Jony Ive is done working with "assholes"
What the Ferrari Luce reveals about Ive's post-Apple life. Also: Fidji Simo on OpenAI's ads push.
Happy Monday. I was surprisingly jealous of everyone having fun in San Francisco for the Super Bowl over the weekend. The best headline on the matter goes to the SF Standard: “Whoa, maybe San Francisco isn’t a hellhole after all?”
“Who I work with is more important than what I work on”
Last week, I stood in an airy room at the top of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, surrounded by disembodied car parts while the man who designed the iPhone walked me through what he has been doing for the last five years.
On Monday, Ferrari revealed the interior for its first electric car, the Luce (”light” in Italian), which was designed by Jony Ive’s firm, LoveFrom. The Luce rejects basically everything the auto industry has decided an EV cockpit should be. Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna, LoveFrom co-founder Marc Newson, and Ferrari’s head of design, Flavio Manzoni, were all there for the press briefing I attended. The full exterior reveal comes in May.
The Luce’s interior is as thoughtful as you’d expect from Ive and his team at LoveFrom. But what struck me more than the clicks of the aluminium air vents or the E ink key fob was seeing Ive in person, talking openly and at length about his work post-Apple. In an era when seemingly every tech executive is posting on X, has a podcast, or writes a newsletter, Ive has been almost aggressively absent from the discourse. He left Apple six years ago and has spent most of that time in near-total silence, working out of his San Francisco LoveFrom studio with about 60 designers and his friend of 30 years, Marc Newson.
Since starting LoveFrom with Newson, Ive’s published work has been quite eclectic, but mostly luxurious: Airbnb’s branding, a $60,000 turntable, a one-of-a-kind Leica camera, an apparel collection with Moncler, a limited-edition Balmuda lantern, and the official emblem of King Charles III’s Coronation (he was knighted at Buckingham Palace, after all). He redesigned the local bookstore across from LoveFrom’s office in the Jackson Square neighborhood. He reportedly helped design a Rivian electric bike and is working with the mayor’s office on a rebrand of San Francisco itself.
What was clearly a rocky end to Ive’s Apple tenure hung over last week’s unveiling of the Luce.
