Steve Jobs posthumous Apple design focus revealed

Steve Jobs warned his team at Apple not to double-guess “what Steve would have done” after he passed, board member Al Gore has revealed, however the opinionated founder also made sure that design was still top of the agenda in developing new products. “Don’t ask what Steve would have done, follow your own voice,” Jobs told staff at Apple in the time preceding his death, Gore recalled in interview with AllThingsD. However, according to the previewed Steve Jobs biography, he also made sure that his “spiritual partner” Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, would remain unimpeachable.

Ive had “more operation power” than anybody else at Apple bar himself, Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson the Associated Press reports. Nobody else within Apple is capable of telling Ive what to do, he explained, with the design chief’s prominence being “the way I set it up.”

“[Steve] took great pride in cultivating the expertise and commitment to excellence and creativity in the executive team” Gore explained, though it seems Ive will keep the final say in matters of design – issues that have certainly shaped hardware and strategy decisions in the past. Back at the CDMA iPhone 4 launch in January, Apple admitted that LTE had been left out because the first-gen 4G radios demanded too many compromises on the physical design of the phone.