Jony Ive, Apple’s chief of design, said that he would stop designing products for Apple and go it alone if the company ceased innovating.

Ive revealed that Apple’s innovation in technology is what keeps his interest at the Cupertino based company, in an interview with the Sunday Times about product design.

“Yes. I’d stop. I’d make things for myself, for my friends at home instead. The bar needs to be high,” said Ive when questioned about whether he would ever leave Apple.

“I don’t think that will happen,” Ive added. “We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed. When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in the future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit. It’s still so, so new.”

‘Months and months and months’

Ive, who leads Apple’s industrial and software design, described the first stage in his relentless process as imaging what “a new kind of product should be and what it should do” with his team of 15 people from the US, UK, New Zealand, Japan and Australia.

“Months and months and months” were spent honing designs like the exact shape of the iMac computer stand, according to Ive, who said: “It’s very hard to design something that you almost do not see because it just seems so obvious, natural, and inevitable.”

Ive revealed that the majority of the design work at Apple happens within his office furnished with computer-controlled cutting machines and a large wooden display bench topped with prototypes.

‘I don’t recognise my friend in much of it’

On the various articles and books written about Apple’s Steve Jobs, Ive said “I don’t recognise my friend in much of it.”

“Yes, he had a surgically precise opinion. Yes, it could sting. Yes, he constantly questioned. ‘Is this good enough? Is this right?’ But he was so clever. His ideas were bold and magnificent. They could suck the air from the room,” said Ive.

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