lead apple designer johnny ives works with a small team in a locked area unseen to the outside world.ut his team is growing, hiring mark newsom. so where does designed to lead apple, or where does apple lead design? design is such an interesting thing with apple. more than any other company, their work is associated with design. as we look at the apple watch, is it function or design first? >> what's interesting about apple is we look at them as a technology company but they are usually a follower on the technology front and they come in at a moment when we are moving not an early adopter space, but into the early majority, and then also need to capture the late majority. in this case, they have seen a number of other people entering the smart watch market wearables they want to get closer to the body, own some of the real estate on the body and get into that. cory: i almost felt like they ceded this. by letting the world they were looking at watch for almost two years, competitors were spitting stuff out, some of it really ill-conceived. samsung motorola, the startups like fitbit and

neil: johnny ives with his designers? >> pretty clear about what works and doesn't work. neil: the perfectionist and all, that you address more the wilderness years between the first firing at apple and returning as the savior, and that included the next period the pixar period, i'm not saying he got nicer, but he seemed to be more at peace and resolve to what he wanted to be? >> he learned a lot both from the failure which turned into a small success but more importantly from the failures at pixar that led to a giant success. it taught him about a business that relied upon all sorts of creative people contributing to make something that he didn't even understand how it went together. neil: how did you get him to talk to you as often as you did? >> we were both curious about similar things, and so i think like he liked a lot of the questions i asked. he seemed to like some of the things i wrote. neil: was it tough to juggle the personal relationship that you developed versus being the journalist at heart? >> not at all. when you see somebody with great frequency, when i s

one of the things i call for and i'm jumping ahead here is a johnny ives of security. think about all the beautiful products we have in this world. apple telephones in ferrari's and rolex watches. what do they'll have in common? beautiful design but there is no human centered design and cybersecurity so it's really a problem. enabling the user. we have come up with policies that say your password needs to be 67 digits long uppercase lowercase contain a hike to and the high school you went to in indonesia. they change it every two days and then they wonder why people take stickies and write down their password and put it on their screen. it's poor human centered design. it's a services issue because there's this whole human element that needs to be dealt with first. >> two things, what does that human centered design look like? let's go at that first. >> i think it is a work in progress. i don't think anybody has a clear idea of it. who uses air bnb? think how beautiful that designed interface looks and think about what most products are. i think of the guided people an

when johnny ives spoke to "the financial times" last week he described it as different from what theythe iphone because everybody on the design team hated their cell phone and that's why they wanted to create a new product. whereas everyone now has a high regard for their watch and for the luxury product. so the trick was introducing new functionality and additional fashion to actually create a new product that could fit in alongside that. you mentioned that shipments might not be as big as the iphone. the iphone was not a blowout success overnight either. wall street estimates, between 8 million and 50 million for the apple watch. so certainly, it's going to be shipping. just not maybe to the volume of the iphone. but millions of shipments is still what wall street is expecting. >> 1:00 eastern this week. can't wait. kayla, thank you, on the west coast as we await the big apple watch launch. >>> up next on the program, it's clear the new ceo of mcdonald's has its work cut out for them. the company posting february sales that were much weaker than expected although the stock has recov

i thought the most interesting thing is johnny ive interview in the "financial times" today, the mosttial designer in the world, talks about the watch and how he likes the idea that the watch is almost something that carelessly you look at. we'll see if they follow through on that on monday. but he's also of course spoken about how he disalikes the design of a lot of the cars on the road. he drives a bentley, which kind of -- >> does he have somebody drive it for him. >> in this interview with the new yorker, correct -- no "the journal"ist was chauffeured. right, it was chauffeured. >> anyway, points the idea they might design a car. ive would like to do that. >>> coming up on the show art carbon will be here on the jobs report. a blowout jobs figure though it's not going to do anything for the market. opened on the positive side. the white house's response from secretary of labor tom perez's first interview here on cnbc. this is where we are with the futures. more "squawk on the street" right back. these days, the most important person in your business could be a software developer.