The whiteness of the casing meant that it kept your fingerprints and got dirty: a treasured sign of actual use. This was accomplished through the dial, which obliquely referenced the rotary dial on a phone. The iPod famously gestured to an earlier era, to Dieter Rams’s clean designs for Braun, and retained from those years the sense of physical activity in the act of searching for a song. Pocket radios and tape players had begun promisingly-Sony’s blue-and-gray Walkman from 1979 is a beautiful thing-but had ultimately descended into a bulky chaos of protruding buttons and belt clips. This extraordinary object, with its brilliant plastic casing-a “shockingly neutral” white, in Ive’s words, which, combined with its transparent Perspex acrylic cover, put “almost a halo around the product”-and its fantastic circular dial, represented both a deference to past design masters and a technological advance. The best result from those years was the first Apple iPod. The smooth, minimalist Ive aesthetic will make its appearance among other products in the world, to the extent that all of those products haven’t been already subsumed by Apple products. His new company, which has the head-scratchy, Marianne Williamson–esque name LoveFrom, will continue to work with Apple, but not exclusively. According to the Wall Street Journal, he was dispirited after the underperformance of the Apple Watch, and failed to show up to meetings. He has appeared on television shows and bought Jobs’s private jet. (Jobs was known for relentlessly calling people back from vacation.) In the past few years, Ive has often worked outside the company, designing, with his longtime collaborator Marc Newson, a one-off camera for Leica, an all-diamond ring, and a Christmas tree. After the death of Steve Jobs, Apple, under its new C.E.O., Tim Cook, reportedly adopted a more forgiving policy toward its employees’ downtime, and Ive was not averse to the arrangement. Ive, the most famous industrial designer in history, announced his departure from Apple on Thursday, in a move received by the business world as the unnerving end of an era. A more suitable comparison is the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which, like the iPhone, threatens everything with oblivion. But no infinity pool is the depthless black of the iPhone. Ive and his team reportedly wanted to create the appearance of an infinity pool, where the water rises to meet the edge. It rests hard against your thigh, glows through light clothing with every portentous notification, and attempts to replace any other object-a card-and-cash-thick wallet, a set of keys-that happens to reside in your pocket. When speaking, you shove it against the side of your head, or bark at it. Except for the curve of the edges, where the bevel of the glass screen has been painstakingly fused to the phone’s body, it is the shape of a photo, not a face. It is made for a world without liquids, secretions, or hard surfaces, all of which threaten its destruction. Few objects so continuously in use by human beings are as hostile to the human body as this slim, black, fragile slab, recalcitrant to any curve of head or shoulder or even palm, where it usually rests. The Apple iPhone, in the various iterations that the industrial designer Jony Ive produced, is the opposite. Molding itself to your hand and also to the crook between your shoulder and ear, it was a perfect instantiation of how a designer could shape everyday technology to the form of the human body, while anticipating the instincts-such as the desire to speak hands-free-that would guide the use of that technology. But it was the handset that was the product’s masterpiece. It had, surprisingly, some mobility: you could hold the base of the phone in one hand, ideally with your middle and ring fingers, while walking around a room to the extent that the connection to the copper-wire outlet would allow. The archetypal telephone, the Model 500, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, had a clunking rotary dial, a heavy base, and a coiled cord that connected to a curved handset. The ultimate consequence of Jony Ive’s industrial-design work for Apple-though it’s not entirely his fault-has been the slow ransacking of the physical world.
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