Apple's chief designer: All large-screen phones other than iPhone 6 are "dumb and big"

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Although Apple last month launched its largest phones to date, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, rivals have been offering large-screen smartphones for years, but Apple's top designer Jonathan Ive believes that no large-screen phone can compare to the iPhone 6.

Ive said some competitors' current large-screen smartphones are similar to Apple's early large-screen phone prototypes, which are slightly larger and less portable. Ive also called them "big and bulky."

"They have some interesting features and they have larger screen sizes," Ive said. "And here's the problem: They're really unattractive because they're too big and too bulky, just like some of the large-screen phones that our competitors are offering right now."

Ive said Apple is aware that increasing screen size is important, but without compromising on design. "We've done a lot of work to make larger phones more attractive," he said.

One of these is to restore the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to the rounded corners of previous generations, rather than the right-angled edges of the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s. Ive said that the result of this change is that the actual larger phone does not look very large. Because of this, the large-screen iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus do not look very large.