Jony Ive: The man behind Apple's magic curtain

Marco della Cava | USA TODAY

CUPERTINO, Calif. — The man who designed the iPod ponders the question with furrowed brow.

"That's a good one," says Jony Ive, when asked what he would turn his talents to if Apple no longer required them. There's a long silence, then a whispered, thoughtful and prolonged answer that boils down to one thing. He's not going anywhere.

"Look at that chair, we understand it because its form and function are the same thing, which is how the manufactured world has been for hundreds of years," he says in a soft British accent. "And then incredibly and relatively recently, there's this opportunity but with a set of problems to create objects whose forms don't hint at what they do. And they're packed with incredible sophistication and capability."

Ive twirls his iPhone 5s in his hand, then smiles.

"It all feels so new and all-consuming," Ive, 46, tells USA TODAY. "It feels like we're just getting started."

If Apple has a design wizard, it is Ive. He joined the company in 1992 and has been the fertile and detail-obsessed mind behind culture-shaping products such as the lollipop-colored iMacs (1998), the iPod (2001), iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010). His work has earned him countless design awards, flattery in the form of product imitation and even a new name — Sir Jonathan — courtesy of Queen Elizabeth II.

Most recently, Ive and his hardware design group collaborated closely with teams led by Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, to dream up the newly launched iOS 7 operating system and 5c and 5s iPhones. Industry observers and consumers alike see these new products as critical to proving that the company Steve Jobs created can still think differently.

While the affable and well-coiffed Federighi, 44, often bounds onstage like a game-show host at Apple developer and media presentations, the privacy-loving Ive appears only in polished videos. But as Apple seeks to fend off competition from the likes of Samsung and other Android armies, the reserved knight of this digital Oz is peeking out from behind his curtain.

In a rare interview, Ive, joined by Federighi, settles into a spartan meeting room with a simple black-and-white photo of a MacBook on one wall and the new lineup of iPhones on a counter. Over the course of an hour, the pair discusses their teamwork, personal philosophies and commitment to Apple's unwavering mission.

Chemistry that isn't forced

Apple is notorious for secrecy and stage-managing its every move, but there is undeniably genuine chemistry between the two 40-something company veterans (Federighi joined Jobs' NeXT venture in 1994, went to Apple when it acquired NeXT, left in 1999 but returned a decade later).

Sitting on the same small, gray couch, each leans in as the other is speaking. Federighi nods during Ive's layered commentary; Ive mutters "Yes" at Federighi's animated explanations. Both are dressed casually — Ive in a blue polo shirt and baggy white pants, Federighi in a crisp but untucked dark dress shirt and pressed jeans — and both greet a visitor with strong grips and nods that are almost a bow.

Although in many ways the two men are peers, Ive possesses a magnetism and gravitas that makes him stand out. He starts by saying that while he knew that Apple had to come up with a mobile operating system that rewrote its own rules, he approached the challenge with a confidence born of success.

"When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn't need physical buttons, they understood the benefits," says Ive. "So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way."

Ive is referring to iOS 7's more simplified and almost two-dimensional feel, particularly when it comes to app tiles. The so-called skeuomorphic template established during Jobs' time — where real textures and objects are mimicked, such as the green pool table felt of the Game Center app — was laid to rest in favor of a less fussy look. Game Center is now just a series of colorful bubbles.

Federighi says iOS 7's new look is inextricably linked with technological advances.

"This is the first post-Retina (Display) UI (user interface), with amazing graphics processing thanks to tremendous GPU (graphics processing unit) power growth, so we had a different set of tools to bring to bear on the problem as compared to seven years ago (when the iPhone first launched)," he says. "Before, the shadowing effect we used was a great way to distract from the limitations of the display. But with a display that's this precise, there's nowhere to hide. So we wanted a clear typography."

Ive jumps in. "Yes, we wanted to defer to the content, and just get out of the way."

He picks up his iPhone and slides the Notifications Center into place; it appears like information attached to a frosted shower door, where the world behind it is still visible.

"Look at that," says Ive. "The lovely thing about translucency is you're not sitting there going, 'Where have I just been taken?' because your world is still there."

Federighi nods. "You didn't just get walled off," he says. "It's about a different philosophy."

Manufacturing as philosophy

Most tech companies don't typically talk about having a philosophy. More handy are spec sheets teeming with numbers meant to impress consumers, a "bigger is better" approach to conquering market share.

Even more convincing are low prices. Apple's recent announcement that the 5c would start at a higher-than-anticipated $99 (subsidized) led many industry pundits to question whether Apple — having already collected 40% of the U.S. smartphone market — could grow in new markets like China without lower-priced product. Apple stock took a tumble after its Sept. 10 iOS and iPhone announcements.

Neither Ive nor Federighi will broach business questions, but their comments effectively confirm that Apple will continue to choose quality over quantity.

"Look at the camera space, companies are chasing megapixels but the pictures often look horrible because of their tiny sensors," says Federighi. "My family cares about taking a good picture, not a megapixel count. We carry that through to all the decisions we make about our phone. What experience is it going to deliver? Not what number will it allow us to put on a spec sheet."

Ive rocks excitedly, then leans forward. Could be the espresso he's just set down.

"That is exactly it," he says emphatically. "It's just easier to talk about product attributes that you can measure with a number. Focus on price, screen size, that's easy. But there's a more difficult path, and that's to make better products, ones where maybe you can't measure their value empirically.

"This is terribly important and at the heart of what we do. We care about how to design the inside of something you'll never see, because we think it's the right thing to do."

Apple co-founder Jobs was obsessed with details that consumers never saw, a trait he inherited from his adoptive mechanic father, Paul. In 1996, Jobs said this about design: "(It's) a funny word. Some people think design is about how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works." When a year later he and Ive unveiled the candy-colored transparent iMac, he ensured that that same sense of fun and whimsy was reflected in the machine's new software, OS X.

By all accounts, Ive comes by that same obsession with sweating the small stuff naturally. That is perhaps why Jobs, notoriously tough on staff, considered Ive a "spiritual partner" with more operational power at Apple than anyone besides its founder, according to Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs, which bowed in 2011 just after the tech icon died from pancreatic cancer.

Robert Brunner, who was Apple's director of industrial design from 1989 to 1997, encountered Ive, who grew up in the London suburb of Chingford and attended the same high school as soccer star David Beckham, as he was trading a degree at Northumbria University for a job at a London design firm called Tangerine.

"He showed me a wireless home telephone with a radical design, all of whose features and parts he had figured out, which was unusual," says Brunner, who went on to contract Tangerine on a few Apple projects "really just to get Jony over here."

Ive turned down Brunner's first offer of work at Apple, but a subsequent trip to the company's Northern California headquarters swayed the Londoner, who since then has called the Bay Area home along with his wife and two sons.

"At his heart, Jony's a craftsman," says Brunner, founder of San Francisco-based Ammunition, the design firm behind Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. "He's also an incredible intellectual and an incredibly nice person, which often don't go together when you reach superstardom. He's highly respected at Apple, which means he doesn't have to carry a big hammer."

Brunner senses that Ive "is going to become more the face of Apple, because it's one of those few companies you can count on one hand that are fully design-focused. They start with the user's experience first, and drive back through their infrastructure to make that a reality. You need leaders with that strong editorial voice, which is why Jony is so important at this point in time."

Max Chafkin recently spent months interviewing dozens of former Apple employees for his new oral history e-book, Design Crazy: Good Looks, Hot Tempers and True Genius at Apple. He says that among "Apple optimists, there's a hope that Jony will become the company's guardian of design."

In fact, he adds, iOS 7's radical look already has given many of that crowd hope.

"There is a feeling (among ex-Apple staffers) that the company hasn't been doing anything bold or shocking, that whether you're talking about iPod or iMac they're just tweaking designs and features," says Chafkin, a contributing writer at Fast Company. "iOS 7 is new and different and risky, and that's exciting. They seem to be heading back toward shocking us."

Call him Jony, please

While the products and designs that Ive has conjured up over the years may have indeed shocked the world — 1,000 songs in your pocket? — the man himself won't likely be morphing into a mic-wielding, stage-striding frontman.

His style is more hushed, whether that's quietly designing a pair of rose-gold ear buds to be auctioned off for pal Bono's RED charity, or appearing on a long-running BBC children's crafts show Blue Peter, where he immediately asked the deferential host to drop the Sir Jonathan bit for just Jony.

That lack of pomp extends to his personal design credo.

"I've said this before, but simplicity is, well, it goes back to …you're trying to define the essence of something and come up with a solution that seems utterly inevitable and obvious," he says. "I think a lot of people see simplicity as the lack of clutter. And that's not the case at all. True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, 'Yeah, well, of course.' Where there's no rational alternative."

A case is point is iPhone 5s's TouchID, a fingerprint scanner embedded in the central and lower home button that instantly reads a print presented to its glass eye at almost any angle. Ive is literally at a loss for words when asked to describe its creation.

"This right here is what I love about Apple, this incredibly sophisticated powerful technology that you're almost not aware of, it absolutely blows me away," he says. "You can't get this without working cross-functionally."

Federighi is quick to admit that any engineer tasked with such a challenge would be sure to call attention to his brilliant work. "You know, you're going to have some big message saying 'Scanning!' and buzz-buzz-zzz-zzz later it says 'Authenticated,' blink-blink-blink, with 10 seconds of animation," he says, as Ive starts laughing.

"Ultimately we realized all that had to disappear," says Federighi. "If it disappears, we know we've done it."

Ive says this first extended exposure to Apple's engineering side has left him with not just an appreciation for the problem-solving minds available to tackle his design visions, but also bullish on the kinds of future inventions that are possible with truly integrated and aligned hardware and software teams.

"I would love, love, love to show you what we are working on now, but I'd lose my job," Ive says with an impish grin.

"But you've got a sense about perhaps not what we are building, but the way we approach problems as a group," he says. "About how we go back again and again until something is just right. I do sense that people can tell we really care. We make products that we think are right, that maybe you can't easily justify or evaluate, but they feel right."

Today, Tim Cook is Apple's efficient CEO, but is Ive the man charged with holding the company's compass, as many posit? Or do perhaps Ive and Federighi together guide the ship Steve built?

Mention Jobs and there's a noticeable hush. His spirit is inescapable here. One floor below is a white wall bearing a Jobs quote: "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next." Around the corner is a big photo of a young Jobs hovering over an early Macintosh.

But while there's reverence in the air, it's clear that the current leadership feels Apple can and does exist outside of that outsized shadow.

"I've been here for years, and the way we're working is the same," says Ive. "Nothing's changed in terms of that. We're trying to solve problems in terms of future products that are incredibly complex, whose resolutions have no precedent." Pause. "And then sometimes there are a lot of people who talk about stuff who aren't at Apple anymore, so that's a self-selecting group."

Federighi chimes in.

"People come here for the values that are evident in every product we build," he says. "When we make decisions, it's not a battle of people trying to break us out of our value system. We all want to double down on these values, whose aim is to make things simpler, more focused. Those are spoken and unspoken mantras in all the discussions we have. You can call that Steve's legacy, but it's Apple now."

Ive says that while he keeps a keen eye on competitors' tech designs, he remains uninfluenced by them.

"We, and the people who buy our products, steer us," he says. "It's certainly not other corporations at all, and we've shown that for a long time."

Ive shakes his head, and in a way that seems almost believable expresses a wish that he could just for a moment unlock the door to Apple's Fort Knox-like design center and show off the incubating fruits of his labors.

"It feels like each time we are beginning at the beginning, in a really exciting way, and if you could see what I mean it wouldn't just be rhetoric," says the man whose sense of aesthetics and taste has helped Apple sell some 700 million iOS devices to date. "It's very easy to make something that is new, but it won't be new the day after tomorrow. So we are trying to make things that are better."

And if that next new and better thing really and truly couldn't be a technological device, Sir Jonathan, what would it be instead?

Ive mulls.

"I'd like to design cups."

Cups?

"Cups."

With handles or without?

"Ah," he says with a grin. "That's for me to know."

And, judging from Ive's track record, for the rest of the world to buy.