Apple Design Chief Ive Working on Most Important Project So Far - PCWorld

By Daniel Ionescu, PCWorld    May 23, 2012 6:55 AM

Apple is currently working on its “most important and best work” so far, Jonathan Ive, the company’s senior vice president of industrial design, said in a rare interview for UK daily The Telegraph. Ive was in his home country this week to receive his knighthood from the queen, who has both an iPod and an iPad, recognizing his “services to design and enterprise.”

When asked by the paper what would be one design that he would like to be remembered for, Ive, 45, hinted that “what we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about.” So what is Apple’s next big thing?

An educated guess, given the rampant rumors in the past weeks, would be one of two things: Ive is either working on the hotly anticipated iPhone 5, or the Apple TV, which Walter Isaacson’s official Steve Jobs biography notes Apple’s late CEO saying that he finally “cracked it.” However, very little is known about either project, besides a series of unofficially sourced reports from both established outlets as well as from publications with a spotty track record when it comes to getting Apple rumors right.

The Apple TV Jobs was talking about was not the little black box you plug in to your TV to watch movies and TV shows from iTunes or Netflix. Instead, it’s expected Apple will introduce a large, thin and sleek LED television that would do away with the remote control in favor of voice controls, similar to Siri on the iPhone 4S. Apple has been apparently trying to secure content deals with providers, with various degrees of success, in order to provide a solid offering for its TV set, which could arrive as early as 2013.

If it’s not the Apple TV that Ive and Apple are putting their best work on, then the next iPhone is closer to home. Multiple separate reports are indicating that Apple will ditch the 3.5-inch display on the iPhone, which has maintained the same screen size since 2007, in favor of a larger 4-inch display. This larger display would be just as wide as the current display, but will be slightly taller, 9To5Mac asserts, giving the new iPhone a 16:9 aspect ratio screen, while still keeping the same category-leading pixel density.

Ive also tackled in the interview the question whether the death of Jobs and having Tim Cook as the chief executive would lead to Apple’s demise. Ive said: “We're developing products in exactly the same way that we were two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. It's not that there are a few of us working in the same way: there is a large group of us working in the same way."

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