Jonathan Ive - Apple's Design Magician

conq writes "BusinessWeek takes an in-depth look at the man behind the Apple magic. The article features a slideshow with all his designs (including one before he was with Apple)." From the article: "During an internship with design consultancy Roberts Weaver Group, he created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. 'It immediately became the owner's prize possession, something you always wanted to play with,' recalls Grinyer, a Roberts Weaver staffer at the time. 'We began to call it having Jony-ness, an extra something that would tap into the product's underlying emotion.'"

Business Week Dufuses

[soft_guy]

They have a slide saying that Jonathan Ive designed the Newton MessagePad 110. However, the picture they show is not the MessagePad 110 - it is a picture of the original MessagePad or the MessagePad 100 (which had the same case).

Also, I KNOW that Jonathan Ive designed the eMate 300 which they don't show. I was not aware that he did design the 110 - which may not in fact be true. Possibly they are crediting him with the design of the wrong device. In any case, they look like idiots with a slide of the Newton 110 and a picture of the OMP (Original MessagePad).

I would have emailed them to point out the problem, but was unable to find an email address in their "contact us" section.

Re:Why yes, yes I can..

[be-fan]

The new iMac makes a great developer machine. They're very fast (they run GCC as fast as the quad-G5), they can take plenty of RAM, and they've got big hard drives with FW800 ports for very fast external disks. They've also got great screens and are extremely quiet. The fact that they can run all three major OSs (Windows, Linux, OS X) within a very affordable virtualization environment (Parallels) is just icing on the cake.

Re:Why yes, yes I can..

[dfghjk]

The first PC to support dual displays was the IBM PC in 1981. The first PC OS to support it was IBM PC-DOS 1.0. Yes, PC's were text mode at that time, but dual monitor support was part of the original PC architecture and why the option ROMs and I/O mappings were distinct. DOS itself could do little with two monitors other than switch back and forth via the mode command, but applications could, and did, take advantage when they could. I ran dual-head CodeView before your precious Mac II in 1986.

OS/2 1.0 also had dual monitor support but that was officially dropped prior to release (mainly because MS was too stupid to figure out how to test and support it). I personally used dual-head OS/2 1.0 back in the day.

Frankly, it doesn't matter since multiple monitors didn't have significant adoption til long after, but to suggest that Apple came up with multiple monitors before PCs is absurd. Neither Macs nor PCs came up with the idea originally. I worked briefly on a dual 21" SGI workstation around 1985 or so while in college.

Re:Give credit where credit is due.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Actually, he is. He's the vice-president of the design group and heads the teams that builds these things, particularly the iMac. Apple doesn't outsource their designs.

Re:Oh, but as to the pen...

[cdrdude]

+5 Informative for a Pseudo random [wikipedia.org] wikipedia link!? There's no way the moderators are that bored ;-)

Re:Amazing creativity..

[Rxke]

The 'toilet seat' or clamshell was quite popular, and I still use it to this day occasionally, when I flip it open on the train, comments are invariably positive, so I wouldn't call it a stinker.

(Likewise I preferred the puck above the later optical mouse, thought it fitted my hand better, but I guess I'm weird that way...)