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Vanity FairApple’s Jony Ive Full Conversation with Graydon Carter | Vanity Fair
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Jony Ive on Apple’s process: prototypes, care, and resolve
- Jony Ive describes Apple’s core design group as intentionally small and long-tenured, and says the team’s collaborative way of working may outlast specific products in his memory.
- He outlines a process built on frequent team meetings, drawing, and extensive prototyping, with a major creative inflection point when abstract ideas become physical objects.
- He explains that larger iPhone screens demanded solving multiple interrelated constraints (including comfort at the edges) to avoid creating a “big and clunky” product driven by a single feature.
- He recounts multi-touch as a pivotal, non-inevitable bet that faced repeated setbacks and nearly got abandoned, requiring both persistence and realism.
- He argues that copying Apple’s work is not flattering but theft, and he defines good design as holistic care where usability and beauty are inseparable.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasIve credits long-term team continuity and process over individual products.
He says one of his strongest future memories won’t just be the products, but the way the team worked together over many years, emphasizing stability and shared process.
Their design process is conversation-first, then accelerated by physical prototypes.
He describes a rhythm of meeting as a full creative team multiple times a week, drawing together, talking first, and then building many physical models to give form to ideas.
A first physical model acts as a galvanizing ‘flag’ that clarifies direction.
He says the biggest shift happens when an abstract idea becomes something you can touch; even early models that won’t become the final design can “describe what we’re trying to do” and align a broader team.
Bigger screens required holistic redesign, not a feature-driven tradeoff.
Discussing larger-screen phones, he says Apple had explored bigger displays years earlier but found the result “big and clunky,” concluding that pursuing a seductive feature can undermine the overall product unless many related problems (thickness, weight, edges/comfort) are solved.
Breakthroughs required persistence through uncertainty, including near-abandonment.
He cites touch as a major “what if” that nearly failed, describing repeated moments where they almost gave up and the need to be “resolute” while accepting that an idea might not work.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI have to spend much too much time with myself.
— Jony Ive
I feel so absurdly lucky to be part of a creative process where, you know, on one day, on Tuesday, um, there's no idea. We don't know what we're gonna do. Um, there's nothing. And then on Wednesday, there's an idea, um, that was created.
— Jony Ive
There's a danger, isn't there, that you s- you, you, you're seduced by a feature at the expense of making a great product.
— Jony Ive
When you use a product, um, that you can't use, you don't assume it's the product. You assume it's you, don't you?
— Jony Ive
A beautiful product that doesn't work very well is ugly.
— Jony Ive
SPEAKERS
Graydon Carter
hostJournalist and editor, longtime editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair.
Jony Ive
guestIndustrial designer best known for leading design at Apple across products like the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
