A rare visit with the man who designed the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone

Jonathan Ive. From Gary Hustwit's "Objectified."

"I guess it's one of the curses of what you do," says Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president for industrial design, "is that you are constantly looking at something and thinking 'Why why why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this?'"

Ive's five-minute appearance in Objectified is one of the centerpieces of Gary Hustwit's 2009 documentary about contemporary industrial design. It's a follow-up to Hustwit's amazing Helvetica (2007), the only full-length film about a typeface. Objectified may not be as surprising or groundbreaking, but it does feature this rare inside look at Apple's (AAPL) secretive design lab, an inner sanctum on the Cupertino campus only slightly less guarded than Fort Knox.

"I remember the first time I saw an Apple product," says Ive as the camera pans across a busy Apple Store. "I remember it so clearly because it was the first time I realized when I saw this product I got a very clear sense of the people who designed it and made it."

Below fold, unless Hustwit has pulled it, a YouTube clip of that video.

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Ive and Jobs. Photo: TMZ.com

The celebrity gossip site TMZ.com has posted what it claims is an iPhone snapshot of Steve Jobs leaving Apple's (AAPL) Cupertino, Calif., campus Wednesday afternoon with Jonathan Ive, senior vice president for industrial design.

That would make it the first photograph of Apple's CEO published since his last public appearance nine months ago — at the unveiling of the aluminum unibody MacBooks in the company's Town Hall meeting rooms on October 14, 2008.

Jobs returned to work part time in June after a five and a half month medical leave, during which he received a liver transplant.

See also: Apple: 'Steve Jobs is back to work'

Jonathan Ive, the reclusive designer of the iMac, iPod, PowerBook G4, MacBook and iPhone, made a rare public appearance Tuesday night at London's Royal College of Art, where he was the guest of honor and featured speaker at an "Innovation Night" dinner.

The event was by invitation only, but one of the attendees was the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones, who filed an appreciative report on the Beeb's dot.life site.

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"You know, I think it wouldn't be a party," Steve Jobs told Fortune in February, describing the future of his company if, as he put it, Jobs got hit by a bus. "But there are really capable people at Apple. … My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors."

Life at Apple without Jobs may be more than just a hypothetical. The 53-year-old Silicon Valley pioneer had a malignant tumor removed from his pancreas four years ago. With fresh concerns about his health following his gaunt appearance at the World Wide Developers Conference two weeks ago, it's fair to ask: who's on that executive team — and which ones have a shot at ruling Apple once Jobs leaves (even if he exits years from now and not for health reasons)?

There are 11 men in all — not counting Jobs. A handful are familiar faces to the small community of professional Apple watchers. As far as the general public is concerned, they are invisible, hidden in the long shadow cast by Apple's (AAPL) high-profile CEO.

Some seem more qualified to step into Jobs' shoes than others, but judge for yourself. Here they are, as listed on the company's Executive Profiles web page, in rough order of their chances of succeeding Steve Jobs.

Timothy D. Cook: Chief operating officer. A 12-year veteran of IBM (IBM) and Compaq, Cook, 47, probably has more direct line responsibility that anyone in the company — even Jobs. Not only is he head of the resurgent Mac division, but he's responsible, as his official bio puts it, "for all of the company's worldwide sales and operations, including end-to-end management of Apple’s supply chain, sales activities, and service and support in all markets and countries." Cook's deep knowledge of Apple's operations and ready command of detail has won him the respect of the board of directors and the investment community. A bachelor with a passion for cycling, he's as steady and low-key as Jobs is temperamental. A Wall Street Journal profile described Cook's dressing down of another man at a meeting as so "professional and surgical" it was only afterward that observers realized the man had just had his head handed to him. Although some wonder whether Cook has enough charisma to run Apple, when the CEO was out of commission, Cook was the executive Jobs put in charge.

Tony Fadell. Senior vice president, iPod division. With his American swagger and his hair bleached white, Fadell, 38, stood out at button-down Philips Electronics (PHG), where he led an in-house pirate operation designing Windows CE-based devices. It was there that he came up with the idea of marrying a Napster-like music store with a hard drive-based MP3 player. He shopped the concept around the Valley before Apple's Jon Rubenstein snapped it up and put Fadell in charge of the engineering team that built the first iPod. Ambitious and charismatic (and no longer a bleached blond), he now runs the hardware division that makes two of Apple's three key product lines: the iPod and the iPhone.

Ron Johnson. Senior vice president, retail. Johnson, 49, was a retailing star at Target (TGT) before he came to Apple in 2000, and he's an even bigger star today, having designed what is arguably the world's most user-friendly chain of retail stores. He shares Jobs' single-minded focus on the customer experience, and when he parts ways with Jobs — the Genius Bar, where customers get hands-on troubleshooting, was a Johnson idea that Jobs resisted — he is often right. Most retailers focus on how you find the right item, he says, how you select it and how you get it out of the store. "We said there's a bigger idea. Let's design it around the customer's life, not the moment when they're in the store." (link) Apple's second-most charismatic public speaker, he is on several outsiders' short list of possible successors.

Philip W. Schiller: Senior vice president, worldwide product marketing. An avuncular, unthreatening presence, Schiller, 47, plays a slightly rotund Sancho Panza to Jobs' Quixote at nearly every Apple event. His deer-in-the-headlight performance — caught on videotape — when ambushed by a British TV reporter at the London unveiling of the iPhone contributed to the sense that Apple would be in trouble if Jobs were ever to leave. But it would be a mistake to underestimate Schiller. He has 24 years of marketing experience — 17 of them at Apple — and his official bio credits him with delivering a long list of "breakthrough" products: iMac, MacBook, Airport, Xserve, Mac OS X, Safari, AppleTV, iPod and iPhone.

Scott Forstall. Senior vice president, iPhone software. A veteran of NeXT, where he helped build the operating system that became OS X, Forstall came to Apple with Jobs in 1997. After proving himself by managing the team that released OS X Leopard, he was put in charge of software for the iPhone. "I actually have a photographer's loupe that I use to make sure every pixel is right," he told Time. "We will argue over literally a single pixel." His profile was raised by public appearances at WWDC 2006 and the March '08 SDK announcement. In an executive shakeup three days before WWDC 2008, he was elevated to senior vice president, reporting directly to Jobs. "Forstall is the man if SJ gets to pick [his successor]," says 9to5Mac's Cleve Nettles.

Jonathan Ive. Senior vice president, industrial design. Although his name is often floated as the next Apple CEO — and despite the fact that he garnered 49% of the votes in a recent online poll that asked "who would you trust to run Apple, without Jobs?" — Ive, 41, is probably the least likely of the leading contenders to take the job. Modest and notoriously shy (when he won the 2005 Design and Art Direction award it was Jobs who made the acceptance speech, although Ive was in the audience), he guards his privacy jealously; even Apple's HR department doesn't know exactly when he was born. Ive is perhaps the most influential industrial designer of our age. Why would he give up a job he clearly loves to take on the responsibilities of a CEO?

Below the fold: The also-rans.

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It's no accident that Eve, Wall-E's sleek, pod-like love interest in the forthcoming Disney/Pixar animated feature film by the same name, looks like something out of Apple's (AAPL) design department.

Writing in the current issue of Fortune, Richard Siklos reports that Jonathan Ive, head of Apple's design department and the man responsible for the iMac, iPod and iPhone, had a hand in creating the robot.

In the piece, director Andrew Stanton tells Siklos:

"I wanted Eve to be high-end technology — no expense spared — and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous. The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design." (link)

According to Siklos, a call from Stanton to Steve Jobs in 2005 resulted in Ive spending a day at Pixar consulting on the Eve prototype. Siklos writes:

"Stanton said that it was a 'lovefest' with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. 'Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going,' says Stanton. 'The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.' (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)" (link)

Disney (DIS) bought Pixar in 2006 in a deal that made Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder.

Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo, says he's been kicking around the idea for Wall-E for years, even before Toy Story was made. He has summarized it most succinctly like this: "What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?"

The movie opens June 27, which is the day the smart money is betting that the 3G iPhone goes on sale.

You can read Siklos' piece at Fortune.com here.

One of the nicest things about Jonathan Ive, chief designer of the iPod, the iPhone and just about every other Apple (AAPL) product since the original candy-colored iMac, is that he has displayed absolutely no ambition to rise to the top of Apple Inc. He seems content to lead a design team that is without equal in the world of consumer electronics.

Which is what makes the two questions at the top of the long profile of Ive in today's Times of London so bizarre:

Could Jonathan Ive, the publicity-shy Essex boy who started his career designing toilets and combs, be close to performing one of the most extraordinary coups in American business history?

Could this 40-year-old gym-toned, shaven-headed, Aston Martin-driving Brit, who lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco, with his wife, who is a historian, and their twin sons, be the next man to run Apple Computer? (link)

Does Rupert Murdoch's Times know something we don't? Is Apple PR paving the way for Steve Jobs' succession?

No, no, no and no. If you read the Times story closely you will see that it is what journalists call a write-around — a profile written without the cooperation of the main subject or his handlers.

"Jony feels his time would be better spent doing his job than doing interviews," an Apple spokesperson tells the Times' Chris Ayres in the last sentence of the piece.

With nothing new to say and no access to Ive, why run the story at all?

Why indeed. If there is a Murdochian agenda at play here, it seems to be to stir the embers of the nearly dormant Apple stock option backdating case, a train of logic that starts in paragraph 10 and leads to Ive by the most circuitous route:

No matter how remote the possibility of Mr Jobs standing down might be, some investors would be happier if Mr Ive was named officially as the Apple CEO’s successor to avoid future doubt.

Mark Molumphy, the lawyer who is filing the revised lawsuit against Apple, conceded to The Times that Mr Ive was more or less untouchable as far as the stock options litigation goes. “The evidence we’ve seen does not implicate him,” he said.

Strip all that away and what you have is a local-boy-does-good story served up for The Times' homegrown readership. The fact is, Ive shows no appetite for the spotlight that shines so brightly on Apple's CEO, as even Ayres must concede:

There are sceptics, of course. Some have suggested that Mr Ive lacks the charisma to become “Steve 2.0”, and that he could never deliver Mr Jobs’s Hollywood-style press conferences, replayed endlessly on YouTube.

As it happens, Jonathan Ive does make a rare video appearance on YouTube, which 9to5Mac has kindly dusted off and which we have pasted below the fold.

Is this the next Steve Jobs? You be the judge.

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