My apologies, because everybody you know on the Internet has probably also linked to this fantastic profile of Jony Ive by Ian Parker for The New Yorker, but I simply couldn’t let it pass.

More than any particulars about Ive’s work (of which the piece, unsurprisingly, reveals very little), what I find fascinating is Ive’s depiction of his personal friendship and professional relationship with Steve Jobs:

The Wired article appeared that June. The next month, Jobs, who had left Apple twelve years earlier, and gone on to launch Pixar and NeXT, returned as Apple’s C.E.O., supplanting Gilbert Amelio. Jobs and Ive had an intense first meeting. Ive said, “I can’t really remember that happening really ever before, meeting somebody when it’s just like that”—he snapped his fingers. “It was the most bizarre thing, where we were both perhaps a little—a little bit odd. We weren’t used to clicking.”

And later:

At Jobs’s memorial, which was held on the lawn at Infinite Loop, Ive said, “Steve used to say to me—and he used to say this a lot—‘Hey, Jony, here’s a dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were: really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet, simple ones which, in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.” Ive said to me, “I couldn’t be more mindful of him. How could I not, given our personal relationship, and given that I’m still designing in the same place, at the same table, where I spent the last fifteen years with him sat next to me?”