BillTongg

Jony Ive will be on BBC Radio 4's 'Desert Island Discs' today, Sunday 23 February 2025. Press reports quote him saying that he feels responsible for the 'not so positive consequences' of the iPhone, but that he is still proud of his work.

Speaking to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Sir Jony said: “I celebrate and am encouraged by the very positive contribution (of the iPhone), the empowerment, the liberty that is provided to so many people in so many ways.

“Just because the not so positive consequences, I mean they weren’t intended, but that doesn’t matter relative to how I feel responsible, and that weighs, and is a contributor to decisions that I have made since, and decisions that I’m making in the future.”

Listen on the BBC Sounds web page or app from 10.00 London time, and the programme will be archived there to listen again for the next 28 days {EDIT: it's actually available for at least a year]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00289vf

Apart from hearing what he has to say about his work and about technology, it will also be interesting to hear which selection of records he would chose to have if he were marooned on a desert island.

EDIT: I've listened to the programme now. The first 25 minutes has interesting comments about the nature and philosophy of industrial design, how the design of any made object can be understood to reflect the intentions of the maker, the influence of his silversmith father and lots about his early life and training. Comments about joining Apple from around 27m 20s, relationship with Steve Jobs, working on the Apple Newton and the iMac. Why he left Apple and comments about the iPhone from 43m 20s, comments on his current work from 50m 40s. He does make the remarks quoted above and I was not at all surprised that the presenter, Lauren Laverne, didn't press him on what he meant about the negative impacts he mentioned. In particular he expressed concern about the need for caution and personal discipline with the ubiquitous connectivity offered by smartphones and admitted that he struggles with that. I'd like to have heard a lot more about that, and there was nothing at all about privacy and data, but ultimately Desert Island Discs (which has been running more or less continuously since the 1940s) is not that kind of programme and never has been.

The Masquerades of Spring is the latest novella by Ben Aaronovitch. It takes place in the Rivers of London universe, but is set in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s. As with the longer RoL books it has a first person narrator, in this case Augustus "Gussie" Berrycloth-Young, a young Englishman living in New York. He was a contemporary of Thomas Nightingale at Casterbrook School, where young British gentlemen of the magical persuasion have been educated for generations, and was connected with the Folly (headquarters of the Society of the Wise) but is now a man of leisure, enjoying a life of jazz clubs, parties and gay hedonism.

The book is many things - an affectionate pastiche of Jeeves & Wooster by P.G. Wodehouse (Gussie is a nod to Gussie Fink-Nottle, Jeeves is represented by Berrycloth-Young's valet, Beauregard), a detective story, an LGBT love story, a paean to the roaring '20s and the jazz age, and a celebration of the resilience and creativity of the people of Harlem. There is some magic, after Thomas Nightingale turns up in search of an enchanted trumpet and a friend of the Folly's maid and housekeeper Molly, another Fae who needs to be rescued.

There is lots to be enjoyed here, so if you are a fan of Peter Grant and Thomas Nightingale in the full-length RoL books then this is going to be right up your alley. At the back of the book there is what appears to be a spoof of those publishers' advertisements for other books, with descriptions of more Gussie & Beauregard stories which seem not to exist, but perhaps they are a teaser for further volumes yet to come? That would be something to look forward to.

By the way, have you ever wondered why the headquarters of the Society of the Wise, the centre of British wizardry, is called the Folly? It's actually a reference to the poem Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, by Thomas Gray.