Newly knighted, Apple design chief hints at mystery product
The iPhone: A good looking machine. So good, in fact, that the man who designed it has just been made a "sir." to the BBC, Jonathan Ives, the design chief at Apple, was knighted on Wednesday by , at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. The BBC reports that Ives, a native of Britain, even had a friendly post-knighting chat about the Princess's iPad and Ive's regular trips to and from his home country.听
Jonathan "Jony" Ive was born in 1967 in London. He studied聽industrial design at聽Northumbria University, and after graduation, he and three friends founded a design agency called Tangerine. One of Tangerine's first clients was Apple, which promptly hired Ive away to California. Ive was made design chief at Apple in 1992, and in the two decades since, he has helped oversee the creation of a range of products, including the iPhone and the iPod.听
Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple, biographer Walter Isaacson that Ive was a kind of "spiritual partner."
"We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that鈥檚 the only possible solution that makes sense," Ive聽聽in an interview with聽the Daily Telegraph this week. "Our products are tools and we don鈥檛 want design to get in the way. We鈥檙e trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we鈥檙e trying to order the products.听I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care."
In the interview with the Telegraph 鈥� rare for Ive, who is press shy 鈥� Ive explains that although he is proud of his past work, it's his current projects that he'd like to be remembered for. "[W]hat we鈥檙e working on now feels like the most important and the best work we鈥檝e done, and so it would be what we鈥檙e working on right now, which of course I can鈥檛 tell you about," Ive said.听
Of course, as Josh Ong of Apple Insider noted today, it's easy enough to read between the lines. "Though Ive likely has a range of products in the pipeline, his comments will likely be interepreted as evidence toward a rumored Apple television," Ong . "According to聽one report聽from early this year, Ive has a 50-inch prototype TV inside his well-guarded design studio."聽
Or it could be the new iPhone. Just saying.听
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