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Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. It’s considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet to be bettered by modern science. Japanese smiths work through the night (better to judge the heat of metal by eye) hammering, melting and forging by hand to produce the finest blades in the world.

The steel is folded and refolded thousands of times to create a hard outer layer and a softer inner core resulting in a singular blade: terrifyingly sharp but far less prone to breaking than any sword forged in the West.

Once the blade is complete it is polished to a mirror finish, an elaborate procedure that itself can take weeks. The long and laborious process pushes metal to its absolute limit – which is precisely why Jonathan Ive wanted to see it first hand.

Ive endlessly seeks crucial knowledge that can help him to make the thinnest computing devices in the world, so it surprised no one at Apple that their obsessive design genius would take a 14-hour flight for a meeting with one of Japan’s leading makers of katana.

Afterwards Ive, shaven-headed, heavily muscled, in his trademark T-shirt and jeans, watched intently as the man went about his nocturnal labour.

‘For the first three years Jony was having a pretty miserable time designing Newton PDAs and printer trays,’ says Clive Grinyer. ‘It was a bad existence.’

The design team was eventually forced to surrender the Cray supercomputer it used for simulating new gadgets. Even the designs that did get built were met with a lukewarm reception. Ive’s Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was one of the first computers to have a flat LCD screen but it was saddled with a strangely squashed appearance and a massive price tag. Originally priced at $9,000, it was selling for under $2,000 by the time it was pulled from shelves less than a year later.

But just as Ive was considering a return to England, his luck changed. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple after an absence of 12 years. He purged the company, dropping most of its products and dispensing with staff. Eventually, Jobs took a tour of the design department, then based across the street from Apple’s main campus.

‘Jobs comes in, looks at all Ive’s amazing prototypes and says, “My God, what have we got here?”’ says Kahney.

Ive soaked up the pressure, refusing to hire more designers and continuing to experiment.

‘One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong,’ he has said.

‘It’s the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mosl...gn-genius.html