A new Daily Mail article by Rob Waugh guesses that Apple design guru Johnathan Ive won’t be leaving the company, as has been rumored, to move back to his native England. It also provides an account of the lengths Ive will go to make his designs sleeker. An excerpt:

“Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. It’s considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet to be bettered by modern science. Japanese smiths work through the night (better to judge the heat of metal by eye) hammering, melting and forging by hand to produce the finest blades in the world.

The steel is folded and refolded thousands of times to create a hard outer layer and a softer inner core resulting in a singular blade: terrifyingly sharp but far less prone to breaking than any sword forged in the West.

Once the blade is complete it is polished to a mirror finish, an elaborate procedure that itself can take weeks. The long and laborious process pushes metal to its absolute limit – which is precisely why Jonathan Ive wanted to see it first hand.

Ive endlessly seeks crucial knowledge that can help him to make the thinnest computing devices in the world, so it surprised no one at Apple that their obsessive design genius would take a 14-hour flight for a meeting with one of Japan’s leading makers of katana.

Afterwards Ive, shaven-headed, heavily muscled, in his trademark T-shirt and jeans, watched intently as the man went about his nocturnal labour.

This month Apple, the fabulously successful technology company – indeed, now the world’s biggest, having surpassed Microsoft – launched its latest piece of technology, the iPad 2. The machine was the result of this sort of research, and Ive’s preferred process of making the same product over and over again; in this case, carving metal and silicon until the product was one-third thinner and 0.2lb lighter than its predecessor.”

Ive in the documentary, Objectified: