Designer Jony Ive, best known for his work on everything from the iMac to the iPhone, wanted to quit Apple before Steve Jobs returned as CEO.
Instead, he stuck around at the tech company for nearly three decades and revolutionized consumer electronics. Now, he’s looking to do the same with AI.
In May, OpenAI acquired Ive’s startup and he is now partnering with CEO Sam Altman to make AI-first devices. Here is a look back at how he became one of the most well known tech designers in the world, with the help of a Silicon Valley icon.
Ive joined Apple in 1992 after he’d graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University, in the U.K. and had launched his career at London-based design firm Tangerine, according to the biography Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. After Tangerine secured a contract with Apple, Ive moved to Cupertino, Calif., to take a job in the design department, where the young designer quickly moved up the ranks and became head of the department in 1996.
Still, Ive wasn’t happy, and in fact, he was planning to quit. Under then-CEO Gil Amelio, Ive felt the company was focusing too much on profits, and its designers were expected to spit out models for product exteriors, while the engineers made the inside of the products function as cheaply as possible.
This dynamic changed when cofounder Steve Jobs returned in 1997 after being ousted more than a decade prior. Isaacson wrote that Jobs, in one of his first talks with employees, Ive recalled, specifically said the company’s mission was “not just to make money but to make great products.” Hearing this message persuaded Ive to stick around.
While Jobs first looked outside of Apple for a design partner, he grew fond of Ive for his earnestness during a tour of Apple’s design department, wrote Isaacson.
“We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Ive told Isaacson. “We were on the same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company.”
Jobs, for his part, developed a special bond with Ive despite their 12-year age difference, wrote Isaacson. The designer, who was supposed to report to the head of the hardware division, later became a frequent visitor to Jobs’ home and regularly had lunch with the CEO. The often highly critical Jobs even seemed to spare Ive the worst of his outbursts.
“Most people in Steve’s life are replaceable. But not Jony,” enterprenuer, philanthropist, and the widow of Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs, told Isaacson.
Their admiration was mutual. Of Ive, Jobs said to Isaacson: “He gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He’s not just a designer.”
Ive stayed at Apple for nearly a decade following Jobs’ death, and departed the company in 2019 to help start a design firm, LoveFrom.
In 2023, LoveFrom began working with OpenAI, and in 2024, Ive cofounded io, a startup focused on building AI-native devices.
Following OpenAI’s $6.5 billion acquisition of io, Ive is now trying to build on his past design success with new AI-native devices. OpenAI retreated temporarily from the io name after a lawsuit and subsequent temporary restraining order on OpenAI’s use of the name issued by a judge in June. Ive’s company is referred to as “io Products, Inc.” in a July letter.
In a July update to a letter signed by both Ive and Altman, the pair said Ive and his LoveFrom team will be independent and “assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI.”
By teaming up with OpenAI, Ive may also be forming another dynamic duo, this time with Altman—another influential tech leader, but 28 years his junior.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on May 25, 2025.
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