Jony Ive thinks Apple rumor stories are mostly “cynical clickbait stuff”

Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, isn’t fond of Apple rumor stories.

According to Rob Pegoraro and others who published interesting quotes on Twitter after attending Ive’s talk yesterday at the Hirshorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the designer called Apple rumor stories “cynical clickbait stuff” and “a load of rhetoric that has little basis in fact.”

He also doesn’t care what you think of the new Apple Park headquarters.

We didn’t make Apple Park for other people. So I think a lot of the other criticisms I think are utterly bizarre–because it wasn’t made for you. And I know how we work and you don’t.

The main Apple Park building has enough workspace for Apple’s hundreds of designers, with the team’s studio even housing several milling machines to turn out prototypes.

I think you only really understand a material—its properties and attributes and, importantly, the opportunity the material allows—if you actually work it yourself. And the most remarkable point in the whole process is when you make the first model. We might like it, we might not, but the first model you make, everything changes.

No idea the design comes up with is too big or small to put on the table, he added, saying that “As a team, we don’t censor our ideas.” There’s another good quote about bringing products to the market: “For 99% of the design process and the development process, it’s failing and it doesn’t work,” Ive said. “If it did work, we’d be shipping it!”

He then commented on the difference between Apple’s marketing strategy for the original Apple Watch and subsequent models, saying how they finally brought on Nike as a partner after realizing they’d been underplaying the watch’s role as a fitness tracker.

“We don’t get it right all the time,” he said of the long process of perfecting any Apple product. “As designers, you’re having to constantly learn.”

He called iPhone X’s design something Apple as a company has “aspired to for years.” To Ive, iPhone 7 now seem “a rather disconnected component housed in an enclosure.”

This bit from the Smithsonian Magazine on how Ive’s father influenced his design sense:

When Jony Ive was a boy, his father, a college professor of design and technology and a silversmith, presented him with an unusual Christmas present—an agreement.

“If I spent time determining what I wanted to make and developing the idea with drawings,” Ive recalls, “he would give me some of his time and together we would go into the university workshops and complete it.”

Over the years they built furniture, a go-cart and parts for a treehouse, working in wood and a variety of metals. “From the earliest days I can remember, I loved drawing and making things.

You can listen to the full interview on SoundCloud.

As previously announced, the famed designer recently sat down for an interview with the Smithsonian Magazine that will be featured in the 2017 issue.

Ive is a 2017 honoree of the Smithsonian’s American Ingenuity Awards.