Maybe Samsung as well as the other Apple competitors are on to something when they say the iPhone was an inevitable evolution of the mobile phone. Maybe that was Apple’s plan all along. Designing the inevitable, but designing it before anyone else knew it was inevitable. Jony Ivy sat down for a rare interview with the Telegraph, and one thing really jumped out at us. While the whole article is worth reading, we wanted to focus in on one comment in particular:
We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense,” he explains. “Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products. “I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.”
If you sit down and think for a bit about every Apple product that has been released, and some of the changes and alterations that went into those new products, it becomes pretty apparent that the ethos at Apple centres on logic and inevitability. In hindsight, any average Joe from Main St. can see the inevitable changes from the first generation iPhone through to the iPad’s release, but it takes someone special to notice those kinds of things before anyone else is talking about them. Apple does that better than anyone. It’s why they took the first step towards a computer in your pocket. It’s why they took a step towards the iPad. Heck, it’s why they went straight for a digital music player when all the other major players in the industry were still trying to figure out ways to make portable CD players skip less.
It’s remarkable really when you sit back and think about it. Doing it once can be written off as luck, but making the right decision time and time again takes talent. Steve Jobs had that talent, obviously. And from the sounds of it, that ethos is still alive and well in Cupertino. Apple sees the inevitability in their product road map; everyone else just claims they do after Apple takes the first step.
