Ive on Apple's pricing


A pretty in-depth interview with Ive is online from Time's John Arlidge. The interview covers a number of topics, but I wanted to highlight his thoughts on Apple's pricing:

On price, Ive points out that developing life-changing products that we could not have imagined before but when we see them we want at once, is very expensive. What's more, manufacturing them the Apple way, often to tolerances far higher than needed, costs a bomb. "We don't take so long and make the way we make for fiscal reasons. Quite the reverse," he laughs. Ive picks up his iPhone to demonstrate how technically complex its construction is. "The body is made from a single piece of machined aluminium," he says, sticking to the British pronunciation Jobs used to tease him about. "The whole thing is polished first to a mirror finish and then is very finely textured, except for the Apple logo. The chamfers [smoothed-off edges] are cut with diamond-tipped cutters. The cutters don't usually last very long, so we had to figure out a way of mass-manufacturing long-lasting ones. The camera cover is sapphire crystal. Look at the details around the sim-card slot. It's extraordinary!"