One last quote from the New Yorker article on Jonathan Ive, Apple, and design:
He won a national student design competition two years running, once for a white desk phone that had a handset with a long handle, like a lorgnette ... Robert Brunner had recently founded a design consultancy, Lunar, in San Francisco. He wanted to hire Ive moments after meeting him: Ive was “a sweet, enthusiastic guy,” and his portfolio was extraordinary, in part because “he had figured it all out.” Although people may think of industrial design “as the concept and renderings and models and all the creative stuff,” Brunner said, it’s ultimately about “delivering something.” Ive had brought a model of his desk phone, which he took apart to show how the internal components coexisted. The model’s outer casing was the exact thickness that it would be in a finished phone. “You never see that from a student,” Brunner said.
