Jonathan Ive Tells BBC He Wants to Stay at Apple

Design guru Sir Jonathan Ive said in an interview on Thursday that he wants to stay at Apple, effectively squashing speculation that he would leave the company in order to return to England. Sir Jon made the comments to the BBC in an interview related to receiving his knighthood on Thursday.

Apple Forever Tattoo

According to the BBC, Sir Jon said that he wanted to stay with, “the same team I’ve been fortunate enough to work with for the past 15 years, and that he wanted to continue to, “work on trying to solve the same sort of problems we’ve been trying to solve over the last fifteen years.”

In a separate interview with The Telegraph on Wednesday, the designer also referenced the team he has worked with, saying, “We’re developing products in exactly the same way that we were two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It’s not that there are a few of us working in the same way: there is a large group of us working in the same way.”

He added, “We have become rather addicted to learning as a group of people and trying to solve very difficult problems as a team. And we get enormous satisfaction from doing that. Particularly when you’re sat on a plane and it appears that the majority of people are using something that you’ve collectively agonized over. It’s a wonderful reward.”

As noted above, stories that Apple’s head designer wanted to leave Apple and go back home to the UK have been circulating since at least 2011. Angst may have been added to speculation when Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs was released, and much was made in the book about how Sir Jon and Steve Jobs considered each other spiritual partners.

Be that as it may, designing things and solving problems at Apple remains important to Sir Jon. He told the BBC that, “the challenges [of design[ are more significant now than they have been in the past,” and that he thinks, “the consequences of getting it wrong are also more significant.”

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