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Steve Jobs, Jony Ive named smartest in tech

Apple's CEO and lead industrial designer are both named among technology's smartest people by Fortune.

Jim Dalrymple Special to CNET News
Jim Dalrymple has followed Apple and the Mac industry for the last 15 years, first as part of MacCentral and then in various positions at Macworld. Jim also writes about the professional audio market, examining the best ways to record music using a Macintosh. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. He currently runs The Loop.
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Jim Dalrymple
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Fortune on Friday released its list of the 50 smartest people in tech. Topping the list of CEOs is Apple's Steve Jobs, while the company's lead designer, Jony Ive, took the top spot in the designer category.

James Martin/CNET

Jobs is credited with bringing Apple back from the brink of disaster in the late 1990s, introducing products like the iMac and iPod. Jobs later lead the charge to change the mobile industry with the iPhone and mostly recent, the iPad.

"He is a visionary, a micromanager, and a showman who creates such anticipation around new products that their releases are veritable holidays," writes Fortune. "And Jobs is a pop culture icon like no other business executive."

Runners-up for the smartest CEO include Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt.

Jobs is no stranger to receiving top honors like this. In the last couple of years, Jobs has been named Mobile Industry Personality of the Year at the Mobile World Congress andCEO of the decade last December by Fortune. He was also inducted into the California Hall of Fame.

Fortune connected the dots between Jobs and Ives. "Steve Jobs dreamed up the iPhone, but Jonathan Ive created it," writes Fortune. "As Apple's senior vice president of industrial design, Ive, 43, is an expert at manufacturing lust. Like his boss, he is a perfectionist who leads a small team working in near secrecy. Most Apple employees aren't allowed in his studio. From the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad, his contributions have set the course not just for Apple but for design more broadly."

In 2003, Ive was named Designer of the Year by London's Design Museum. In 2009, Ive gave a rare glimpse into the process and philosophy of his designs.

Other categories in Fortune's top 50 smartest list include analysts, founders, engineers, academics, hybrids, investors, scientists and executives. The list includes Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, Farmville CTO Luke Rajlich, and Netscape's Marc Andreessen, among others.