Wait, Apple Isn’t About Making Money?

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) may be one of the world’s most valuable companies, but design chief Jonathan Ive says its goal is not to make money, simply good products.

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“Our goal isn’t to make money. Our goal absolutely at Apple is not to make money,” Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, said at the British Embassy’s Creative Summit. “We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn’t to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it’s the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money.

Ive talked about how Apple was close to going bankrupt in the 1990s before Steve Jobs sparked the company’s turnaround. “His [Jobs’] observation was that the products weren’t good enough,” Ive said, according to Wired. “His resolve was to make better products.”

Ive also defended the company’s policy of focusing on a fairly small range of products. “We say no to a lot of things that we want to do and are intrigued by so that we only work on a manageable amount of products and can invest an incredible amount of care on each of them,” he said. “You can make one chair carelessly, thoughtlessly, that is valueless. Or you can make a phone and invest so many years of care and have so many people so driven to make the very best phone way beyond any sort of functional imperative that there is incredible value.”

Ive said the company’s creative process involves starting with an idea, or a “barely formed thought” that turns into a conversation before being built into a prototype “You go from something tentative and exclusive to something tangible and — by nature of it being a thing — a table of people can sit around it and start to understand it; it becomes inclusive and it galvanizes and points to a direction for effort.”

The designer also added that the company was sticking to its policy of not doing market research, which “guarantee[s] mediocrity.”

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) closed up 1.69% at $595.03 per share on Monday.

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