Ian Parker profiles Apple's Jony Ive for The New Yorker:
According to Clive Grinyer, “Jon’s always wanted to do luxury.” By this point, Grinyer said, Ive had already fulfilled one duty of industrial design: to design a perfect stapler, for everyone, in a world of lousy staplers. (Most designers driven by that philosophy “didn’t really rule the world,” Grinyer said. “They just ruled staplers.”)
The key to designing the perfect stapler, in my mind, is to make paper nearly obsolete by designing the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.