When Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, design head Robert Brunner had recently resigned, and his deputy Jonathan Ive was thinking of leaving, too. Mr. Ive decided to stick around, though, and he and his team proceeded to craft some of the most memorable products in decades. The translucent, candy-colored iMac helped arrest Apple’s nosedive, and Mr. Ive and his team went on to devise new form factors for all the new i-devices that Apple kept developing—iPods, iPhones, iPads. Mr. Kahney’s biography takes us inside the creation of these memorable objects, if not inside the mind of the man himself.

Mr. Ive is a true genius in crafting the physical feeling we get when holding one of his devices. Mr. Kahney shows how, as a student in England, Mr. Ive was trained from a young age as a maker—someone who could draft and sculpt exquisitely with his own hands. As a result, he wasn’t afraid to delve deeply into the minutiae of a problem—one time he went over his boss’s head to Jobs to fight for using a specific type of screw on the Power Mac G4. It’s a choice that may have seemed minuscule to others but was gravely important to him—like a skilled chef who knows the taste of a dish using salt from one region can be completely different than salt taken from another.

But all that genius might have gone to waste if Jobs hadn’t elevated design to the role he did. To Jobs, design was never just about plastic versus aluminum (though such choices were always made with great care). Apple’s approach under Jobs recognized that great design had to be flawlessly manufactured and marketed at a profit margin advantageous to Apple. That is, producing the right product required not only Mr. Ive identifying the perfect aluminum but CEO Tim Cook locking down the raw materials at a sustainable price. Though on the surface Apple appears to be dominated by the guys in black turtlenecks, what truly distinguishes the company is how integrated its efforts are—the manufacturing requirements and supply-chain logistics are included in the design process.