Sir Jony Ive has spoken to the media many times over the past few months, but this latest interview with T3 is perhaps the most interesting one of all. He reveals that the experience of working at Apple when it was near bankruptcy was ‘extraordinarily painful but remarkably educational’ and stated that the main reason he stuck it out with Apple was because he felt frustrated with conventional PCs.
Sir Jony Ive:
It was extraordinarily painful but remarkably educational to experience the company so close to bankruptcy. I thought I must be technically inept, but the computers that I had been expected to use were absolutely dreadful. You have to be very courageous as a team to say, ‘This isn’t good enough, let’s stop’. As you learn those lessons as a team it gets easier to make that call.
Your sense of a brand is really defined by your sense of the product, I’ve never understood how people can think that you can describe what you want the brand to be and sort of legislate that in a way that’s not entirely driven by the product.
It’s certainly a very interesting extract and a harsh reminder that one upon a time Apple was seriously struggling and about to go the way of the dodo, as well as not creating interesting or successful products. You can read the full interview in the T3 magazine, available in print and on iPad.
