It is one of those October days that thinks it is still early September, so I choose an outside table at London’s River Café with a view of Hammersmith Bridge. As Sir Jony Ive is a little late for lunch, I do the next-best thing to talking to Apple’s chief design officer and pull out his most famous creation to watch a recording of last month’s “Apple Special Event” at the tech giant’s new Norman Foster-designed campus in Cupertino.
It is a film of two parts. The first is a dramatised Mission: Impossible-type sequence showing a young woman dashing to the Steve Jobs Theater with a metal briefcase — a bit of high-production-value fun that allows us to take in the swish yet democratic 21st-century grandeur of the HQ of the world’s most valuable company. Things have come a long way since the early 1990s, when Ive joined the then struggling computer maker before the second coming of Jobs. I scrub through part two, an orgy of Californian self-congratulation that features a series of chronically upbeat senior Apple employees, dressed in varying shades of anthracite and olive and explaining, among other things, how the new model Apple Watch can now sense irregular heart rhythm, and call an ambulance if it detects that you’ve fallen down and not got up.
It sets me wondering what Apple consumers would make of the designer’s wardrobe as he makes his way along the outside tables at an amiable amble. The 51-year-old is wearing a suit tailored by Caraceni of Milan in a lightweight pied-de-poule, a white linen shirt and his signature Clarks Wallabees. He over-apologises for being 10 minutes late. He spots the architect Lord Rogers at the next table; there is an outbreak of mildly abashed mutual effusiveness; then he settles into his chair, picks up the menu and lets out a sigh of satisfaction.