Jonathan Ive and Craig Federighi: The Complete Businessweek Interview

Complete transcript of Sam Grobart’s interview; I found this much more interesting than the cover story that resulted from it. This bit from Federighi, on what it’s like working for Tim Cook, caught my eye:

Oftentimes, a product’s design requires manufacturing to solve unreasonable problems. That’s the same as engineering a user interface design. Both are about just solving these crazy problems. But you never get a sense from Tim or from Jeff [Jeff Williams, Apple’s current operations chief] that there’s a question about why are we solving this. Why aren’t we taking an easy way out and sidestepping this problem? It is, “No, this is the right design, and we’re going to do things that no one else in the world has ever tried to do in order to get it right.”

They’ve also published the full transcript of Grobart’s interview with Tim Cook, and that’s pretty interesting as well:

I think if I bought [an Android tablet] and used it, and I thought that was a tablet experience, I’m not sure I would ever buy another tablet. The responsiveness isn’t there. The basic touch is really off. The app experience is a stretched-out smartphone kind of experience. It’s not an optimized experience. However, that said, I have always said that the tablet market was going to surpass the PC market. I was saying that well before it was viewed to be sane to say that. It’s clear that we’re 24 months away from that.

★ Thursday, 26 September 2013