Jony Ive will be on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ today, Sunday 23 February 2025. Press reports quote him saying that he feels responsible for the ‘not so positive consequences’ of the iPhone, but that he is still proud of his work.
Speaking to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Sir Jony said: “I celebrate and am encouraged by the very positive contribution (of the iPhone), the empowerment, the liberty that is provided to so many people in so many ways.
“Just because the not so positive consequences, I mean they weren’t intended, but that doesn’t matter relative to how I feel responsible, and that weighs, and is a contributor to decisions that I have made since, and decisions that I’m making in the future.”
Listen on the BBC Sounds web page or app from 10.00 London time, and the programme will be archived there to listen again for the next 28 days {EDIT: it’s actually available for at least a year]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00289vf
Apart from hearing what he has to say about his work and about technology, it will also be interesting to hear which selection of records he would chose to have if he were marooned on a desert island.
EDIT: I’ve listened to the programme now. The first 25 minutes has interesting comments about the nature and philosophy of industrial design, how the design of any made object can be understood to reflect the intentions of the maker, the influence of his silversmith father and lots about his early life and training. Comments about joining Apple from around 27m 20s, relationship with Steve Jobs, working on the Apple Newton and the iMac. Why he left Apple and comments about the iPhone from 43m 20s, comments on his current work from 50m 40s. He does make the remarks quoted above and I was not at all surprised that the presenter, Lauren Laverne, didn’t press him on what he meant about the negative impacts he mentioned. In particular he expressed concern about the need for caution and personal discipline with the ubiquitous connectivity offered by smartphones and admitted that he struggles with that. I’d like to have heard a lot more about that, and there was nothing at all about privacy and data, but ultimately Desert Island Discs (which has been running more or less continuously since the 1940s) is not that kind of programme and never has been.
There’s an opinion that sometimes it works - “people were weak and strong, comrade Colt made them equal”.
There was a fledgling industry of PDAs, a bit too expensive, but usually with a functional and accessible OS.
There was an established industry of mobile phones, limited by their price expected to be (by iPhone measure) low, but fitting better and better functionality and ingenuity into that limit.
iPhone was an ugly, tasteless thing from the latter at the price of the former.
By the way, people say Steve Jobs was a jerk, that he treated his biological child worse than those able to smell him, that he believed in unscientific medicine which slowly killed him.
But he did have a vision, just not much further than it. Steve Jobs’ ideas were all one-time shockers. In the following generations of products those shouldn’t have been cleansed with fire, but the idea of him being some prophet generating good paradigms is wrong, actually it’s the opposite, his ideas are paradigm-agnostic, it’s clear form over function. It’s fine to salt product lines built around good paradigms with his design ideas, but not allowing them to prevail.
A lot of clueless normies still think a touchscreen slab is a good idea because a physical keyboard and a stylus cost something, ignoring that their touchscreen slabs usually cost a lot more than mobile phones and even kinda good PDAs did cost, with physical everything. I’m not even talking that time and effort to perform an action are a cost that accumulates every day, it may be hard to convert into any currency, but if you do, you’ll weep over all those moments of trying to do something with taps and gestures instead of a few keypresses.
No, a touchscreen slab was Jobs’ shocker to sell stuff! It worked, and it also helped Apple financially, so they went on with it. Pure business. Even if Jobs were a prophet, he’s a different kind of prophet, not usability prophet, but shockers prophet.
OK, it’s graphomania I think.
Point being - iPhone contributed in the opposite direction. Made those things expensive enough to be harder to replace or alternate, more tailored for consumption and two-button apps, and a thing of fashion in the wrong sense.
That’s why he’s saying such things, it’s a certain tired (Salvador Dali style) way of appearing a cultured person.