Jony Ive Is Not Flattered by Xiaomi

Kyle Russell, writing for TechCrunch on Ive’s appearance on stage at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit:

“Many years ago we made prototypes of phones with bigger screens. They were interesting features, having a bigger screen, but the end result was a lousy product, because they were big and clunky,” Ive noted when the panel’s moderator asked why it took so long for the iPhone to get bigger.

I’m pretty sure Russell just referred to Graydon Carter as simply “the panel’s moderator”.

When a member of the audience came up to ask a question about Xiaomi and their unofficial tagline of “the Apple of China,” Ive was very straightforward with his response: “I’ll stand a little bit harsh, I don’t see it as flattery. When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work, you spend 7 or 8 years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is OK at all.”

See also: Steve Kovach’s loose transcript at Business Insider.

★ Thursday, 9 October 2014