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Tag: steve jobs

Published March 25, 2015

The Shiny Surface of Jonathan Ive

My ‘longreads’ to-read list is as bad, if not worse, than the pile of books I have to read right now, so it’s taken me until today to get to that very, very long New Yorker profile of Jonathan Ive, the senior vice-president of design at Apple.

Unfortunately, the whole thing is a bit disappointing and, I thought, even a little sad. By the end, Ive remains an enigma. What lingers is his famous friends, love of bland luxury brands, and just how remarkably wealthy he is (writer Ian Parker reminds you several times that Ive owns a private jet).

It seems Ive is either depressingly shallow or, more likely, these superficial things are all that he is willing to reveal about himself, which is depressing too in its own way. Ive is, no doubt, just politely protecting his privacy, but he comes across as peevish and sadly unlikeable, which is a shame. Or maybe I’m just not interested enough in industrial design and luxury brands, or Apple if it comes to that.

The article does, however, give me an excuse to post this blistering 15 minute video of NYU Stern marketing professor Scott Galloway talking a mile-a-minute about Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. I’m sure he’s wrong about a lot of things, but not only does he talk about Apple’s transition from tech company to luxury brand, he also offers some of the most cogent insights into the current problems facing Amazon I’ve heard in a while:

 

Interestingly, Ian Parker says in his New Yorker article that watch manufacturers are not worried about Apple stepping into the market. Galloway says they should be. I guess we’ll see who is right.

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Published February 24, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Blown Covers — The New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly has a Tumblr (pictured above:  “Eustace at a Stoplight—Right?,” by David Urban)

Spanking — Charles McGrath remembers the late Barney Rosset in the New York Times:

Mr. Rosset was far from a highbrow. Sometimes he signed up books without having read them. He determined to publish “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” for example, while riding in a cab and hearing on the radio that other publishers had turned it down. And he was proud of publishing a profitable line of Victorian spanking pornography. To a considerable extent the dirty books made the arty ones possible, and Mr. Rosset wasn’t the least abashed about it.

See also: WNYC has reposted two archive interviews with Rosset from 1995 and 2008, and John Gall has posted a collection of links to reminiscences about Rosset on his blog Spine Out.

Form and Fortune — A fascinating  review  of  Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, in The New Republic which discusses Apple’s relation to the Bauhaus and Braun:

The design philosophy of Dieter Rams, Braun’s legendary designer, has shaped the feel and the look of Apple’s latest products more than any other body of ideas. Since joining Braun in 1955, Rams—who likes to describe his approach to design as “less, but better”—began collaborating with the faculty at the Ulm School of Design, which tried to revive the creative spirit of Bauhaus with a modicum of cybernetics and systems theory. Eventually Rams produced his own manifesto for what good design should accomplish. His “ten principles of good design” encouraged budding designers to embrace innovation and make products that were useful but environmentally friendly, thorough but simple, easy to understand but long-lasting, honest but unobtrusive. Rams wanted his products to be like English butlers: always available, but invisible and discreet.

See also:  Maureen Tkacik’s on Steve Jobs and Isaacson’s biography at Reuters.

And lastly…

James Wood reviews Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels for The New Yorker:

Patrick Melrose, the protagonist of what is now a quintet of novels devoted to the Melrose family, is the scion of a wealthy dynasty almost as monstrous as the dodgier Roman emperors; he has spent much of his adult life trying to kill himself with drugs and booze. St. Aubyn’s novels have an aristocratic atmosphere of tart horror, the hideousness of the material contained by a powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose style. In good and bad ways, his fiction offers a kind of deadly gossip, and feeds the reader’s curiosity like one of the mortal morsels offered up by Tacitus or Plutarch in their chatty histories.

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