Jony Ive, the designer behind some of Apple’s most successful products, became even more important to Apple after the death of Steve Jobs.
But given Mr. Ive’s importance at the company, relatively little is known about him. In the new book “Jony Ive,” Leander Kahney, the author of several books about Apple, took on the challenge of analyzing Apple through the lens of Mr. Ive’s design process.
In an interview, Mr. Kahney talked about some of the highlights of his book.
An edited transcript of the interview follows.
Q.
Who exactly is Jony Ive? We know he is the chief designer, but what does that mean?
A.
He was a design prodigy. He’s been obsessed with design since he was a kid. His dad — people say that he is a silversmith. But he was actually a designer — he was an education reformer. He specialized in design education in the U.K.
So he and his son were a couple of design nuts. They used to walk around looking at everything in the street, talking about the lampposts and why they were designed the way they were, and would they work in the rain or in the fog.
Jony was winning design prizes as a student, so he went on to be the star student at New Castle Polytechnic, which is now Northumbria University, the top design school in the country. And then he had a short career as a consultant before getting picked up by Apple. Apple tried to get him right out of school. They tried three times to recruit him, and eventually they did.
Q.
Apple is famously secretive. They didn’t give you access to Jony Ive. So how did you write a book about him?
A.
I approached him through a back channel, through a friend. And he declined. And then I approached Apple officially, and they didn’t even respond.
Then I discovered that Jony has made everything in his past life private. He has sealed all of his school records, his high school records, his college records. He’s persuaded all of his ex-workers, his ex-colleagues not to talk. So his family would not talk. It was all shut off. I was freaking out because I had nothing.
But then I got a lucky break. I got one of one of his old design colleagues, Douglas Satzger, who worked with him for more than a dozen years. He was there before Steve Jobs came back and there all the way up to the iPad. And I went down to see him at his home in Silicon Valley.
I’ve never done an interview with anybody from Apple who was so frank and open and just started unloading. So I did about six hours of interviews with him.
What was fascinating about this guy was that, well for one, it was obvious that he had never told these stories before. He hadn’t told his wife or anybody about this stuff. So they weren’t coming out as stories. They were coming out as raw memory. So it was a very weird experience from an interview perspective, just to see somebody transcribe that flash of images as pure memory.
Q.
What was your favorite story from Mr. Satzger?
A.
It was about a meeting with Terry Gou, the head of Foxconn, the manufacturing company.
He told me how they got into Foxconn. It was very much organic. They were looking at doing aluminum products. And they were working with a bunch of companies in Japan who introduced them to all these companies in China. And they were trying to do it with an American company, but the American company was just hopeless. They weren’t playing ball. But Terry Gou at Foxconn was.
Do you remember the G5 PowerMac from 10 years ago? It looked like something out of “2001: Space Odyssey.” This massive aluminum tower. So they told Terry Gou that this thing was so beautiful, that they realized that people weren’t going to put it under their desk, but they were going to put it on top of their desks. So if they were going to put it on top of their desk, that means that people can see it from behind and they can see it from the sides. So they wanted every surface of that machine to be perfect.
And because you took the door off to get inside, they wanted the inside to be perfect, too. So they designed everything inside: the motherboard, the chips, the chip covers; they even designed the cables. It’s insane.
So they told Terry Gou this. And Gou was like, “Are you crazy? Are you mad? I’ve never heard of anything like it. No one does this kind of stuff.”
And Satzger recounted this long meeting where he confronted a flabbergasted Terry Gou about their demands. And Terry Gou, when he understood their demands, he totally busted everyone’s chops to make sure they could deliver it. And that was the beginning of that relationship with Foxconn.
And Foxconn subsequently went on to get more and more Apple products. That was a revelation because I think people think that Apple went to China because it’s cheap labor, because it’s exploitative. But the impression that I got was that they found a partner who is as committed and is as inventive as they were.
Q.
What was the most surprising thing you learned about Jony Ive?
A.
Three of his former colleagues told me he almost got killed in a car accident on the 280 freeway with one of his buddies.
This was right after the iPod started to take off. Apple’s fortunes were hockey-sticking. Everyone got fat paychecks. So he bought this Aston Martin DB9. You know, the James Bond supercar for $250,000. He had it delivered to New York, he drove it across country with his dad. And then a month later he wrecked it on 280.
This is the strange thing: I couldn’t find any records. I contacted every police agency from here to Bakersfield. No one’s got any records. Nothing. You know, I contacted tow companies, I contacted all these wrecking yards.
Apple freaked out about his accident. They gave him a huge paycheck, pay raise, and a bunch of options. They realized then how important he was to the company. So that was kind of, not a turning point, but it boosted his profile.
I also thought one of the most insightful things, one of the things that I found most fascinating, was that Jony Ive is dyslexic. But one thing I noticed, that no one has ever made clear, is that he’s always been very tactile. He loves to touch things. One of his first products, when he was a student working as an intern for a design company, was a pen that you could fiddle with, and they had what they called it “the fiddle factor.” He knew people fiddle with pens.
So when he got to Apple, the first product that he worked on was the MessagePad. He added the fiddle factor to that, with a pen that popped out and a pen interface on the screen. And then when he started working with Jobs, he put a handle on the iMac. And he did that not just so that you can carry it, but also to tell people it was O.K. to touch the machine.
By touching the computer, it becomes not as intimidating, it’s not as scary. When you go into the Apple store you see everyone touching things. So he put handles on the early products: all the first iMacs, the iBook had a handle on it, the towers had handles on them.
Q.
What do you think of Apple after Steve Jobs? What’s changed?
A.
Well you know, that’s an interesting thing. People say, “Why isn’t Jony the C.E.O.? If he’s the most important thing, why isn’t he the C.E.O.?”
Tim Cook is doing for Jony what he did for Steve Jobs, which is take away the responsibility of the day-to-day management and free him up to be an inventive, creative product person. So Tim Cook’s in exactly the same role as he was before. Except now his master is different. His master is now Jony Ive rather than Steve Jobs. Jony doesn’t answer to anybody. Nobody can tell him what to do.
One of his former colleagues, Clive Grinyer, who worked with him in London and is a big designer in his own right, said Jony Ive is more important to Apple than Jobs was. And obviously Jobs leaving Apple was a big blow and potentially devastating. But you know, if Jony Ive left Apple now, then the company would really be in trouble.
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