Jony Ive will no longer collaborate with Apple. Since 2019 the most famous designer in the world had left Cupertino and founded a company, LoveFrom, which Tim Cook’s company was among the main customers. A three-year contract and the promise of a long way to go together: “Even if I am no longer an employee, I will still be very involved – I hope for many, many years to come,” he told the Financial Times.
Tim Cook also reassured investors and users that Ive would work exclusively with the company for many years. But today the New York Times reveals that the contract has not been renewed. The reasons are different: on the one hand, the exorbitant amount (100 million dollars, it seems) paid by Apple, and the fact that many of the Cupertino designers were leaving the company to work alongside Ive and his partner Mark Newson. On the other hand, the limitation imposed on LoveForm in the choice of customers, which was to be limited to sectors not in competition with Apple. That, in these three years, without Ive, she hasn’t fared badly at all. It is true that many products have remained unchanged, but the new iMac, the MacBook Pro, and even the latest iPhone have been able to conquer the public thanks to details that Ive never would have approved: more ports, slots, the return to stylistic features of design of old models, such as sharp edges.
And this, in hindsight, only confirms the reasons for the divorce: Apple today prefers practicality to experimentation, and perhaps is more attentive to market research than to the philosophy of design. It adds, and does not take away, as it had done up to now. Focus more on user capitalization, with the sale of software and services.
Statistics
Apple counts as 30 Netflix, and other numbers you (maybe) don’t know about Big Tech
by Emanuele Capone
Who is Jony Ive
55 years old, massive physique and shy gaze, Ive is determined, obsessive, paranoid in his attention to detail. He has a passion for cars, drive a black Bentley Mulsanne, an Aston Martin or a Range Rover. He made a sink for Ideal Standard, and advised director JJ Abrams to build the lightsaber for Star Wars. And above all he has signed some of the greatest commercial successes of the Apple and the best-selling gadgets of all time, entered in the history and in pop culture, and in the lives of billions of people around the world: the colorful iMac, the iPod, the ‘iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch. As head of the interface, he completely overhauled the appearance of the iOS and OS X operating system, introducing a graphic style soon taken over by competitors. Because of this, many have seen in Ive the true heir of Steve Jobs: the founder of Apple and the English designer have been united by a spiritual commonality, a passion and an untiring dedication. Jobs himself had told it in his biography written by Walter Isaacsson, the widow Laurene Powell Jobs confirmed it several times.
A 3-decade-long history
Ive’s with Apple was a relationship that lasted since 1990, a more unique case in the fast-paced world of technology, but the collaboration had begun. in the late 1980s, when he worked at a company called Tangerine, where, among other things, he worked on the design of the first PowerBooks. He was hired in 1992, and only then did he decide to leave London. The first product to bear his signature was the Apple Newton, an innovative but unsuccessful personal assistant. Five years later, Ive was ready to leave the company, but that’s when Steve Jobs returned, and after the first meeting he appointed him vice president of design, starting a collaboration that would have brought Apple – then on the verge of bankruptcy – to become the first hi-tech company in the world.
The anniversary
15 years after its launch, the iPhone is still in Apple’s future
by Bruno Ruffilli
Aesthetics and ethics
The quality of the materials, the excellence of the finishes, the paranoid attention to detail are typical characteristics of Apple products, and have contributed largely to their success. There are many reasons for this, but there is also a design culture that is unrivaled in the history of consumer electronics. Only two exceptions, which not surprisingly served as a model for Jobs from the beginning of his adventure: Sony and Olivetti, companies capable of building a personal and innovative aesthetic language. Where there is no room for ornamentation and every choice is important: what is there cannot be missing, and what is not there must not be there. Thus aesthetics becomes ethics, and from beauty to the concept of right.
Plastic, however example: until recently it was not uncommon to find it disguised as metal, especially in gadgets and cheap electronic devices. Today it has disappeared, and even on the cheapest Chinese products it is difficult to see chromed plastic. When he introduced the iPhone 5c, Jonathan Ive said it was achieved with a plastic “that does not have to apologize”.
And then the aluminum, and the glass, so typical of Apple: finished to perfection but always so that their nature is evident. They are choices that denote intellectual coherence, transparency towards those who buy an item. The sincerity of the materials is an ethical choice, which refers to concepts such as quality, durability, the possibility of reuse and recycling.
Many have taken the lines and materials of Apple, and not only the iPhone (just think of computers, from the colorful iMac to the MacBook Air). However, no one was able to invent a culture of design like the one embodied by Jobs first and then by Ive. Because it is easy to say that the most famous industrial designer of today was inspired by another legendary designer, Dieter Rams, but the similarities between the iPod and the Braun radio of the seventies are not accidental, they are references to the same intellectual matrix .
The latest project
For eight years, Ive had been working on Steve Jobs’ latest project: Apple Park. The Apple founder passed away on October 5, 2011, but four months before his last public release was for participate in a session of the city council of Cupertino and introduce the new campus. The project was developed by the studio of British star architect Norman Foster, but Ive oversaw every detail, even the door handles. Apple’s headquarters is a workplace, but also a Zen symbol. The main building has a total area of 260,000 square meters and the entire Pentagon could find its place inside. It actually houses a lawn, a pond and fruit trees. Apricot trees, like the ones that grew up there in Jobs’s childhood, around what was then the headquarters of Hewlett Packard.