Jony Ive Talks Apple Watch With Financial Times

Nick Foulkes has an extensive interview with Jony Ive ahead of Apple’s Spring Forward watch even. In the interview, Ive talks about designing the smartwatch, the inevitability of its existence, and much more.

Ive discusses how design plays a very important role in Apple products, and how the company goes through many iterations before it is ever satisfied:

This seriousness begins with the design of the products. “Even now, when the design of the Apple Watch is incredibly mature and has gone through thousands and thousands of hours of evaluation and testing, we’re still working and improving. You are trying to keep everything fluid for as long as possible because everything is so interconnected. The best products are those where you have optimised each attribute while being very conscious of other parts of the product’s performance.”

Ive also explains how Apple’s approach to Apple Watch hasn’t been very similar to their experience making iPhone:

“It was different with the phone – all of us working on the first iPhone were driven by an absolute disdain for the cellphones we were using at the time. That’s not the case here. We’re a group of people who love our watches. So we’re working on something, yet have a high regard for what currently exists.”

Ive is clearly referencing mechanical watches here and not the other smartwatches we’ve seen on the market from Samsung, LG, Motorola, and others (for which he likely has the same “absolute disdain” mentioned above). Given the high level of build quality and craftsmanship that goes into many of these mechanical watches, that makes a lot of sense. And remember, one of Ive’s closest friends, Marc Newson, came from defunct luxury watchmaker Ikepod to work on Apple Watch alongside to longtime Apple design guru. Ive loves luxury watches, and this is the first product he’s ever made that’s meant to be as much a respectful homage as it is a competition killer. He doesn’t seem like he wants to encroach upon the Swiss industry at all.

But high level craftsmanship extends beyond Apple Watch and into the packaging:

“We didn’t want the packaging to be a sort of shorthand for value, where the box needs to be big and we have to include expensive materials. We’ve always liked the idea that if we are heavy in our thinking, we can be much lighter in the implementation. So there’s huge virtue, I think, in keeping the packaging small: at least, it is the right choice environmentally, it’s easier to move things around and you don’t end up with your wardrobes full of large watch boxes that you don’t use.” Thus, the box of the top-of-the‑range watch is aniline-dyed leather on the outside and a “sort of ultra- suede on the inside” – so far, so conventional, but there is a connector at the back that turns it into a charging dock when the watch snaps into place thanks to magnetic technology. “I like the idea that it’s all part of one experience, it’s all part of how we feel about something, and that each of these elements can play a positive and interesting role.”

There’s plenty of other tidbits such as price guesses, which Apple told 9to5Mac were inaccurate. You can read the full interview here.