Jony Ive and Marc Newson on the Apple Watch with Suzy Menkes (published April 24, 2015)
"I hope people will like the watch and will find it a personal and beautiful product" -- Jony Ive
Topics: Innovation, Design, Technology, Fashion, Luxury, Product -- transcript excerpts:
"…. [Our] focus has been on trying our very best to develop a product that is beautiful and useful on. I mean quite honestly when we started work on the iPhone, the motivation there was ... we wanted a better phone. When we worked on the watch the motivations were completely different. We happen to love watches … collected mechanical watches for many years … it was because we saw that the risk was a fabulous place for technology and so the motivation was very different … I think you know the wrist is and has always been for literally hundreds if he is one of the best places on the body to to put an object … we can only imagine even how much we upgrade our phones this is going to need an upgrade … How do you think most people are going to use the new watch? People will use it for very different reasons. To some people it will be … the health and fitness capabilities and … other people have been really intrigued by some of the perhaps more intuitive, more personal ways of communicating with other people that wear the watch. I see this is one of the first times that we could make some assumptions that somebody else has this product intimately connected with them for most of the day. You can't make that assumption with the phone and so you can actually communicate … you can actually communicate in some new ways and I think this is just the beginning. But I think we've had some very encouraging feedback … we chose that material [gold] because we loved it and we didn't just buy off the shelf -- we developed our own gold and we love these attributes and how it felt … in the real world sadly so many objects, so much a manufactured environment testifies to carelessness ... something that was built to a price point or to a schedule … But you know there's no doubt that you are now producing things that may be more desirable than traditional luxury to consumers particularly the younger consumers, don't you think that's cool? I don't know, we'll see. I think that what I do know … our intent has remained the same and is consistent, which has been to try and take what is remarkable technology in terms of its capability and its utility and to make it more and more personal and that's what we're trying to do ... I hope people will like the watch and will find it a personal and beautiful … product …"
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