Yes, you nailed it. They know Tim Cook can't carry the brand as a detail obsessed designer so they need Ive to do so instead.

The problem is, does it work? I got a few impressions from the article, beyond "Jony Ive is a really nice guy" which everyone seems to agree on.

One: all his experience is in hardware. All of it. He wasn't given any responsibility over software design when Jobs was in charge at all. This leads to the question of why, given their closeness .... I suspect it's because Jobs knew that Ive is really an industrial hardware designer and the skills needed to do great software design are different.

Two: he comes across as kind of burned out. He's spent years designing a relatively small number of products, most of which are (as the article points out) basically just variants on the same "slab of glass with a button" idea. Can he really feel like he's fully exercising his design muscles in such an environment? The article says several times he's sort of wanted to leave and go off and do other things like luxury products several times, but feels he can't go now because so many Apple employees depend on him.

Another thing is that the Apple (hardware) design team seems to be a lot smaller than I expected. They have three recruiters and hire one designer per year? Seriously? I've seen picky hiring before at Google but one hire per year given three full time recruiters is crazy. This is meant to impress upon us how incredibly elite and discerning Ive is. I read something else in it: they are all friends who trust each other, and quite simply don't like hiring. They are expected to do it by the company but would much prefer not to.

It also leads me to think they are having problems. The iPod and iPhone were huge successes, partly because none of the competitors in those spaces cared much about industrial design. In some areas (in-car systems?) that's still the case. But increasingly Apple has been competing with Google and the big Asian firms for consumer electronics, and there they have been losing their edge.

They started talking about the Apple watch in 2011. In 2015 it's still not on the market. Meanwhile the Android team and their hardware partners have launched several watches, of which the round Moto 360 has been attracting the most attention (disclosure: I got one for Christmas, it's neat). But despite a 50+ page article, the journalist lets Jony Ive dismiss round watches in the span of a single sentence. Apparently they just "don't make sense" because smart watches are using "for lists". Except that they do make sense and the one I have works pretty well.

I got the strong impression from reading this that the design team at Apple is small, insular, ignores their competition completely, doesn't want to scale up and doesn't feel any real sense of urgency. For example, they work long hours but many of those hours were spent making dozens of slightly different sized models so they could rediscover the insight that people wanted larger smartphone screens. Something that all the other smartphone makers had already realised ages ago, designed and shipped. Surely they could have reduced their time to market by simply spending some time with their competitors products instead?