How Jony Ive saved Apple from bankruptcy

Jony Ive is the most celebrated designer of his generation. He’s won every award under the sun, from Designer of the Year to the BBC’s “Most Influential Person on British Culture” (he beat JK Rowling and Ricky Gervais). By March 2013, the 46-year-old was named in more than 600 patents; and all this in a stretch of just 10 years. And in the nearly two decades that Ive has been at Apple, the company has pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy and is now one of the world’s most valuable companies. So how did the Chingford-born Ive put the “i” in Apple?

It was 1997. Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple. The company was struggling badly. Microsoft put the boot in with Windows 95, and Apple was just months from bankruptcy.

The problem? The products stank. Apple made boring beige boxes that cost twice as much as anything else. To save the company, Jobs cut the company back to the bone. But he needed a hit, and he needed it fast. Ive was already there, running a design department that struggled to get management’s attention. Jobs was about to fire the entire crew when he took a tour of the studio. What he saw astounded him: it was full of colourful, plastic computers that the previous management was too timid to release.

Jobs and Ive set about making a computer that was dead easy to get on the internet. It was a huge risk. They bet the company on it. If it failed, Apple was going out of business. To give it personality, Ive persuaded Jobs to make it in bulbous, see-through plastic. He added a handle, not for carrying, but to encourage people to touch it, which made it less intimidating, more approachable.

The iMac was a mega hit, and it changed the computer industry for ever. No longer did consumers much care about megahertz, they wanted gadgets with personality. They wanted tech that was easy to use. They craved devices that could be shown off instead of hidden under a desk.

FIVE WAYS IVE MADE APPLE ICONIC

1. White

Making the iPod white was Ive’s idea. He’d grown tired of the multicoloured crazy colour stage, itself a reaction to beige. At first, Steve Jobs was against the idea, so Ive’s designers showed him prototypes of products in very light grey, which weren’t technically white but very close. Jobs reluctantly agreed, and soon everything going through the design department was in white. The iPod, with its telltale white earbuds, was the first one to make a splash.

White sent a message that the gadget wouldn’t dominate the user, unlike black tech products that tended to come off as “technical” or “nerdy”. The new iMac and iBooks, as yet unreleased, were also fashioned in white plastic. Curiously, all the things Ive did at design school years before were white, and he started pushing white at Apple.

2. Plastic

The iMac was going to be made in plastic — it would be an “unashamedly plastic” product, in Ive’s words — but plastic came with difficulties. “We didn’t want it to look trashy,” Ive explained later. “There’s a fine line you walk between affordable and cheap.”

To make it look classy, Ive and his designers made it transparent. There was also a subtle psychological reason. You can see inside transparent objects, which make them just a little less more mysterious. It was a time when technology was intimidating to a lot of people, and Ive worked hard to make it as friendly and as “transparent” as possible.

3. Lamp shaped desktop (iMac G4)

Ive always wanted Apple’s computers to have flat screens but in the early days the technology wasn’t there. In 2002, he and Jobs hit on the idea of separating the screen from the guts. The iMac G4 went on to become one of Apple’s most iconic products but it was one of the hardest engineering challenges Ive’s team faced.