Jonathan Ive, the reclusive designer of the iMac, iPod, PowerBook G4, MacBook and iPhone, made a rare public appearance Tuesday night at London’s Royal College of Art, where he was the guest of honor and featured speaker at an “Innovation Night” dinner.

The event was by invitation only, but one of the attendees was the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, who filed an appreciative report on the Beeb’s dot.life site.

“What emerged,” writes Cellan-Jones, “were some fascinating insights into the culture of Apple and the craft of industrial design. Ive was insistent that the key to Apple’s success was that it was not driven by money – a claim that may raise eyebrows amongst shareholders and customers – but by a complete focus on delivering just a few desirable and useful products.’For a large multi-billion dollar company we don’t actually make many different products,’ he explained. ‘We’re so focused, we’re very clear about our goals.’ “

The format of the talk was a fireside chat with Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College. Among the highlights:

• “We don’t do focus groups,” Ive said firmly when asked how Apple (AAPL) decided what products to build. He explained that focus groups resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone. (To which Sir Christopher added Henry Ford’s famous line that if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have demanded a faster horse.)
• Ive stressed the physicality of design — “from the Apple design workshop full of machines, throwing off a lot of noise and dust,” writes Cellan-Jones, “to visits to Japanese aluminium craftsmen to learn how that material could be crafted into a laptop casing. Yes, of course he and his team use all the latest computer-aided design tools — but he also likes to knock out a physical prototype and feel the weight of it in his hand.”
• Ive told the story of how, as a young boy, he had taken apart an alarm clock and discovered inside the spare outer casing “an entire watch factory.”

“Extraordinary complexity wrapped in a simple, functional, touchable, beautiful case,” concludes Celan-Jones. “That seems to be the Apple design ethic.”

Got it in one.

Ive is scheduled to receive an honorary doctorate Wednesday from the Royal College, whose graduates include Ridley Scott (who directed the 1984 “Big Brother” Mac commercial), artist David Hockney and inventor James Dyson, designer of the Dyson vacuum.

[The photo of Ive in Apple's design shop courtesy of filmaker Gary (Helvetica) Hustwit, whose new documentary Objectified was released in March. Ive appears briefly in the trailer pasted below the fold.]

The touchscreen tablet computer that is widely expected to be Apple’s (AAPL) answer to those $300 netbooks will cost more, come later and be more dramatically different than most investors expect.

That’s the thrust of a note to clients posted by Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster early Thursday.

According to Munster, the device will fill the gap between the iPod touch and the MacBook, cost between $500 and $700, run App Store apps and arrive some time in the first half of 2010.

“We are anticipating a new category of Apple products,” he writes, “with an operating system more robust than the iPhone’s but optimized for multi-touch…

“We expect the end result … to be launched later but with more dramatic differentiation than the Street is expecting.”

Making the case for a touchscreen tablet, Munster ticks off the signs:

• Apple’s consistent message that it refuses to launch a “cheap” portable netbook
• Its gradual addition of multi-touch technology to all of its core products (iPhones, iPods and Macs)
• Its acquisition of P.A. Semi along with other recent chip-related hires (making it increasingly clear that Apple is investing more in its mobile computing franchise)
• Apple’s desire to differentiate itself in a maturing market before it’s too late (similar to the timing of iPod and iPhone)

Rumors that Steve Jobs was working on a successor to the ill-fated Newton date back to at least Sept. 2007, 18  months after a team of Apple engineers is said to have begun working on it. According to AppleInsider, the tablet team was pulled off the project in 2006 to help get the iPhone out the door.

What’s holding it up now, according to Munster’s sources, is the operating system. “Its complexity, along with our conversations with a key company in the mobile space, leads us to believe [the new device] will not launch until calendar year 2010.”

Munster does not address the question of whether the tablet will come with a real keyboard like the MacBook, or a virtual one like the iPod touch.

A touchscreen tablet wouldn’t need a keyboard for videos, Web-surfing, iPhone apps or e-books. But some analysts believe it couldn’t really serve as a netbook without a physical keyboard — if only as a peripheral.

On that other hand, it’s hard to imagine Jobs or Jonathan Ive signing off on a design as clunky as, say, the Asus t91 pictured here, with its hinged, rotating keyboard.

Will Apple solve this dilemma? Apparently we’re going to have to wait a little longer to find out.

See also:

• Netbook sales will soar to 22 million in 2009 – IDC
• Amazon’s Christmas bestsellers: Acer, Apple and Asus

It took five tries — and four redesigns –  but Apple (AAPL) last week finally won approval to build a retail outlet in Washington D.C., its first in the nation’s capital.

The final rendering, shown at right, was designed to echo the architectural features of the city’s historic Georgetown neighborhood. It was enthusiastically embraced by the same architectural preservation board that had soundly rejected Apple’s previous designs.

“This is beautifully executed,” Stephen J. Vanze, chairman of the Old Georgetown Board, told Karl Backus, Apple’s architect, according to the Washington Post. “We’re very pleased.”

The Post did not say if Steve Jobs is equally pleased. Apple purchased the building that now stands on the site, 1229 Wisconsin Ave. NW, in 2007 for $13.3 million, according to IFOAppleStore. It has been navigating the maze of D.C.’s multi-layered approval process ever since.

For a company that puts so much stock in cutting-edge design, it must have been painful to be second-guessed at every turn by a couple of neighborhood boards.

How far is the final version from Apple’s original conception? We tell the story through pictures below the fold.

It’s no accident that Eve, Wall-E’s sleek, pod-like love interest in the forthcoming Disney/Pixar animated feature film by the same name, looks like something out of Apple’s (AAPL) design department.

Writing in the current issue of Fortune, Richard Siklos reports that Jonathan Ive, head of Apple’s design department and the man responsible for the iMac, iPod and iPhone, had a hand in creating the robot.

In the piece, director Andrew Stanton tells Siklos:

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology — no expense spared — and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous. The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” (link)

According to Siklos, a call from Stanton to Steve Jobs in 2005 resulted in Ive spending a day at Pixar consulting on the Eve prototype. Siklos writes:

“Stanton said that it was a ‘lovefest’ with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. ‘Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,’ says Stanton. ‘The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.’ (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)” (link)

Disney (DIS) bought Pixar in 2006 in a deal that made Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder.

Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo, says he’s been kicking around the idea for Wall-E for years, even before Toy Story was made. He has summarized it most succinctly like this: “What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?”

The movie opens June 27, which is the day the smart money is betting that the 3G iPhone goes on sale.

You can read Siklos’ piece at Fortune.com here.

One of the nicest things about Jonathan Ive, chief designer of the iPod, the iPhone and just about every other Apple (AAPL) product since the original candy-colored iMac, is that he has displayed absolutely no ambition to rise to the top of Apple Inc. He seems content to lead a design team that is without equal in the world of consumer electronics.

Which is what makes the two questions at the top of the long profile of Ive in today’s Times of London so bizarre:

Could Jonathan Ive, the publicity-shy Essex boy who started his career designing toilets and combs, be close to performing one of the most extraordinary coups in American business history?

Could this 40-year-old gym-toned, shaven-headed, Aston Martin-driving Brit, who lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco, with his wife, who is a historian, and their twin sons, be the next man to run Apple Computer? (link)

Does Rupert Murdoch’s Times know something we don’t? Is Apple PR paving the way for Steve Jobs’ succession?

No, no, no and no. If you read the Times story closely you will see that it is what journalists call a write-around — a profile written without the cooperation of the main subject or his handlers.

“Jony feels his time would be better spent doing his job than doing interviews,” an Apple spokesperson tells the Times’ Chris Ayres in the last sentence of the piece.

With nothing new to say and no access to Ive, why run the story at all?

Why indeed. If there is a Murdochian agenda at play here, it seems to be to stir the embers of the nearly dormant Apple stock option backdating case, a train of logic that starts in paragraph 10 and leads to Ive by the most circuitous route:

No matter how remote the possibility of Mr Jobs standing down might be, some investors would be happier if Mr Ive was named officially as the Apple CEO’s successor to avoid future doubt.

Mark Molumphy, the lawyer who is filing the revised lawsuit against Apple, conceded to The Times that Mr Ive was more or less untouchable as far as the stock options litigation goes. “The evidence we’ve seen does not implicate him,” he said.

Strip all that away and what you have is a local-boy-does-good story served up for The Times‘ homegrown readership. The fact is, Ive shows no appetite for the spotlight that shines so brightly on Apple’s CEO, as even Ayres must concede:

There are sceptics, of course. Some have suggested that Mr Ive lacks the charisma to become “Steve 2.0”, and that he could never deliver Mr Jobs’s Hollywood-style press conferences, replayed endlessly on YouTube.

As it happens, Jonathan Ive does make a rare video appearance on YouTube, which 9to5Mac has kindly dusted off and which we have pasted below the fold.

Is this the next Steve Jobs? You be the judge.