The average Apple user doesn't know Sir Jonathan Ive. When the subtle diamond-cut bezel of the iPhone's unibody construction rests in their hand, they don't consider the prototypes that didn't make the grade, or the long nights spent poring over every detail.

But they do, of course, know Steve Jobs. Even among Apple diehards, Jony Ive was always positioned as Jobs’ dutiful sidekick, the one who turned his fantasies into reality. You can practically hear Jobs’ philosophies — and even a bit of his cadence — when he talks about a new Apple product in a promotional video, one of the few times we get to hear his voice:

"If you imagine an object that is a television, that's a radio, that's a computer ... You imagine an object that has an incredible sound system. You imagine all of those functionalities, all of those technologies, you imagine them converging into one object. What should that object be? What on earth should it look like?"

This could be an iPad or a Mac mini that Ive's talking about here. It's not. Rather, he's introducing us to the Twentieth Anniversary Mac in a 1997 video recently unearthed by OSXDaily. His words may sound like something Jobs would say, but the fact is, they didn't work together on this particular project; in all likelihood they had never even met before this sleek, drool-worthy all-in-one computer hit the market.

The TAM — which marked the 20th anniversary of Apple, not the Mac — was nothing short of a breakthrough. A clear delineation from the bland beige boxes being churned out every few months, it was the first machine to showcase Ive's true talents, with a gorgeous flat screen, vertical optical drives and a metallic shimmer unlike anything the industry had ever seen. It signaled a sea change in design for Apple and the start of a renaissance of sorts.

And Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with it.

"One of the things that I think's really striking about the product are the colors that we've used, the materials and the finishes, so those range from fabric on the speaker through to leather on the palm rest. Even the subwoofer that normally lives on the floor actually has a large rubber component on the top. We really also wanted to design a product that would fit into environments, into personal environments much better traditional solutions have done."

Really, nothing.

"We wanted to design a product that had a very small footprint, a product that is easy to move around. We wanted to try and manage the cables better, to actually make the thing easy to set up, but also to make sure that that the back of the computer, the back of the object was as well-resolved as the front. And certainly the sound system of the product really did demand that we try to convey, try to describe just how compelling, just how impressive the experience is."

If "well-resolved" isn't straight out of Steve Jobs' lexicon, I don't know what is. 

But Ive's vision, his words, are his own. If Jobs steered Apple out of the dark ages and into the magical world of iMacs and iPods, Ive set the car in the right direction and made sure they didn't miss a turn. The TAM was conceived several years before the iMac, and we can plainly see the inspiration, both in its industrial, all-in-one design and in Ive's incredible attention to detail.

"Painting the plastics with a lacquer that actually has metallic flakes in it as well gives the plastics a depth that you don't often associate with computers. The foot on the product is die cast from metal — a great material in terms of its strength and its weight. The foot also serves two purposes: obviously to support the unit, it lets you adjust the angle of the main head unit; also it folds up and becomes a handle."

In some ways, Jobs walked onto Ive's turf when he came back to Apple. While the TAM didn't fly off shelves — the exorbitant price tag might have had something to do with it — it repositioned Apple as an absolute innovator, a company willing to take risks and fail if necessary, as long as it kept skating to where the puck was going. The video describing it only features Ive; this was his vision, and he owned it.

Merely a footnote today, without Ive's work on the TAM we might never have seen the iPod or the iPad. It allowed Ive the space to grow and experiment before Jobs took over. 

"The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, I think really describes a whole new product type. While it doesn't have answers for all the questions it asks, I think it's a consequential, it's an important product. I think it gives a new face, a new meaning to technology that has changed at an enormous pace over the last 20 years."

Ive told Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson that “it hurts when (Jobs) takes credit for one of my designs.” There really was no other way; Ive and Jobs are cut from a very similar cloth, driven by the pursuit of perfection and undeterred by any challenge. When Jobs picked up a new iPod or iPhone, it was as if Ive had reached into his head and plucked it out. And when Ive spoke, it was as if Jobs had told him just what to say.

"I think more significant, more exciting is the indication, the signal that Apple takes design very seriously, that Apple is prepared to innovate, maybe ask more questions than provide answers for, but that we're pushing design extremely aggressively as we close the millennium."

As the new Human Interface chief, we'll be seeing Ive's imprint on just about everything designed by Apple, from the next generation of iOS devices to the apps they run. 

There will still be more questions than answers. But Ive wouldn't have it any other way.

Find Michael Simon on Twitter or App.net as @morlium.