Jonathan Ives and Steve Jobs on a better day

The real creative genius behind the iPhone, iPad and iMac was not Steve Jobs – it is Jonathan Ives

The press is wringing its collective hands over the departure of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. What will Apple do without the man who created the iPhone and the iPad, ask the pundits.

The decline of Apple is more likely to happen if they can’t keep the real genius behind the successful run of the past 15 years, which was rumored to be in question six months ago. 

According to The Guardian, in February of 2011, Jonathan Ives requested a transfer from Silicon Valley to Apple’s offices in the UK and the Apple Board said no.

“Ive wants to spend more time in the UK where he wants his sons to go to school, the Times claims, but the Apple board has refused to support his relocation. The story quotes a family friend as saying that “they have told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them”. Jonathan Ives is Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. As insiders know, he is the man who brought all of Apple’s really successful designs to market.” Guardian.

iPad 2 - the design is the device

Wikipedia sums up Ives importance “He is the leading designer and conceptual mind behind the iMac, titanium and aluminum PowerBook G4, G4 Cube, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.”

While Steve Jobs may have sold those products to the world, it was “Jony” Ives who is responsible for Apple finally getting it right with consumers.

Before Ives arrival, Apple was a rump player in the computer world. With a dedicated band of faithful customers Apple was losing market share from 15% in 1980 to 5% in 1995. Apple products were overpriced, used a unique hardware and operating system platform that doomed the company to the also-rans category.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 determined to rescue his creation from extinction. Jobs marketing savvy and execution are second to none; however, without the cool products that resonated with consumers his efforts would have gone nowhere.

His best move was hiring Ives and putting him in control of new products. The rest is history as Apple has re-written the book on cellphones and resurrected the moribund tablet market to the hottest game in town.

Bloomberg is the first major media to pick up on the importance of Ives with its article Jobs Departure Puts Product Pressure on Ive

“Ive has been Jobs’s foremost creative partner within Apple, said Eric Chan, who runs Ecco Design Inc., an industrial design firm. “You need the combination of the chemistry that Jonathan and Steve have,” Chan said. “They have trust and they have the kind of quality vision that you need. They push each other.”

“In a typical scenario, Jobs or one of Apple’s engineers would come up with a concept. Jobs would then commission Ive, 44, to produce a variety of prototypes to turn the idea into a physical model. Since his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs frequently disappeared into the design studio Ive shares with his team of designers.”

“Once Jobs made his choice, Ive oversaw the painstaking development that led to Apple’s computers and devices. While each process was different — the team visited a confectioner to perfect the candy-colored enclosure on the iMac — Ive consistently created products that were functional, reliable and melded with Apple’s software.”

“If Jobs steps aside altogether, it raises the possibility that Ive may leave Apple as well, said Brunner, who now runs a design company called Ammunition LLC. That would make it harder for Cook to preserve the company’s product vision.”