Former Apple chief designer officer

Jony Ive

recently appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs podcast where he said that he was given ‘an impossible’ task by founder Steve Jobs the first time they met. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 when the company was facing financial difficulties. The designer said that at the time, Apple secured a $150 million investment from

Microsoft

to stay afloat. The company needed a successful product, and Jobs assigned Ive to lead its design.
Ive and his team started working on what would become the

iMac

. He said that personal computers were not common in households at the time, and many people found them difficult to use. The goal was to make the new computer more accessible.
"We started work from the first day that we met on what became the iMac," the designer said in the podcast.
Ive explained that the team carefully considered every detail of the colorful PC lineup to make it more user-friendly. The handle, for instance, was a deliberate design element meant to give the iMac a distinct feature, making it more approachable for those unfamiliar with computers.

“It references immediately and unambiguously your hand, and you understand, therefore, something about this object,” he said. Ive noted that features like the handle and translucent colors made the iMac more engaging for consumers than technical specifications like gigahertz and hard drive capacity. "It felt alive; it didn't static; it didn't feel stuck," he said.
For those unaware, Apple launched the iMac in 1999 and sold 800,000 units within five months. The product debuted with the tagline “Collect all five.” After the iMac, Ive continued to work on Apple’s major products, including the iPhone and iPad. He eventually became the company’s Chief Design Officer. Apple later moved away from colorful designs, but in 2021, it reintroduced color options for the iMac. Ive left Apple in 2019 after 27 years with the company.