In one sentence: Leander Kahney’s 2013 biography follows Apple’s design chief from his father’s workshop through a British polytechnic and a frustrating consultancy to the studio where the iMac, iPod, iPhone and unibody MacBook were made, and is excellent on how that work gets done, but it was reported without Ive’s cooperation, borrows its best Jobs scenes from Walter Isaacson, and stops in 2013.
At a Glance
Author: Leander Kahney
First published: 2013 (Portfolio)
Category: Biography / Design
Length: about 320 pages, about 95,000 words (Portfolio paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59184-706-9 (Portfolio paperback)
Summary reading time: about 12 minutes
Book reading time: about 6 hours
Notable adaptations: none
A note on sourcing: Kahney did not interview Ive, and Apple did not respond to his requests for comment, so Ive’s own words here come from earlier published interviews, Apple videos and court testimony. Several of the most dramatic scenes are sourced to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs or to unnamed former employees, and some claims are flagged as rumor in the text. The book closes in mid-2013, which leaves out everything Apple and Ive have done since. This summary notes where the reporting is thin.
Kahney is a longtime technology journalist who runs the Apple news site Cult of Mac and had already written a book about Steve Jobs. This is a journalist’s design-and-business biography, built from interviews with Ive’s teachers, early partners and Apple colleagues, plus published material. Kahney reports contacting more than 200 people, mostly current or former Apple staff, many of whom would not go on the record. The result is an outside-in portrait: strong on craft and method, weaker as a judgment of the man, because nearly everyone who talked admires him.
Read it if you want to understand how industrial design is practiced at the highest level. Skip it if you want Ive’s own account, a balanced verdict, or anything after 2013.
The Big Idea
Kahney’s thesis is that Ive’s method came from three places: a father who made him draw before he built, a British design education that took making as seriously as drawing, and the frustration of consultancy, where good work got gutted by clients who did not understand it. By the time Ive reached Apple he knew how he wanted to work. He lacked a company that would let him.
Two other men supplied that. Robert Brunner built the studio Ive inherited and recruited him. Jobs, on his return in 1997, gave that studio authority over the whole company. Clive Grinyer, Ive’s former partner, supplies Kahney’s frame: “Steve unlocked Jony.” The method that followed, which Kahney calls simplification, strips a product to what is essential and then spends enormous effort on the parts nobody will notice.
Key Ideas
1. A father who made him draw it first
Michael Ive was a silversmith turned teacher who became one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors and helped write the national design and technology curriculum for England and Wales. Kahney reports that his Christmas gift to his son was a day in a college workshop making whatever the boy wanted, on one condition: he had to draw it by hand first. On walks he pointed out street lamps and asked why they differed. Ralph Tabberer tells Kahney the father’s influence was “purely nurturing”.
2. Newcastle, the dust and the pen
Ive took a four-year sandwich course at Newcastle Polytechnic, with industry placements and a roughly one-in-ten admission rate, and his own memory is that he did nothing but work. The detail Kahney dwells on is a sculpture professor who cleaned the dust off students’ pieces before criticizing them, which Ive read as respect for the work. For his final show he built more than a hundred foam models in his flat, and was the first undergraduate to win two Royal Society of Arts travel bursaries. His placement produced the Zebra TX2, a white pen with a ball and clip added purely so the user would have something to fiddle with. It went into production in Japan, and colleagues coined a word for the quality: “Jony-ness”.
3. Tangerine, and the Apple that nearly lost him
Ive joined Grinyer and Martin Darbyshire as a third partner at Tangerine at 23, working on power tools, combs and televisions. His bathroom suite for Ideal Standard was rejected on cost, and Darbyshire’s verdict is that the client “tore out its heart and soul”. Ive’s own summary is that he was neither interested in nor good at business. Brunner recruited him through Project Juggernaut, a design investigation one Tangerine partner suspected was really a recruitment device, and Ive joined Apple in September 1992. His standout from those years is the Newton MessagePad 110, with its copper-sprung lid and telescoping stylus, because opening it should feel special. The Twentieth Anniversary Mac, inherited from Brunner and marking Apple’s twentieth year, launched at 9,000 dollars and flopped. Kahney reports that Ive was close to quitting until Jon Rubinstein talked him out of it.
4. Jobs returns and the iMac starts from people
At the July 1997 all-hands, Kahney reports, Jobs told the company its products had no sex in them. He cut the line to a two-by-two grid, killed the Newton, and nearly outsourced design before touring the studio and deciding Ive already had what he needed. The iMac team started from people rather than engineering specifications. Translucency came from a thermos, a BMW taillight and kitchenware, and the Bondi Blue from beach glass. The handle made the machine inviting to touch, because Ive believed people were afraid of computers. It dropped the floppy drive, reviewers predicted failure, and it shipped 800,000 units in its first year, a third to first-time buyers.
5. The studio’s method
After the 2001 move to Infinite Loop 2, Kahney reports, roughly sixteen designers worked at four project tables under black cloth, with a CAD room, three CNC machines and a spray booth. Brainstorms ran two or three times a week for about three hours, attendance mandatory, with everyone’s sketchbook pages copied to the project lead. Chris Stringer’s detail is fifty models of a single home button. Scott Forstall’s badge would not open the door, and one former engineer describes the pressure as a gun to your head. Ive’s position on cost, according to Kahney’s sources, was that he did not want his people thinking about it. This is the best material in the book.
6. The iPod and iPhone, with credit spread around
Kahney is candid that the iPod was an odd-duck project led by engineering, with Ive brought in for what he calls a hated skin job. Rubinstein found the Toshiba drive, Tony Fadell built a foam mock-up weighted with fishing weights, and Phil Schiller brought the scroll wheel. The design group contributed the two-piece case with no battery door, the absence of an on-off button, the white, and packaging as a ritual of unpacking. The iPhone story is just as plural. Duncan Kerr showed multi-touch at a brainstorm in late 2003, and Ive showed Jobs privately because ideas at that stage are fragile. Two designs were killed before the team returned to an overlooked earlier model, glass meant a handshake deal with Corning, and the gap between glass and bezel was sized against the designers’ stubble. In the fall of 2006 Jobs said they did not have a product yet, and Ive recalls that they nearly shelved it.
7. Ninety percent manufacturing
Brunner’s figure is that Apple’s designers spend ten percent of their time on traditional industrial design and ninety percent working with manufacturing. Ive spent three months in a Foxconn dormitory during SARS in 2003, Kahney reports. The unibody process took a 2.5-pound slab of aluminum down to a quarter-pound part through thirteen milling operations, cut part-to-part interfaces on the iPhone from nearly thirty to five, and required Apple to buy most of a supplier’s CNC output. This is where simplification stops being a slogan.
Context and Analysis
What holds up is the account of how industrial design actually gets made. The education, materials and manufacturing chapters, the studio’s method and the honesty about the iPod’s engineering-led origin all come from people who were there: Grinyer, Darbyshire, Brunner, Stringer and Doug Satzger. Kahney also partly corrects for his own admiration, noting Ive’s habit of saying we rather than I alongside a healthy ego. The chapter on Apple after Jobs is measured too. Ive did not take the chief executive role, and his own line is that you could transplant him and his group elsewhere and they would not work at all.
The problems are sourcing and dating. Kahney never interviewed Ive, and their one meeting is a chance conversation at a trade show in 2003. Every Ive quotation comes from earlier interviews, Apple video, the Objectified documentary or Apple v. Samsung testimony. Most key Jobs scenes are sourced to Isaacson, and where accounts conflict, as on who pushed for glass, Kahney presents both rather than resolving them. Fadell’s departure as an Ive win, Rubinstein’s ouster, a car crash, a pay rise and reported bonus figures all rest on unnamed sources, and the October 2012 removal of Forstall is read as a dispute over skeuomorphic software on rumor Kahney flags as rumor. The register is hagiographic, and although the book’s own evidence shows Fadell, Rubinstein and Schiller driving the iPod, Kerr, Imran Chaudhri and Bas Ording driving multi-touch, Forstall driving iOS and Tim Cook building the supply chain, the closing chapter credits the iPod, iPhone, iPad and unibody to Ive alone. There are factual slips: the ages given for Ive do not match his February 1967 birth, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac is said to mark the Macintosh’s anniversary when it marked Apple’s, and the year of his CBE differs between chapters. And the book closes in mid-2013, forecasting that tablets would outsell the entire PC market by 2015, which did not happen. Kahney’s closing secret is to follow simplification slavishly, but he gives the last word to Professor Alex Milton, who warns that Apple’s brand DNA has become a noose and that Ive is now the establishment. Twelve years on, that is the most prescient page in the book.
On this site it pairs naturally with Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the authorized biography that supplies many of this book’s Jobs scenes and tells the same partnership from the other side, and with Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, the insider account of protecting fragile ideas inside a creative company, written by someone who ran one.
What It Teaches
Five lessons that survive the book’s limits.
1. Draw it before you make it. Michael Ive’s workshop rule and the studio’s copied sketchbook pages are the same discipline at different scales. 2. Start from people, not specifications. The iMac began with how a nervous first-time buyer would feel about touching a computer. 3. Treat ideas as fragile. Ive showed Jobs multi-touch privately because a raw idea cannot survive a room full of critics. 4. Design is mostly manufacturing. A seamless product is an industrial achievement before it is a visual one. 5. Credit the team. The iPod, iPhone and iOS were built by many people, and the healthiest thing in Ive’s account is his habit of saying we.
Memorable Lines
“There was a real sense of the people who made it.” (Jony Ive)
“The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.” (Jony Ive)
“The real risk is to think it is safe to play it safe.” (Jony Ive)
“We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don’t see that effort.” (Jony Ive)
“I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development.” (Jony Ive)
“Our goal absolutely at Apple is not to make money.” (Jony Ive)
Should You Read the Full Book?
Verdict: Summary is enough
This summary carries the thesis, the sources of Ive’s method, the division of credit on the iPod and iPhone, and the key manufacturing figures. The full book adds texture: the Newcastle years, the iMac’s material experiments, and a long account of the studio’s method and the unibody process, worth six hours for anyone who designs or makes things for a living. For everyone else the case against is decisive: the subject never spoke to the author, the best Jobs scenes belong to Isaacson, several claims are rumor by the book’s own admission, and the story stops in 2013, before the Apple Watch and before Ive left Apple in 2019. Read it, if you do, as an account of a craft rather than a verdict on a man.
The Jony Ive book page has the full details and where to get a copy.