Jony Ive’s Letter

October 6, 2021

Ive, writing on the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death:

As thoughts grew into ideas, how­ever ten­ta­tive, how­ever frag­ile, he rec­og­nized that this was hal­lowed ground. He had such a deep un­der­stand­ing and rev­er­ence for the cre­ative process. He un­der­stood cre­at­ing should be af­forded rare re­spect—not only when the ideas were good or the cir­cum-stances con­ve­nient.

And:

Ideas are frag­ile. If they were re­solved, they would not be ideas, they would be prod­ucts. It takes de­ter­mined ef­fort not to be con­sumed by the prob­lems of a new idea. Prob­lems are easy to ar­tic­u­late and un­der­stand, and they take the oxy­gen. Steve fo­cused on the ac­tual ideas, how­ever par­tial and un­likely.

The whole letter is wonderful, and reminds me of the seismic impact these two have had in the world. For the remainder of my life, not a day will go by where I’m not inspired by their work.

A few notes from others:

• Marco Arment
• Jason Fried
• Jason Snell

And of course, Tim Cook’s internal memo, as well as the commemorative video shared by Apple.