People who constantly use their phones are actually ‘misusing’ them, according to Jony Ive, the man who makes them

‘Like any tool’ the iPhone is only as good as the things you do with it, Apple's head designer says

Apple's Chief Design Officer Jony Ive speaks onstage during the 2017 New Yorker TechFest at Cedar Lake on October 6, 2017 in New York City (Brian Ach/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

You might be misusing your iPhone without even knowing it, according to the man who designed it.

Apple's chief design officer Jony Ive has said that people who use their phone too much are in fact using it wrongly, during a rare public appearance.

He said that the iPhone was "like any tool, you can see there's wonderful use and then there's misuse". Pressed by the New Yorker's editor David Remnick on what constituted misuse, he said that thought that was "perhaps constant use".

It was part of a discussion at the magazine's tech festival, during which Sir Jony also said that the inspiration for the iPhone was partly hatred for phones, too.

"When we worked on the iPhone, certainly a significant part of our motivation was the loathing we had for the phones that we were using," he said. "I think they were a little soul destroying."

And that theme carried on through the event. Asked by Mr Remnick what he "detests", Sir Jony made clear that he hates "most things really".

During the rare public appearance, Mr Ive elaborated on some of the recent products he had tried to design. He said that he had created the Apple Watch so that people could get immediate notifications on there and leave their phone for less time sensitive uses, for instance – something that he said had stopped him incessently checking his emails, and misusing his phone.