Ive's first design for Apple was the MessagePad 110, part of its Newton line of pioneering personal digital assistants. These devices were innovative, boasting stylus input and other cutting-edge features, but they were never sales successes.
Ive's first smash-hit came later: The original candy-colored iMac looked like nothing else on the market when it came out in 1998. It got lambasted for not having a floppy drive — making this the first time that Apple got rid of a feature that everybody else considered standard, and then ended up looking like a visionary.
Starting in 1999, the iMac design would also give way to the similarly colorful iBook family of laptops, which looked funky, but would later be replaced by the more rectangular MacBook.
The Power Mac G4 Cube, another Ive design, wasn't quite the same sales sensation, but it reinforced Apple's reputation for making good-looking computers that stood out against the bland beige boxes that characterized the PC industry of the day.
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdThe original iPod, too, was an Ive design. While music players had existed before, the sleek sophistication of the iPod, combined with its ease-of-use, started a revolution — and gave Apple the grounding it needed to establish its now-huge iTunes Music store.
Fast forward to 2007, and Ive made arguably his biggest stamp on the world of gadget design with the launch of the iPhone, which set the standard for how smartphones should look and feel.
Ive helped create an entirely new category of mobile devices with the iPad, unveiled in 2010. The iPad was the first in a wave of tablets that had most of the functionality of a laptop, and was slightly larger than the iPhone.
Ive also helped design some of Apple's accessories, like the Apple Pencil. The Apple Pencil was unveiled in 2015 as a companion to the high-end iPad Pro, but was widely seen as an overly expensive stylus — and had the bizarre "feature" of needing to be plugged into the side of the iPad Pro to charge.
Ive took on mobile computing design yet again with Apple's first wearable device, the Apple Watch, in 2015. Now in its fifth iteration, the Apple Watch supports a range of health technology, wellness monitoring, and cellular data options.
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdIve even had his hand in Apple's biggest project, its massive new headquarter and campus that was unveiled in 2017.
Ive never stopped working on Apple's laptops, though. Most famously, he created the MacBook Air, Apple's smallest, lightest, and thinnest laptop.
Indeed, Ive has had his hands in just about everything Apple has come out with in the past decades, including the new Mac Pro unveiled at Apple's developer conference WWDC on June 3.