Daniele Lepido and Tim Higgins
(Bloomberg Business) — When it came to picking 18-karat gold for the Watch, Apple’s first new gadget in five years, the company’s top designer went with what felt best.
“The choice of gold wasn’t driven by some notion of predetermined price point—that absolutely wasn’t the reason we chose that material,” Jony Ive said Wednesday, April 22, in Florence, Italy, during a rare public appearance. “We chose that material because we loved it, and we didn’t just buy it off the shelf; we developed our own gold.”
Apple’s gold alloy is as much as twice as hard as standard gold, according to the company’s website. The material is used in the high-end version of the smartwatch, which starts at $10,000 in the U.S. and reaches $17,000.
“It really is our love of material that drives so much of what we do, so much of the way we look at the world,” he said.
The Apple Watch, which officially goes on sale Friday, is a move by the Cupertino (Calif.) tech company to position the brand in the upper echelon of luxury, competing not just against other gadgets but with high-end timepieces. The company is offering less expensive models made with aluminum and stainless steel.
Ive said the company is on “the same path that Apple really determined to be on in the ’70s, which was to try to make technology approachable and relevant and personal.” If users “struggled to use the technology, then we failed,” he said.
