Apple's Design Genius Jony Ive Thinks The iPhone's Competitors Are 'Big' And 'Clunky'

Getty Images/Michael KovacJony Ive at the Vanity Fair Summit

Apple's newest pair of iPhones are its biggest yet, but other competing smartphone makers have been creating phones with larger screens for years. Still, Apple's design chief Jony Ive doesn't think any of these gadgets even come close to the iPhone.

On stage at the Vanity Fair Summit earlier this month, Ive referred to competitors as "big" and clunky." According to Ive, some rival smartphones are just as unwieldy as Apple's early prototypes of big-screened iPhones.

"They were interesting features, having a bigger screen," Ive told Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. "But the end result was a really lousy product because they were big and clunky, like a lot of the competitive phones are still."

Ive said Apple knew that having a large screen on a smartphone was important, but didn't want to make any compromises in terms of design.

"We had to do a lot of things to make the larger screen yield a compelling product," Ive told Carter.

One of those things was reverting back to the rounded edges seen on earlier iPhones rather than square edges of the iPhone 5 and 5s. This, according to Ive, makes the phone feel less wide than it actually is - ultimately providing the larger screen without making the phone feel too big.

Check out the full interview below.