Apple’s design chief Jony Ive sat down for a lunchtime chat with Financial Times reporter Nicholas Foulkes, and discussed a number of topics, such as the Apple Watch, the move to Apple Park, and although reluctantly, the possibility of an Apple Car.
When asked as to why Apple’s design team was the last to make the move to Apple’s new Apple Park HQ, I’ve replied that it was planned that way all along.
It wasn’t late, it was always scheduled to be then. When you’re moving 9,000 people, you don’t do it in one day. We’re one of the last groups. It’s a loaded and significant event because it meant leaving a studio that has decades of history, where we designed and built first prototypes. This is the studio I went back to on the day that Steve died. And it’s the place where we figured out the iPhone and the iPod.
When Foulkes asked if the Apple Watch is best described as a watch, Ive instead replied that he thought of it as a “very powerful computer”:
No, I think that this is a very powerful computer, with a range of very sophisticated sensors, that is strapped to my wrist. That’s neither very descriptive nor very helpful. You and I share the same perspective and we had this same challenge with the product that we called the iPhone. Clearly the capability of the iPhone extends way beyond the function of what we would traditionally call a phone.
As for the possibility there may someday be an Apple Car, he was reluctant to share much on the subject. Instead he preferred to talk about the associated issues and challenges Apple faces with any new product.
We explore so many different thoughts and so many different technologies for products or services. Some companies use the fact that they are exploring lots of different ideas as a PR tool — we don’t. If you are genuinely working on something, it’s better to be working on it and struggling with the associated issues and challenges, rather than talking about it. Our capital, our equity, is our ideas and the technologies that we’re developing. It’s important that as long as possible that remains ours, to try and postpone that point when they will then be copied — which is what history suggests.
