Jony Ive talks about what he learned from Steve Jobs

Updated Sunday October 19, 2014: Vanity Fair has posted the entire video of this interview. It’s embedded at the bottom of the post.

Jony Ive sat down with Graydon Carter at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on Thursday to talk about Apple’s design team, his feelings about copycats, what it was like to work on the Apple Watch and the iPhone, and what he learned from Steve Jobs.

Vanity Fair initially posted one video from his talk, embedded below, in which Ive mentions specifically what Steve Jobs taught him about the power of focus, and the sacrifices it requires: “What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.”

Ive also called out as “lazy” attempts by companies such as Xiaomi, the so-called Apple of China, to succeed by shamelessly piggybacking on Apple’s design aestethic.

“I actually see it as theft,” Ive said, according to a report by the Verge. And he doesn’t just mean theft of intellectual property. Ive explained that his team devotes years of work and huge amounts of overtime into getting their designs just right: “All those weekends I could have had at home with my lovely family but didn’t.”

Here’s the full video.

If you could ask Jony Ive one question, what would you want to know?