Jony Ive
Based on Wikipedia: Jony Ive
In May 2025, OpenAI paid six and a half billion dollars for a company that didn't make anything yet. The company was called io, and it was founded by a British designer who had spent nearly three decades making the devices that defined how we interact with technology. Now he was betting that the smartphone era—an era he had helped create—was coming to an end.
That designer was Jony Ive.
The Man Who Made Your Phone Beautiful
If you've ever held an iPhone, you've held Jony Ive's work in your hands. The smooth aluminum. The precise curves. The way the device feels like it was carved from a single block of material rather than assembled from parts. That's not an accident. That's obsession.
Ive spent twenty-seven years at Apple, eventually rising to Chief Design Officer—one of only three executives at the company with a "C" in their title, alongside Tim Cook and the chief financial officer. During that time, he designed or oversaw the design of virtually every significant Apple product: the iMac that saved the company in the late 1990s, the iPod that conquered the music industry, the iPhone that swallowed the world, the iPad, the MacBook, and the Apple Watch. He also designed the buildings themselves—Apple Park, the company's spaceship-shaped headquarters in Cupertino, was his vision made architectural.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ive is that he almost quit before any of this happened.
A Silversmith's Son
Jonathan Paul Ive was born on February 27, 1967, in Chingford, a suburb in northeast London. His father, Michael, was a silversmith who taught at Middlesex Polytechnic—now Middlesex University. His grandfather was an engineer. Design and craft ran in the family.
At some point during secondary school, teachers discovered Ive had dyslexia. This learning difference, which affects how the brain processes written language, didn't stop him from excelling in visual and spatial thinking—skills that would define his career.
What did nearly derail his path was cars. Or rather, the people who designed them.
As a teenager, Ive fell in love with automotive design. He investigated car design programs in London, including one at the prestigious Royal College of Art. But when he visited, something about the students repelled him. "The classes were full of students making vroom! vroom! noises as they drew," he later recalled. The performative enthusiasm felt juvenile. He wanted something more serious.
So instead of cars, he studied industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic—now Northumbria University—where he encountered the Bauhaus philosophy for the first time. The Bauhaus was a German design school that operated from 1919 to 1933, and its central idea was radical simplicity: include only what is necessary. No ornamentation for its own sake. Form follows function. Less is more.
These weren't just aesthetic preferences. They were ethical positions about honesty in design.
Ive absorbed them completely.
The Toilet That Changed Everything
After graduating with a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989, Ive won the Royal Society of Arts Student Design Award two years running. The prize came with a small stipend and travel expenses, which he used to fly to San Francisco. There, he met a designer named Robert Brunner who ran a small consultancy—a firm that would later do work for Apple Computer.
Back in England, Ive joined a London design agency called Tangerine, based in Hoxton Square. The work was varied: microwave ovens, drills, toothbrushes. He designed for clients like LG and Ideal Standard, the bathroom fixtures company.
Then came the toilet.
Ive designed a toilet, bidet, and sink for Ideal Standard. He was proud of the work. The company rejected it, telling him the products looked too modern and would cost too much to manufacture. They wanted something safer. Something that wouldn't challenge anyone.
This is the moment that shapes many creative careers—the collision between artistic vision and commercial timidity. Some designers learn to compromise. Others become embittered. Ive became frustrated enough to consider leaving the profession entirely.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Robert Brunner was trying to recruit him to Apple. It took two years of persistence. Apple eventually became a client of Tangerine, and Ive worked on "Project Juggernaut," investigating the future of portable computers. The project laid groundwork for what would become the PowerBook line.
In September 1992, Ive finally agreed to move to California and join Apple full-time.
Almost Quitting
The Apple that Ive joined in 1992 was not the Apple we know today. It was a company in decline, struggling to compete with Windows PCs, hemorrhaging money and talent. Steve Jobs had been pushed out in 1985 after a power struggle with CEO John Sculley. Design wasn't a priority.
Ive's first major assignment was the Newton MessagePad—Apple's early attempt at a handheld computer, a kind of proto-smartphone that was too ahead of its time to succeed. The work was interesting enough, but the company's lack of emphasis on design excellence wore on him. By the mid-1990s, Ive was seriously considering quitting.
What kept him was a promise.
Jon Rubinstein, Ive's boss at the time, told him that Steve Jobs was returning to Apple and that they were "going to make history." Jobs had spent eleven years in exile, building a computer company called NeXT and funding an animation studio called Pixar that was about to release a film called Toy Story. Now Apple was buying NeXT, and Jobs was coming back.
Ive stayed.
The Partnership
Jobs and Ive discovered something rare when they began working together: they saw the same things.
"When we were looking at objects, what our eyes physically saw and what we came to perceive were exactly the same," Ive said in 2014. "And we would ask the same questions, have the same curiosity about things."
Jobs was more direct about the relationship. "If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it's Jony," he said. He described Ive as "wickedly intelligent" and noted that he understood not just design but business and marketing concepts. "He gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product."
This wasn't the typical CEO-designer relationship. Jobs gave Ive something almost unprecedented in corporate design: operational power. "There's no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out," Jobs explained. "That's the way I set it up."
Their offices in Cupertino were connected by a covered corridor. They would walk back and forth constantly, looking at prototypes, debating materials, obsessing over details that most executives would consider trivial—the exact radius of a corner, the click of a button, the weight distribution of a handheld device.
The iMac and After
In 1997, Jobs promoted Ive to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. His first major assignment in this role was the iMac.
The original iMac, released in 1998, looked like nothing else in computing. While every other computer was a beige or gray box—deliberately invisible, meant to disappear into an office environment—the iMac was a translucent blue-green bubble. You could see the components inside. It was whimsical and serious at the same time, friendly without being childish.
It was also a massive commercial success, and it announced that Apple was no longer interested in making boring beige boxes.
The iMac begat the iPod in 2001—the device that would transform both Apple and the music industry. The original iPod team was assembled by Jon Rubinstein, but Ive was the lead design engineer. Its white plastic face and chrome back, its satisfying click wheel, its simple interface of nested menus—these became the template for a decade of Apple products.
Then came the iPhone in 2007. Interestingly, Ive's team had actually started designing what would become the iPad before the iPhone, but Jobs decided to release the phone first. The iPad finally appeared in 2010.
On January 9, 2007, when Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld, Ive was in the audience. After the keynote, he made the first public phone call on the device—to Jobs, who was still on stage.
The Secret Studio
Ive's design studio at Apple was almost comically secretive. Located somewhere in the Cupertino campus, it was accessible only to his core team of about fifteen designers—colleagues from the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand who had worked together for roughly two decades. Top Apple executives could enter. Almost no one else could.
Ive's own children were not allowed inside.
The reason for all this security was simple: the studio contained every concept and prototype the design team was working on. Letting anyone see inside would reveal Apple's entire future product roadmap.
This secrecy extended to Ive's compensation. After 2011, when it was reported that he earned a $30 million base salary plus a $25 million stock bonus, Apple stopped disclosing his pay. He was the only Apple executive afforded this privacy. By 2012, his net worth was estimated at £80 million—roughly $100 million at the time.
The Watch and the Departure
Starting in early 2012, Ive led the design and development of the Apple Watch. When the product launched in April 2015, some analysts were skeptical—did the world really need a computer on its wrist?
The world decided it did. The Apple Watch became the best-selling wearable device in history. By December 2022, an estimated 115 million people were wearing one.
"An obvious continuation of this path that we've been on for so many years," Ive said of the Watch, "was to make technology more personal and more accessible."
But even as the Watch succeeded, there were signs that Ive's relationship with Apple was changing. In 2015, he was promoted to Chief Design Officer—a grander title that some interpreted as a step back from day-to-day product work. By 2017, Apple announced he would resume direct responsibility for product design, suggesting he had drifted away from it.
On June 27, 2019, Apple announced that Ive was leaving after twenty-seven years. Jobs had died in October 2011, and perhaps the company felt different without him. The covered corridor between their offices now led nowhere.
LoveFrom
Ive's post-Apple venture is called LoveFrom, a creative collective he founded with fellow designer Marc Newson. The name captures something about Ive's philosophy—that great design comes from genuine affection for the work and the people who will use it.
LoveFrom keeps a deliberately low profile. It unveiled a minimalistic website in October 2021—essentially just the company name. The client list, however, is anything but minimal: Ferrari, Airbnb, and OpenAI, among others.
The Airbnb connection is personal. Ive is close friends with Brian Chesky, the company's chief executive. Through an initiative called Terra Carta Design Lab, Ive has even produced designs for King Charles III, including work related to the King's coronation in 2023.
Some of LoveFrom's projects seem playful—in 2023, Ive led the development of a foldable red nose for Comic Relief, the British charity that raises money for vulnerable people in the UK and around the world. The company has also launched a scholarship program to increase representation in the design industry, covering full tuition for students at the California College of the Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Royal College of Art.
The Next Device
In September 2024, the New York Times reported that LoveFrom was working with OpenAI on something intriguing: an artificial intelligence hardware device that would be "less socially disruptive than the iPhone."
Think about what that phrase implies. Ive, the man who designed the iPhone, was now working on its potential successor—and he was explicitly framing it as a correction. The iPhone, for all its brilliance, has arguably damaged human attention, face-to-face interaction, and perhaps even democracy itself. Ive seemed to be acknowledging this and trying to do better.
The project was housed in a separate company called io, which Ive founded in 2024 with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan. In May 2025, OpenAI announced it would acquire io for $6.5 billion. As part of the deal, Ive and LoveFrom would assume creative and design responsibilities across all of OpenAI's operations. LoveFrom would remain independent with other clients, but its founder would now be shaping the interface between humanity and the most powerful AI systems ever built.
The merger was completed on July 9, 2025.
The Look
Ive is famous for his nearly shaved head and tightly trimmed beard—a look he apparently adopted around 2001, when he was promoted to vice president of industrial design at age 34. In 2013, GQ magazine included him on a list of the "100 Most Powerful Bald Men in the World." His aesthetic has inspired Halloween costumes and what one might generously call a "small-scale fashion movement."
His clothing choices are similarly considered: multi-colored houndstooth suits, painter's pants, linen button-down shirts, Clarks Wallabees—the distinctive crepe-soled shoes that look vaguely like moccasins. His favorite tailor is reportedly the British clothier Thomas Mahon.
Then there's the voice. If you've watched any Apple product video since 1994, you've heard Ive speak in voiceover: measured, reverent, with an Essex accent that sounds almost liturgical when describing aluminum machining or display glass. The voice has become so associated with Apple that parody accounts have sprung up on social media, mimicking Ive's breathless descriptions of curved edges and seamless integration.
Dieter Rams and the Bauhaus
To understand Ive's design philosophy, you have to understand Dieter Rams.
Rams was the chief designer at Braun—the German electronics company famous for its razors and kitchen appliances—from 1961 to 1995. He developed what he called "ten principles of good design," which include ideas like "good design is as little design as possible" and "good design is honest."
In the 2009 documentary Objectified, directed by Gary Hustwit, Rams said that Apple was one of only a handful of companies that actually designed products according to his principles. This was not coincidental. Ive has explicitly acknowledged Rams as an influence, even contributing an essay to a 2011 book about him titled Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible.
The connection goes deeper than admiration. Rams worked in the tradition of the Ulm School of Design, a German institution that operated from 1953 to 1968 and carried forward the Bauhaus philosophy. The Bauhaus had emerged in Weimar Germany in 1919 with the radical idea that art and craft could be unified, that industrial production could be beautiful, and that design should strip away everything unnecessary.
Ive encountered these ideas at Newcastle Polytechnic in the late 1980s. They never left him.
Recognition
The honors Ive has received would fill a small trophy case. He was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry, or RDI—a title awarded by the Royal Society of Arts to designers of "sustained excellence in aesthetics and efficiency." He became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2006, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, or KBE, allowing him to use the title "Sir."
In 2018, he received the Hawking Fellowship of the Cambridge Union Society—an honor named after the physicist Stephen Hawking, himself a Cambridge man.
Perhaps most striking was a 2004 BBC poll of cultural writers, which ranked Ive as the most influential person in British culture. Not the most influential designer—the most influential person, period. This was three years before the iPhone launched.
Chancellor Ive
In May 2017, Ive was appointed Chancellor of the Royal College of Art in London—the same institution whose car design students had once repelled him with their engine noises. He succeeded Sir James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner magnate, and began serving a five-year term as head of college.
The role involves running committee meetings, attending faculty gatherings, and conferring degrees. It's part ceremonial, part administrative—a way for the institution to associate itself with design excellence and for Ive to give back to the field that shaped him.
"I am thrilled to formalize my relationship with the RCA," Ive said at the time, "given the profound influence the college has had on so many of the artists and designers that I admire."
He was still chancellor in January 2023, well past his initial five-year term.
The Museum Trustee
In June 2025—the same month the OpenAI acquisition of io was finalized—Ive was appointed a trustee of the British Museum. The museum, founded in 1753, was the first public national museum in the world. It houses over eight million objects spanning two million years of human history, from Stone Age tools to contemporary art.
The museum is currently undergoing what it calls its "Masterplan for transformation"—a major renovation and expansion project. Ive, with his experience designing Apple Park and Apple Stores, brings architectural as well as product design expertise to the role.
"I am thrilled to be working with such a wonderful team," he said of the appointment, "and look forward to supporting the Museum's appropriately ambitious Masterplan for transformation."
What Comes Next
As of mid-2025, Jony Ive finds himself at an interesting inflection point. He has spent his career making technology more beautiful, more intuitive, more personal. The devices he designed now live in the pockets and on the wrists of billions of people.
But those same devices have arguably made the world more distracted, more anxious, more divided. Social media feeds designed to maximize engagement have arguably undermined democratic discourse. Smartphones have changed how children develop and how adults relate to each other.
Ive seems aware of this. His partnership with OpenAI explicitly aims to create AI hardware that is "less socially disruptive than the iPhone." This is a remarkable framing—an admission that even great design can have unintended consequences, and that the next generation of devices needs to be built with those lessons in mind.
The Bauhaus philosophy that shaped Ive's career was never just about aesthetics. It was about honesty—about making objects that do what they claim to do, without deception or manipulation. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly powerful, that principle of honest design may matter more than ever.
What does a less socially disruptive device even look like? We don't know yet. But if anyone is equipped to figure it out, it might be the man who nearly quit the design industry over a rejected toilet, stayed at Apple because someone promised they would make history, and spent the next quarter century doing exactly that.