WHAT'S NEXT FOR APPLE

JONY IVE IS LEAVING APPLE – AND SETTING UP A NEW DESIGN HOUSE WITH AUSTRALIAN MARC NEWSON. JOHN ARLIDGE EXPLAINS WHY IVE LEFT APPLE AND ASKS, WHAT'S NEXT?

- John Arlidge

Jony Ive – no-one calls him Sir Jonathan – has put the web in our hands, our pockets, our ears and on our wrists with the MacBook, iPad, iPhone, iPod and Apple Watch. We’ve been taking it – and him – with us ever since. With Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary co-founder, Ive transformed Apple from a near-bankrupt also-ran into the first publicly traded company in the world to be worth more than US$1 trillion in market capitalisation.

Jobs is gone now, of course – he died in 2011 – and Ive, too, is leaving the firm to set up his own design venture: LoveFrom, with the man he calls his best friend and close collaborator at Apple, Sydney-born designer Marc Newson. Thanks to endless product launches, countless books and three movies, we know a lot about Jobs. But Ive’s natural shyness means we know little about him.

ESSEX TO CALIFORNIA

Who is he? Why is he leaving the most successful technology firm in history? What will he do next and what will his legacy be? I have at least some of the answers because I am the only journalist lucky enough to have been invited not once but twice to Cupertino in Silicon Valley, where Apple is based, to interview him.

The 52-year-old Briton is the most unremarkable remarkable person you could meet. He’s not particularly tall, sports two-day-old stubble and shaves his head so clean that it seems to mimic the trademark chamfered edges of his products. He dresses like dads do on weekends – navy polo shirt, canvas trousers, desert boots. He speaks slowly and softly in a London accent totally unaffected by living in America for more than two decades. (He was born and grew up in Chingford on the outskirts of Britain’s capital.) “I can’t bring myself to say ‘math’, so I say ‘mathematics’ and sound ridiculous,” he likes to joke.