Post-iPhone 5, Time for Jonathan Ive to Step Up

The iPhone 5 went on sale September 21, 2012 — taller screen, LTE, an aluminum unibody, the new Lightning connector — and sold five million units in its first weekend. It was, by every commercial measure, a triumph. But a year after Steve Jobs's death, it was also something else: the first iPhone launched entirely in a post-Jobs Apple, and the question hanging over Cupertino was no longer whether the company could execute. It was whether it could still dream.

That is why the name on everyone's lips was Jonathan Ive.

Ive was already the most celebrated industrial designer alive — the man behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. But inside Apple he had been, famously, the partner: Jobs supplied the product vision and the ruthlessness about what shipped; Ive supplied the form. With Jobs gone and Tim Cook running the company as an operator's operator, Apple had a management team with no obvious creative center of gravity.

The argument for Ive stepping up was simple. Apple under Cook was at risk of becoming a company that perfected rather than invented — thinner, faster, lighter, but never surprising. Ive was the one executive with both the aesthetic authority and the institutional memory of how Apple made leaps rather than steps. What the company needed was not another product cycle but a creative leader willing to say no to a thousand good ideas to protect the one great one.

History, as it turned out, agreed. Within weeks, Apple's executive ranks were reshuffled: Scott Forstall — the iOS chief and Jobs's other heir apparent — was out, and Ive was given responsibility for Human Interface across the company, setting up the great iOS 7 redesign of 2013. The designer had become, whether he wanted the title or not, the creative conscience of Apple.

The iPhone 5 was a fine phone. The interesting question of September 2012 was never the phone. It was who would decide what the next one meant.