iPhone and iPad, and newer pieces like the Apple Watch and the upcoming HomePod speaker.”
“One of the Ive creations that Apple launched this fall is the company’s vast new headquarters in Cupertino, California,” Tetzeli writes. “The Ring, as Apple employees call the main building on the new campus, is an enormous glass circle that wraps around a landscape of meadows and imported California hardwood trees. Ive spent more than five years working closely with the British architect Norman Foster on virtually every detail, from the 900 curved, 45-foot-long glass panels that serve as walls, to the elevator buttons, which are subtly concave (like the home button on an old iPhone) and made of brushed aluminum (like a MacBook).”
“Jobs loved the iPad, which he called an ‘intimate device’ because it was immersive, like a good book—a window into whatever worlds you chose to explore. ‘In so many ways,’ Ive says, ‘we’re trying to get the object out of the way,'” Tetzeli writes. “The iPhone X, which Ive now holds up for me to see, is Apple’s first phone to have that same transporting quality. It’s really a supercomputer a third-of-an-inch thick with an all-glass front display and back casing that curves seamlessly into the steel band that wraps around the sides. Ive places his space-gray iPhone X on the coffee table next to my iPhone 7-plus [sic], whose white bezel frames its rectangle of glass display. Mine is only a year old, but it looks clunky in comparison. Ive picks up my iPhone and gives a pointed appraisal of his own earlier handiwork: ‘It now seems to me a rather disconnected component housed in an enclosure.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wonder what Jony thinks of Apple TV’s Siri Remote*?
Of course, Ive is right about iPhone 7 Plus and, in fact, all iPhones prior to iPhone X.
*which seems as if it were delegated to a random intern while he was off futzing with subtly concave elevator buttons as the Mac Pro languished in inexplicable stasis