Jony Ive Details Apple Design Process, iPhone 6 Design Choices in New Interview

Apple’s head of design Jony Ive today gave a live interview at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco. In the interview, which BusinessInsider attended, Ive gave some rare insight into the design process at Apple and some of the design choices the team made with the iPhone 6.

According to Ive, he has a great design team that’s quite small, numbering 16 or 17 employees. During a typical day, Ive says that designers gather around tables like those in the Apple Store to draw. The team meets three or four times a week.

One of the major advantages of being part of a design team that’s been together so long is that it’s given them time to develop a design process. Ideas, Ive says, don’t really come along until the design team has created a physical object from their drawings. “It really galvanizes and focuses our team,” said Ive.

When asked whether or not he had experienced a “eureka moment” in a design meeting, Ive pointed towards the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus, saying that there’s a “special moment” when there’s an object you can touch. He says he’s surprised and thrilled every time he gets to see a new first model.

On the iPhone 6’s rounded edges, Ive says that Apple opted to go back to rounded edges because they were necessary to make the device feel less wide. Apple made bigger-screened prototypes years before, but they were “clunky.”

Ive also shared details on Steve Jobs, saying that Jobs was “the most focused person” he’d met in his life. “It’s terrifying that when you really truly focus, it seems a bit illegal. You can achieve so much.” Ive went on to say that focus means saying “no with every bone in your body” to something you know is a good idea, but impossible because “you’re focused on something else.”

During audience questions, Ive also gave some interesting thoughts on Xiaomi, the Chinese manufacturer that closely copies Apple’s designs. Ive says what Xiaomi is doing is theft, not flattery.

There is a danger…I don’t see it as flattery. I see it as theft. (Talking about copying designs in general). When you’re doing something for the first time and you don’t know it’s going to work. I have to be honest the last thing I think is “Oh, that is flattering. All those weekends I could’ve been home with my family…I think it’s theft and lazy. I don’t think it’s OK at all.”

The full paraphrased text of Ive’s interview, where he also shares why he chose to be an industrial designer, what he thought was well designed as a kid, how he came to work at Apple, and his thoughts on Steve Jobs, can be found over at BusinessInsider. Both TechCrunch and The Verge have shared details on the interview as well.

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Apple to Live Stream Upcoming October 16 iPad Event

Apple has plans to offer a live stream of its October 16 event, according to a source that spoke to MacRumors. As with its September 9 iPhone event, Apple will likely offer a stream of the event both on its website and through a dedicated channel on the Apple TV.

Invitations for the October 16 event, which will be held at the Town Hall auditorium on the company’s Cupertino campus at 10:00 AM Pacific Time, went out earlier this week with the tagline “It’s been way too long.”

At the event, Apple is expected to introduce an updated iPad Air and possibly a new Retina iPad mini, as well as updated iMacs with a 27-inch model that has a high-resolution Retina display. OS X Yosemite is also likely to be previewed one more time before its public launch, and updated Mac minis, which are rumored to be in the works, might possibly see an announcement at the event.

In addition to Apple’s live stream, MacRumors will be providing its own live coverage of the event, both on MacRumors.com and on the MacRumorsLive Twitter account.

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​U2’s free album spread to 81 million iTunes users

So, just how far did U2’s Songs of Innocence spread during its tenure as a free, exclusive iTunes album? Pretty far: according to Eddy Cue, Apple senior VP of internist software and services, 81 billion customers heard at least one song from the album during its free period. While those numbers represent just partial downloads of the album, Cue told Billboard that 26 million iTunes users nabbed the whole thing. Those are huge numbers — he told the publication that before the promotion, only 14 million iTunes customers had purchase the band’s music since 2003.

Giving away the album for free doesn’t necessarily mean that the band lost physical sales, however — a deluxe edition of the album is available in stores that features 10 more songs than the free release as well as a handful of other bonus features. Those numbers also don’t account for people who downloaded the album by mistake, though it does set an interesting precedent for the future of music distribution. Will freebie albums become the new trend in the music industry? We’ll let you know once we see how things pan out with that new music format Bono says Apple’s working on.

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Source: Billboard

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GT Advanced Asks Court for Permission to ‘Wind Down’ Operations at Sapphire Plant

After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this week, Apple sapphire partner GT Advanced has asked for the court’s permission to “wind down” operations at its Mesa, Arizona manufacturing plant, reports Re/code and The Wall Street Journal.

GT is said to be filing motions to get expedited hearings to cease certain operations and get out of both contracts and leases connected to those operations.

The facility, which was purchased and outfitted by Apple and run by GT Advanced, has operated for less than a year. Approximately 700 employees are employed at the manufacturing plant, where GT Advanced was rumored to be creating sapphire for use in Apple products like the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Furnaces for sapphire production
Little information about the reasoning behind GT Advanced’s bankruptcy filing is available as the company has asked for a non-disclosure in its bankruptcy proceedings. GT is subjected to a confidentiality agreement with an unnamed third party (confirmed to be Apple by a courtroom reference) that has prevented it from disclosing details about the bankruptcy. The company could be fined up to $50 million per violation for breaking the agreements.

GT’s bankruptcy filing took both Apple and Wall Street by surprise. Apple has reportedly been working with GT Advanced to help it remain solvent and to help it receive its final $139 million payment, but it is unclear how this latest request will impact the relationship between the two companies.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal between GT Advanced and Apple may have crumbled following the former’s failure to deliver sapphire iPhone screens for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple was widely expected to use sapphire screens in at least some models, but both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus continue to feature Gorilla Glass displays.

GT Advanced will again appear in court on October 15 at a hearing related to its wind-down request. Apple, for its part, has again said that it plans to focus on “preserving jobs” in Arizona and that it will “work with state and local officials” as it considers its next steps.

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