![]() ![]() “I’m always focussed on the actual work, and I think that’s a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make.” He sounded calm, but he was fidgeting with his hands, as if trying to flick gum from his fingertips.īehind Ive, at a distance that suggested self-exile, was Steve Wozniak, who, in 1976, co-founded Apple with Jobs, and who was wearing a black steam-punk watch the size of an ashtray. His London accent is intact after more than twenty years away. Jobs excused Ive from most public-speaking duties, and he has held on to the dispensation. But Ive’s role was limited largely to drinking coffee in misty sunshine. Tim Cook, Apple’s C.E.O., was somewhere nearby, preparing to speak to a hall full of enthusiasts and reporters, and to millions online. (Fry later referred, fondly, to “Snoop Seany Sean,” who was gracious when Fry nearly soaked him with a spilled drink.) That day, a hundred assembly lines in Zhengzhou, China, were turning out still secret new iPhones at a reported rate of seventy-five hundred an hour, and rumors about new Apple products, including a watch, were being posted online at nearly the same pace. of Beats and the rapper and entrepreneur Sean Combs. Among the guests were Rupert Murdoch Kevin Durant, of the Oklahoma City Thunder Marissa Mayer, of Yahoo Jimmy Iovine, the C.E.O. Of a thousand attendees expected, a few dozen had been invited to the backstage courtyard. Later that morning, Apple was announcing new products and services, at the kind of event that the company, like a fashion house, stages a few times a year. He communicates with his friend Paul Smith, the British fashion designer, largely through postcards that, as Smith recently recalled, contain “words like ‘lovely,’ ‘special,’ ‘ so nice’-a language that is particular to his gentleness.” He is impeccably solicitous, with frowns of attention and apologies for lateness or workplace untidiness, and he seems to extend this tone to everyone-including, presumably, to the crew of his twenty-seat Gulfstream GV, which he bought from Powell Jobs after her husband’s death, in 2011. Ive was brushing his hand across the top of his head, and talking quietly. A photograph of the gift is the lock-screen image on Ive’s iPhone. The seven-inch Ive had on sunglasses and carried an off-white Valextra briefcase. He was maintaining a look captured in a Playmobil figure of him, which his design colleagues made as a Christmas present a few years ago. He wore pale, wide pants, cut as if for a chef, and tan suède Clarks shoes, and his hair was cropped. One morning in September, Ive was talking with a few friends, including Chris Martin, of Coldplay, and Stephen Fry, the British actor and writer, in a courtyard beside a community-college hall, a few miles from Apple’s headquarters, in Cupertino. (To take a number: a ten-percent drop in Apple’s valuation represents seventy-one billion dollars.) According to Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, who is close to Ive and his family, “Jony’s an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.” He sometimes listens to CNBC Radio on his hour-long commute from San Francisco to Apple’s offices, in Silicon Valley, but he’s uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making-his taste-and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders. ![]() He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company. There were times, during the past two decades, when he considered leaving Apple, but he stayed, becoming an intimate friend of Steve Jobs and establishing the build and the finish of the iMac, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. ![]() His manner suggests the burden of being fully appreciated. In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple-who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has a bench-pressing bulk that he carries a little sheepishly, as if it belonged to someone else-has described himself as both “deeply, deeply tired” and “always anxious.” When he sits down, on an aluminum stool in Apple’s design studio, or in the cream leather back seat of his Bentley Mulsanne, a car for a head of state, he is likely to emit a soft, half-ironic groan. Things are “developed to be different, not better.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic “So much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness,” Ive says. ![]()
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