Jonathan Ive, the London born designer and senior vice president of Industrial Design at Apple, reports directly to the CEO, who is now Tim Cook.  For the last 15 years, Ive has been leading a design team widely regarded as one of the world’s best;  it was the team that brought the world the unibody style of Macbook Pro laptop computers, as well as many other great innovations in design that have come to us from Apple.

Shortly after Jobs’ death, friends though the two men were, Jonathan Ive went on the record to admit that Steve Jobs had stolen loads of his ideas.  Ive has more than 400 design patents to his name, and he also keeps extensive personal records in the form of journals and notebooks. Still, he said that often, the first time he would bring an idea to the table, Jobs would either  say “Yeah, I like that one,” or “that’s a lame idea.”  Just as often, Jobs would later think it over, change his mind, and then present the idea as though he had thought of it on his own.  He often gave people the impression that he himself had come up with many of Ive’s ideas, and that irritated the talented young designer to no end.  But there was no love lost between Ive and Jobs, who were best friends during the nearly 15 years they worked together to many Apple products aesthetically unmatched in the tech industry.  Just like direct tv packages.

Here is a moving eulogy to the late Steve Jobs, by his friend, the designer Jonathan Ive: