News: Apple is "bloody ruthless" and a "monster" according to legendary industrial designer Kenneth Grange, adding that the tech giant uses design to ensure its commercial intentions are "dressed up nicely".

Speaking to Dezeen, the 85-year-old English designer said tech products like the iPhone and Apple Watch were turning people into zombies, adding: "I've got a certain cynicism of Apple and their motives. It's a bit of a monster."

"It's a game they're playing and it's an absolutely straightforward, commercial, ruthless game, and it's dressed up nicely because they've got some talented people in their employ," he said.

Grange, who was knighted in 2013 for services to design, believes that the tech giant has successfully turned Modernism into "good commerce", using aesthetics to dress up a self-perpetuating product cycle.

"There are probably few companies around now that absolutely answer the prospect that Modernism is good commerce," he said. "They've been so bloody ruthless that you almost get no choice in the matter."

Grange, who began his industrial design career in the 1950s, is widely considered to be one of the UK's greatest living designers. He has designed everything from Kodak cameras and Anglepoise lamps to high-speed passenger trains and London taxis.

His comments about Apple come the day after the Californian company unveiled its latest batch of products, including the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch.

Grange said that design has today become an extension of the entertainment industry and that technology is turning people into zombies.

"I see people in the street walking around like zombies unaware that there's a person two feet from them, all glued to this bloody screen," said Grange. "So when the screen's demands are even more inescapable they'll be even more zombie-like."

He continued: "It's a big game, and design has joined a very much bigger game than it did when I started. It’s part of entertainment; it's as much entertainment as it is anything else. The fashion end of technology is making its own morality; it's making its own purposes as it goes along and people will buy the idea."