Apple, Influence, and Ive via Hodinkee

A few excerpts I found interesting from this extended interview with Jony Ive from Hodinkee (which touts itself as a “preeminent resource for modern and vintage wristwatch enthusiasts”).

First: Ive points outs the interesting parallels between the evolution of personal computing and personal time telling (which I had never noticed before):

I think there is a strong analog to timekeeping technology here for our own products and computational devices. Think about clock towers, and how monumental but singular they are. They are mainframes. From there, clocks moved into homebound objects, but you wouldn’t have one in every room; you might have one for the whole house, just like PCs in the 1980s. Then maybe more than one. Then, time-telling migrated to the pocket. Ultimately, a clock ended up on the wrist, so there is such a curious connection with what we wanted to do, and that was a connection we were really very aware of.

Ive made this observation on Apple’s mindset when approaching a product: it’s not just the destination, it’s all you learn along the journey (emphasis mine):

It was fairly clear early on that we wanted to design a range of products, without getting too convoluted, that would broaden how relevant we were. And working in gold and ceramic was purposeful – not only to expand who Apple is, but also from a materials science perspective. As you know, at the end of any project, you have the physical thing (the watch in this case), and then you have all that you have learned. We are always very mindful that the product not be all that we have in the end, and the Edition yielded much to us. We have now worked with ceramic and with gold, and our material sciences team now understands these fundamental attributes and properties in a way they didn’t before. This will help shape future products and our understanding of what forms make sense.

Ive’s respect for companies (and I think by extension, people) who are willing to buck outside pressures in order to be true to their inner compass, which leads to producing something fully unique to their specific characteristics and traits (which no one else in the world can authentically reproduce):

I have so much respect for many of those other brands – Rolex, Omega – because there is the remarkable longevity combined with such an obvious and clear understanding of their own unique identity. It’s rare but inspiring when you see the humble self-assurance of a company that ignores short-term market pressures to pursue their own path, their own vision. Their products seem to testify to their expertise, confidence, and quiet resolve. Their quality and consistency is rightly legendary.