Top 175 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Ive

I think a beautiful product that doesn't work very well is ugly.

When you do everything to make the very best product, it also means you're very focused on just a few products.

There is a clear goal and it isn't to make money. The goal is to desperately try to make the best products we can. We are not naive - if you trust it, people like it, they buy it and we make money. This is a consequence.

Good is the enemy of great.

If something is not good enough, stop doing it.

There's no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.

True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, 'Yeah, well, of course.' Where there's no rational alternative.

The best ideas start as conversations.

I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple's tell-tale white earbuds. But I'm constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better?

You cannot disconnect the form from the material - the material informs the form.

I feel that it's lovely when, as a user, you're not aware of the complexity.

If you are truly innovating, you don't have a prototype you can refer to.

When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.

It never ceases to amaze me what it takes to develop and bring to mass production a product.

I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making.

I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.

It's easy to assume that just because you make something in small volumes, not using many tools, that there is integrity and care - that is a false assumption.

That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.

What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness. This relates to respect for each other and carelessness is personally offensive.

There was a 'Wired' cover that had a big Apple logo with a crown of barbed wire as thorns, and underneath it just said, 'Pray.' I remember this because of how upsetting it was. Basically saying either it's going to just go out of business or be bought.

Make each product the best it can be. Focus on form and materials. What we don't include is as important as what we do include.

To design something really new and innovative you have to reject reason.

There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively.

My father was a very good craftsman. He made furniture, he made silverware and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself.

Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.

Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can't imagine any other way.

Making the solution seem so completely inevitable and obvious, so uncontrived and natural - it's so hard!

With a father who is a fabulous craftsman, I was raised with the fundamental belief that it is only when you personally work with a material with your hands, that you come to understand its true nature, its characteristics, its attributes, and I think - very importantly - its potential.

I left London in 1992, but I'm there 3-4 times a year, and love visiting.

Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging.

Successful collaboration, in your mind, could be that your opinion is the most valuable and becomes the prevailing sort of direction. That's not collaborating.

We knew that iMac was fast; we didn't need to make it ugly.

We won't be different for different's sake. Different is easy... make it pink and fluffy! Better is harder. Making something different often has a marketing and corporate agenda.

There's no other product that changes function like the computer.

The computer industry is creatively bankrupt.

One thing most people don't know is that Steve Jobs is an exceptional designer.

Every new car, you open the door, and you look at all those internal mellifluous swoopy bits, and they have no meaning.

'Design' is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing.

Deep in the culture of Apple is this sense and understanding of design, developing, and making. Form and the material and process - they are beautifully intertwined - completely connected.

As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on.

You learn a lot about vital corporations through non-vital corporations.

The emphasis and value on ideas and original thinking is an innate part of British culture, and in many ways, that describes the traditions of design.

Different' and 'new' is relatively easy. Doing something that's genuinely better is very hard.

When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.

Once, even the simple metal needle challenged the conventional thinking of a time.

A small change at the beginning of the design process defines an entirely different product at the end.

Why is it when we have a bad experience with a product, we assume it is us, but a bad experience with food, we blame the food?!

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.

It's a very strange thing for a designer to say, but one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I'm aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.

The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring.

What I think is remarkable is the force of habit and the fact that while we can have a practice for doing something that has been repetitive and established over many, many years, it doesn't actually mean there's any virtue to doing it that way at all.

The form of computers has never been important, with speed and performance being the only things that mattered.

People's interest is in the product, not in its authorship.

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

One person's car is another person's scenery.

Manufactured objects testify to who made them; they describe values.

Perhaps I'd like to design cars, but I don't think I'd be much good at it.

Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products.

I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design.