Can you remember the first time you picked up an iPod, and how stunning it was to feel the seamlessness of its surfaces, the subtlety of its controls, and the weight of it in your hands? Those qualities, so perfect, are the work of a team of ace product designers at Apple led by Jonathan Ive. It’s no wonder then that Ive wrote the introduction to “Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible,” a new book about this other, legendary product designer who headed the design department at Braun from 1955 to 1980. Rams’ canonical designs for the German appliance company, Ive says, have inspired many Apple products. The transistor, alarm clocks, record players, cigarette lighters, and other small machines Rams and his team designed are seductive in their simplicity, their modernity, and their naturalism. While each is as finely-composed as an abstract sculpture there is also something, as Ive says, “inevitable” about its design. You feel as if it could not have been designed any other way.