[29_9.18N59] Leander Kahney. Jony Ive — The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products

First published by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013

одним словом — neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring

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At school, Jony’s skills as a designer were beginning to emerge. A school friend and fellow design student, Jeremy Dunn, remembered a clever clock that Jony produced. Matte black, with black hands and no numbers, the design allowed the timepiece to be mounted in any orientation. Though made of wood, the clock’s black finish was so flawless his friends couldn’t tell what it was made from.
Jony’s work was exceptional and his drawing excellent. His teachers recalled that they had not seen his standard in another student of his age before; even at age seventeen, his designs were often production ready. “His graphics were brilliant,” said Dave Whiting, a faculty member who taught Jony design and technology for several years. “He used to draw initial designs on brown craft paper with white and black pens, which was a really effective and new way to do that. He had a different way of presenting ideas. His ideas were novel, innovative, fresh.”

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“He did things that other people weren’t doing,” said Whiting.
Jony Ive’s childhood circumstances were comfortable but modest. His father, Michael John Ive, was a silversmith, his mother, Pamela Mary Ive, a psychotherapist. They had a second child, daughter Alison, two years after their son’s birth.

Jony attended Chingford Foundation School, later to be the alma mater of David Beckham, the famous soccer star (Beckham attended eight years after Jony). While at school, Jony was diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia...
Jony’s pen was to be made of white plastic with rubbery side rivets, like small teeth, for a better grip. Again, the product was white, but what set the pen apart from every other was a nonessential feature.

In working out his design, Jony chose to focus on the pen’s “fiddle factor.” He observed that people fiddled with their pens all the time, and decided to give the pens’ owners something to play with when not writing. He cleverly added a ball-and-clip mechanism to the top of the pen that served no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. The “fiddle-factor” notion may have seemed trivial to some, but the incorporation of the ball and clip transformed the pen into something special.
...Jony designed a phone that was an innovative take on landline devices. This was years before the mobile phone became ubiquitous, and his winning design was for an innovative landline phone. Characteristically, it managed to rethink the standard image of what a phone was expected to look like. At the time, phones had a receiver with a headset attached by a coiled wire, but Jony’s resembled a stylized white question mark.

He called it, somewhat pretentiously, The Orator. The all-in-white phone was made from a one-inch-diameter plastic tube. The base contained the mouthpiece; the user was to hold the phone by the stalk or leg of the question mark; the curve of the question rose to the earpiece speaker.
Jony, Grinyer, and Darbyshire designed power tools for Bosche and electronic equipment for Goldstar. The three designers gave their full attention to a simple barber’s comb for Brian Drumm, a hairdresser in Scotland. Jony’s concept contained a spirit level in the handle so that the barber could hold it in the right position while clipping his clients’ locks. It’s still sold for cutting single-length bobs and other precision haircuts. The job had a small budget, but, characteristically, the designers gave it their full attention. “Brian Drumm chose Jon’s beautiful concept for the hair-cutting comb, but I worked painstakingly to translate it into an engineering design for production,” said Darbyshire. It was ultimately worth it: The comb went on to win an award from the highly prestigious German Industrie Forum in 1991, burnishing the firm’s reputation.
As he threw himself into the work for Ideal Standard, Jony bought marine biology books for inspiration and scoured them for influences from nature. “Jony was very fascinated with water, and he looked a lot at water flow,” recalled Grinyer. “He took his inspiration for the bowl he designed as almost a Greek religious artifact.
The three designers drove to Ideal Standard’s headquarters in Hull to pitch the company on the new designs. They set up in a large room so that a product manager could eyeball the models to see if they were fit for presentation. When they were ushered into a meeting with the CEO and a couple of other executives, however, they failed to impress.

The CEO rejected the designs outright in a torrent of criticism. They were too expensive to produce, he said, and they didn’t fit into the established design line. The executive worried that the sink’s architectural pillar, which Jony had been very proud of, might fall over and crush children.

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Grinyer said Jony drove back to London dispirited. “He was dejected and depressed,” recalled Grinyer. “He had poured himself into working for people who really didn’t care.”
Despite the initial failure with Ideal Standard, Tangerine was beginning to work with more and more big clients. The team, according to Grinyer, felt as if they were on a “rollercoaster.” They continued to cleverly publicize themselves. “We did a lot of speculative pieces whereby I came up with some concepts and Jony did amazing design works, which we could then push out to the press, get them beautifully photographed and create a buzz,” said Grinyer. “Within just five years, we went from a small company operating out of a back room of a house in London to having big international customers.”
Bob Brunner, whom Jony had met on his California trip several years earlier, paid a visit to Tangerine’s studio on Hoxton Street in fall 1991. Having left Lunar Design three years before, Brunner had settled in at Apple, and was now the head of ID. He’d built a killer team of hotshot designers (including several who would later play important roles in developing the iPod, iPhone and iPad).

Brunner was scouting Europe for outside design firms to work with Apple on a secret project called Project Juggernaut. Even though it was officially taboo for a big company like Apple to use outside commissions to recruit talent, Brunner later admitted that was one of his goals.

“I was trying to get Jony,” he admitted. “I wanted to get him to work on the project, and I thought it was another way to get him involved with the company.”
Brunner’s design team was busy not only with the MessagePad but also a new line of PowerBooks. Although the first PowerBook hadn’t yet been released, Brunner’s design team was working on the second generation. The PowerBook was a revolution: the first “real” laptop in the fledgling PC industry, which had concentrated on desktop machines.
Attempting to keep the spirit of innovation alive, Brunner had started conducting offline projects—what he called “parallel design investigations.”

“The idea was to develop new form factors, new levels of expression and strategies for handling new technology without the pressure of a deadline,” he explained. Critically, Brunner wanted to keep this type of investigation “off-line” because it allowed his team to make mistakes, to feel separate enough from the grind of production that the creative juices could percolate. “Because the ideas generated off-line are often our best ideas, parallel design investigations can be extremely valuable,” he said. “This information not only enriches our language, it gives you something to point to and say ‘this is what we can move towards.’”
Over the course of a few London meetings, Brunner and Tangerine exchanged ideas. Jony created a prototype mouse as a sort of test. The conversations went well and, as a result, Tangerine was given a contract to consult on Juggernaut.

Jony was both excited and scared. The Apple job was a huge break for Tangerine and, he realized, for him personally too. He later recalled, “I still remember Apple describing this fantastic opportunity and my being so nervous that I would mess it all up.”

As Brunner explained, Project Juggernaut was a wide-ranging parallel product investigation. The idea was to explore a suite of mobile products even further off in the future. Brunner and his team felt confident that the new PowerBook and Newton portable would kick off a whole range of mobile products. They began imagining noncomputer products, including digital cameras, personal audio players, small PDAs and bigger pen-based tablets. (These might sound familiar but fulfillment of these dreams wouldn’t come for at least another decade—and under the leadership of an entirely new regime.)

They hoped that pen-based digital assistants, digital cameras and laptop computers could be linked together using infrared, radio wave and cellular networks. Brunner wanted the design group to have several mobile products ready in case Apple’s upper management suddenly decided the company needed to start making them.

Brunner had approached a couple of other outside design firms in addition to Tangerine, and he had some of Apple’s in-house designers working on concepts. “We knew certain things were coming,” explained Brunner. “We knew wireless was going to be important, and that image capture was going to be more important. Things were going to get smaller. Batteries were going to get better.”

While an Apple team in California worked on several concepts for portable products, the team at Tangerine designed four speculative products: a tablet, a tablet keyboard, and a pair of “transportable” desktop computers. Brunner wanted the products to be convertible; the tablet should convert into a laptop and vice versa. “For some reason, ironically, we thought convertibility would be really important,” explained Brunner. “So you could go from a traditional keyboard and mouse mode to a pen-based mode, which is a little bit of a rage today with some subnotebooks.” Brunner noted that these ideas, which seemed a bit strange and radical in the early nineties, weren’t a million miles from the latest tablets and hybrid laptop/tablets for sale today.

Brunner asked Jony and his Tangerine colleagues to push the boundary of the design but to keep the main elements of Apple’s then-current design language (mostly dark gray plastic with some soft bulges). The designs had to be based on real technology so they could conceivably be real products in the near future.

Jony, together with help from Grinyer and Darbyshire, worked on a tablet called the Macintosh Folio. It was a chunky, notebook-sized tablet with a pen-based screen and a huge built-in stand. Made of Apple’s then-usual dark gray plastic, it could almost be a predecessor to the iPad, despite being about five times thicker.

Jony worked alone on a special smart keyboard for the tablet called the Folio keyboard. But unlike today’s detachable keyboards for modern tablets, the Folio keyboard was conceived as an “intelligent keyboard” because it featured its own CPU, network jacks and a trackpad. In effect it was half a laptop, namely, the keyboard half.
With remarkable speed, Jony and the other designers on Project Juggernaut had developed about twenty-five models. In a matter of weeks, they presented the work to Brunner and his team and, over the next few months, the concepts were refined to four principal designs.

As the project neared completion, Jony’s fears about messing it up almost came true. The fledgling company didn’t have its own model shop for making final prototypes, as such shops require special skills, tools and personnel, typically beyond the means of all but the biggest design studios. (Today, even a company as big as Apple uses external shops for finished models.) So the four Tangerine designers took their Juggernaut mock-ups to a local model maker who had done a lot of work with the film and advertising industry.
After six months of work on Project Juggernaut, Jony, Grinyer and Darbyshire were flown to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to make a final presentation. Since Phillips hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day work on Juggernaut—he’d been keeping the company afloat working for LG—he stayed behind.
After the presentation, as they were packing up to go, Brunner pulled Jony to one side to speak to him privately. He told Jony that if he really wanted to “create something radical,” he should come to work for Apple full time.
In September 1992, at age twenty-seven, Jony accepted a full-time position at Apple. He flew to California with his wife, Heather. The couple moved into a modest house on San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, the highest hill in the city, from which they enjoyed a stunning view of the city that extended the length of Market Street to the skyscrapers downtown.

Inside, the place reflected Jony’s design tastes. “There is a fireplace in the sparsely appointed interior and a tiny television sitting atop an upscale stereo with a turntable, and virtually all the furniture is on wheels,” wrote reporter John Markoff, who visited Jony and his wife for a New York Times profile a few years later.1 “The room is lighted by a futuristic lamp, which appears to hang like a red orb, but there isn’t a personal computer in sight.”

Jony bought an orange Saab convertible for the commute to Apple, about thirty-five miles away down the Peninsula in Cupertino.
Over time, Brunner recruited a team of talented designers, some of whom would remain with Apple for decades and be responsible for a string of hit products, including the iPhone and iPad. Key members of Brunner’s team were Tim Parsey, Daniele De Iuliis, Lawrence Lam, Jay Meschter, Larry Barbera, Calvin Seid and Bart Andre.

Daniele De Iuliis (day-YOU-lease) was perhaps the most precocious of the group. Born in Bristol, United Kingdom, of Italian descent, De Iuliis was a graduate of the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London. Brunner hired him in 1991 from the San Francisco office of design group ID Two (where Jony’s friend Clive Grinyer had earlier worked).

Brunner specifically wanted designers with experience in consulting. “After experiencing the inertia that exists inside Apple, Bob realized that by hiring former consultants he could operate with the speed and efficiency of a freelance group,” said Tim Parsey. “As a former consultant, Bob knew that we would think and act like consultants.”

Fellow designer Barbera was impressed with De Iuliis’s personality right away: “Danny, in particular, gave off that weird light that other designers tend to notice. I took one look at him and figured that our work was gonna get a lot better, fast.”

De Iuliis was able to imbue his designs with strong personality, a skill that served him well later on. One of his early projects was the Macintosh Color Classic, an update of the original Mac that exuded character and was avidly collected by fans for years. He would later work on the MacBook Pro and the iPhones 4 and 5. His name appears on more than 560 patents. They’re vast and varied in scope, including innovations in 3-D cameras, multi-touch displays, location tracking, RFID transponders, nitriding stainless steel, magsafe charging mechanisms, the iPod and improved speaker enclosures.

Later in his career, De Iuliis would receive top design awards for his work. Once Jony joined the team, the two developed a strong relationship. De Iuliis and Jony lived close to each other in San Francisco, and commuted together for more than twenty years.

In 1992, Brunner recruited Bartley K. Andre (known as Bart), a graduate of the University of California at Long Beach and an intern in Apple’s Personal Intelligent Electronics, or PIE group. He would emerge as one of the top five patent holders in the United States on a year-to-year basis (thanks to his last name, he is listed on all of Apple’s major patents in the title: “United States Patent Application Andre et al.”). By 2013, Andre had more patents to his name than any other Apple designer, including Jony. In 2009 alone, he received 92 patents; in 2010, his 114 set a record for an Apple designer. Most of the patent awards were for innovations on the phone, tablet and laptop lines.

Andre worked on everything at ID, from circuit modules to RFID systems. He was credited with the design of Apple’s 035 design prototype of the first iPad, according to information released during the Apple v. Samsung trial in 2012. Along with other members of the team, he several times received the prestigious Red Dot Award, from Germany’s Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen institute.

Daniel J. Coster joined the team after Jony, arriving in June 1994. Described as “tall, goofy [and] super-talented,” Coster had earned an ID degree from the Wellington Polytechnic School in New Zealand in 1986. Initially hired on a three-month contract, he impressed the group with work on colors and finishes for the Newton portable, then was hired full time. He designed various towers and gained notice for being the lead designer of the Bondi Blue iMac. Like his coworkers, Coster rapidly accumulated patents, receiving nearly six hundred working for Apple over the last two decades. In 2012, Coster was inducted into his alma mater’s design Hall of Fame for “an outstanding contribution to New Zealand’s economy, reputation and national identity through art and design.”
Jony’s first big assignment at Apple was to design the second-generation Newton MessagePad. The first Newton hadn’t yet been released, but the design team already hated it. Thanks to a rushed production schedule, the first model had some serious flaws that Apple’s executives, as well as the designers, were eager to fix.

Just before the Newton was shipped, Apple discovered that the planned lid to protect its delicate glass screen wouldn’t clear expansion cards, which were to be inserted into the slot at the top. The design group was charged with developing some quickie carrying cases, including a simple leather slipcase, and off it went into the marketplace. In addition, the Newton’s loudspeaker was in the wrong place. It was in the palm rest, so the user tended to cover it up when holding the device.

The hardware engineers wanted the second-generation Newton (code-named Lindy) to have a slightly larger screen for better handwriting recognition. Since the pen was attached awkwardly to the side, a kludge that gave the Newton extra width, they wanted the new version to be significantly thinner; the original was so bricklike, only the largest of jacket pockets could accommodate it.

Jony worked on the Lindy project between November 1992 and January 1993. To get a grip on the project, he began with its design “story”—that is, by asking himself, What’s the story of this product? The Newton was so new and versatile and unlike other products, that articulating what it was primarily used for wasn’t easy. It morphed into a different device depending on what software it was running, so it could be a notepad or a fax machine. CEO Sculley called it a PDA but, for Jony, that definition was just too slippery.

“The problem with the first Newton was that it didn’t relate to people’s everyday lives,” Jony said. “It didn’t offer a metaphor that users could grasp.” He set about fixing that.

To most people a lid is a just lid, but Jony gave it special attention. “It’s the first thing you see and the first thing you interact with,” Jony said. “Before you can turn the product on, you must first open the lid. I wanted that moment to be special.”

To enhance that moment, Jony designed a clever, spring-loaded latch mechanism; when you pressed the lid, it popped open. The mechanism depended on a tiny copper spring carefully calibrated to give just the right amount of pop.
The Newton was pen based, so Jony focused on the pen, which he knew users would love to play with.

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The slot was too short for a full-size stylus, so Jony created a stylus that cleverly telescoped. Like the lid, the pen featured a pop-up mechanism that made it pop out when the user pressed its top. To give it weight and heft, he fashioned the pen from brass.
The MessagePad 110 was the first Apple product outsourced entirely to Taiwan. Apple had partnered with Japanese companies before (Sony for monitors, Canon for printers), but generally made its products in its own factories. For the MessagePad 110, Apple outsourced the Newton to Inventec.
Jony began to emerge as Brunner’s second in command. Not only did he provide ideas and design taste, he soon helped recruit the next group of designers. Within a couple of years, Jony hired most of the rest of the team that would go on to make the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, including Christopher Stringer, Richard Howarth, Duncan Robert Kerr and Doug Satzger.

Christopher Stringer, born in Australia in 1965, had been raised in the North of England. He attended North Staffordshire Polytechnic in Stoke-on-Trent and graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 1986. A veteran of IDEO—hired in 1992, he helped develop Dell’s design language and won an ID Design Review Award for an innovative light switch—he was recruited by Jony in 1995 as a senior industrial designer.

Stringer worked on the early PowerBooks and tower computers. Over the next seventeen years, he would be involved in all the major releases (including the iPhone), peripherals and in even smaller projects, like the design of product packaging. He was also the first designer to give testimony at the Apple v. Samsung trial, where, according to Reuters news service, “Stringer looked every inch the designer with his shoulder-length hair, salt-and-pepper beard, wearing an off-white suit with a narrow black tie.” Stringer was often seen at Apple launch events talking side by side with Jony. The impression that they are close friends is enhanced by their shared history; both hail from Staffordshire and studied in the north of England.

Richard Paul Howarth was born in Lukasa, Zambia, and graduated from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London in 1993. He was recruited by Apple in 1996 from IDEO and became one of the group’s main designers. Howarth was the lead designer of the original iPhone, and a major contributor to the iPod touch and iPad.

Another designer from the United Kingdom, Duncan Kerr graduated from the Imperial College London in 1985 with a degree in mechanical engineering and a degree in ID engineering from the Royal College of Art. He was also recruited from IDEO. As one of the team’s more technical members, Kerr has great influence in the development and investigations of new products and technologies. He helped pioneer the multi-touch technology that led to the iPhone and iPad. He has been named in numerous patents, including various technical innovations involving components like proximity detectors, display modules and magnetic connectors.

Doug Satzger was the fourth IDEO alumnus. Satzger attended the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 1985. He started his career at IDEO as an industrial design lead, before moving to design TVs at Thomson Consumer Electronics. He would work at Apple between 1996 and 2008 in the IDg. An Ohio native, his interest in materials and knowledge of manufacturing processes made him the group’s design lead for color, materials and finishes, working on the first iMac to the latest iPhone, iPods, iPad and MacBooks. Satzger has been named in many patents, mostly in electronic devices, displays, cursor controls, packaging and connectors. (After Apple, Satzger joined HP/Palm as the senior director of ID then moved to Intel, where he’s vice president of the Mobile and Communications Group and general manager of ID.)

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Another key member of the group in the mid-1990s and after was Calvin Seid, a native of Portland, Oregon, who graduated from San Jose State University in 1983 and worked for design firms in Oregon and Silicon Valley after graduation. He joined the Apple IDg in 1993 to design and manage CPU projects.
With new and gifted designers in place, the Apple IDg started working on a new design language for the company’s products. The aging Snow White language no longer suited the growing range of Apple products. The off-white or gray color schemes, with lots of horizontals on the enclosures, seemed ill adapted to the plethora of new printers, handhelds, speakers and portable CD players.

The team came up with what it called “Espresso,” a Euro-style aesthetic characterized by swooping organic shapes, bulges and an adventurous use of colored and textured plastics. Less a design language per se than a loose set of guidelines and best practices, Espresso was, in short, an aesthetic. There were no hard-and-fast rules. But, as has been said of pornography, the designers knew it when they saw it.

The Espresso name has two possible origins. The official story is that it was inspired by the minimalist design of the modern European coffee pots the group used while working. The unofficial (and more likely) story comes from Don Norman, head of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in the mid-1990s.

“The name was a derogatory term applied to the new design team, who had just installed a fancy espresso coffee machine in the studio. One old-time engineer said it was a sign of the ‘yuppification’ of Apple, and started calling the team ‘espresso.’ The funny thing is, the designers didn’t get it and adopted the term for their new design language.”
Launched in 1992, Project Pomona would be one of Brunner’s parallel design investigations. Just like the Juggernaut project, Pomona involved the whole IDg, along with a few freelance designers. The ambition was large: Project Pomona aimed to imagine the first computer designed for the home, rather than the workplace. The end result would be a triumph—and a disaster.
Brunner created his own Pomona project design. His concept closely aligned with his prescription for a futuristic computer with a slim profile and powerful components. Brunner designed a wide, curved enclosure containing a flat-panel display flanked by a pair of big stereo speakers. It was a computer-cum-stereo, perfect for the kind of multimedia experience promised by CD-ROMs, then new to the market. To keep it slim, he proposed to use the guts from a PowerBook notebook. It would be made from—of all things—black mahogany, like a concert piano.

Since the other designers thought his concept looked more like a product from the high-end audio maker Bang & Olufsen than a PC, Brunner’s solution became the “B&O Mac.” The mating of a PC and stereo system was a novel idea at the time, and it generated a lot of excitement in the design studio. In fact, Brunner’s concept would trounce all other Pomona designs in focus groups in the summer of 1993 and, by the end of the project, was declared the winner of the Pomona competition.

Nearly a year had passed since Brunner released his brief, but the group had a good idea of the basic shape and scope of the project. So far so good.

To turn it into a real product, Brunner handed the project over to Jony in the summer of 1993. Jony had just finished his work on the Lindy MessagePad 110 and, when handed the B&O Mac by Brunner, he knew he was facing a tough challenge. Going back to basics, he started with the design story.

“On a technical level, we understood the challenges associated with packaging a lot of components into a very slim space,” Jony recalled later. “But philosophically, the project was more challenging. Like the first Macintosh, the design had no predecessors, which meant I had to come up with a new meaning for the product. I wanted the design to be simple almost to the point of being invisible.”

Ultimately, Jony would keep the spirit of Brunner’s concept but change almost everything else. He redesigned the proportions of the computer. Where Brunner’s initial design was wide and curved and appeared to take over a desk, Jony made it taller and much narrower. He changed the size of the foot of the base (which was called the bale) and created a hinge that allowed the foot to double as a carrying handle. Handles would feature prominently in Jony’s designs. He redesigned the back panel, giving more room to the CPU and motherboard.

In April 1994, after working on it all winter, Jony handed over his design to a pair of product design engineers to make a working prototype. As the prototype took shape, a marketing manager worked up an internal product brief. The machine gained the official code name “Spartacus.” After eighteen months, everything was on track to turn it into a real product.
As Spartacus was finalized for market, it was discovered that the integrated speakers presented a major problem: When the volume was cranked up, the internal CD-ROM skipped. The skipping vexed the team for several months until an engineer from Bose suggested a solution. He recommended the use of a much smaller pair of speakers on the desktop and adding a subwoofer on the floor, which could also accommodate the machine’s power brick. The fix worked, and the machine could deliver room-filling audio with only forty watts of power.

Making the changes meant a new working prototype wasn’t ready until December 1995. Then it was decided to add a newer, updated circuit board, and a larger liquid crystal display (LCD) screen. In June 1996, Prototype Two finally emerged.
Jony inherited a legacy at Apple that would help him thrive. “The Brunner era (1990–95) was by far the most productive and interesting period in Apple’s design history,” Paul Kunkel would write in AppleDesign. “IDg became the most visible and prestigious corporate design group in the world, won more design awards than the rest of the computer industry combined and reached a level where further improvement meant using its own work as a yardstick rather than the competition’s.” A string of successful and groundbreaking products set the template for the future, including the PowerBook (which anticipated today’s MacBooks); the Twentieth Anniversary Mac (the flat-screen iMac); and the Newton, which was a crude precursor to the iPhone and iPad.
No design slouch himself, Brunner became a partner in the San Francisco office of Pentagram in 1996. He worked with Amazon on the original Kindle, and with Nike and Hewlett-Packard, among many others. In 2007, Brunner helped create the Beats by Dr. Dre brand of headphones, which have been a mega success. In mid-2007, Brunner founded Ammunition, a design consultancy in San Francisco, where he’s worked with Barnes & Noble, Polaroid and Williams-Sonoma. He’s won a ton of awards, and his work is included in the permanent collections of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Windows 95 was Microsoft’s most shameful rip-off of the Mac operating system yet, but the software made their PCs good-enough facsimiles of the Mac. Cheap, utilitarian Windows 95 machines flew off the shelves, while Apple’s overpriced, incompatible machines did not.

Microsoft licensed its operating system to dozens of hardware makers, who competed stiffly and drove down prices. To stay afloat, Apple tried a desperate tactic. It licensed the Macintosh operating system to several computer makers, including Power Computing, Motorola, Umax and others, but the Mac market remained flat.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company had forty products on the market. To appreciate the baffling nature of Apple’s kitchen-sink strategy at the time, consider the company’s computer lineup.

There were four main lines: the Quadra, the Power Mac, the Performa and the PowerBook. Each was split into a dozen different models, which were delineated from one another with confusing product names straight out of a Sony catalog (for example, the Performa 5200CD, Performa 5210CD, Performa 5215CD and Performa 5220CD). And that was just computers. Apple had branched out into a wide-ranging product portfolio, selling everything from printers, scanners and monitors to Newton handhelds.
Jobs started a thorough product review; he set up in a large conference room and called in the product teams, one at a time. The teams, often numbering twenty or thirty people, would present their products and take questions from Jobs and other executives. At first they wanted to give PowerPoint presentations, but Jobs quickly banned them. He saw PowerPoints as rambling and nonsensical; he preferred getting people to talk and asking them questions. In these meetings, it soon became clear to Jobs that Apple was a rudderless ship.

After several weeks, during a big strategy meeting, Jobs had had enough.

“Stop!” he screamed, “This is crazy.”

He jumped up and went to the whiteboard. He drew a simple chart of Apple’s annual revenues. The chart showed the sharp decline, from $12 billion a year to $10 billion, and then $7 billion. Jobs explained that Apple couldn’t be a profitable $12 billion company, or a profitable $10 billion company, but it could be a profitable $6 billion company.

That meant radically simplifying Apple’s product pipeline. How? Jobs erased the whiteboard and drew a very simple two-by-two grid in its place. Across the top he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional,” and down the side, “Portable” and “Desktop.”

Welcome to Apple’s new product strategy, he said. Apple would sell only four machines. Two would be notebooks, the other two desktops. Two machines aimed at pros, two machines aimed at consumers.
Most executives would have thought twice about killing a well-loved product, and Newton lovers flooded Infinite Loop’s parking lots with placards and loudspeakers. (“I give a fig for the Newton,” one sign read.) PDAs were on the rise, thanks to the success of handhelds like the Palm Pilot, but to Jobs, the Newton was a distraction. He wanted Apple to concentrate on computers, its core product.
For Jobs, design amounted to more than appearances. “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” Jobs famously said. “People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
In 1981, with the PC revolution not yet five years old, 3 percent of U.S. households had a personal computer (including toy systems like the Commodores and Ataris). Only about 6 percent of Americans had even encountered a PC at home or work. Jobs understood that the home market presented a huge opportunity. “IBM has it all wrong,” he would say. “They sell personal computers as data-processing machines, not as tools for individuals.”
The Macintosh would be the world’s first all-in-one PC, with the screen, disk drives and circuitry all housed in the same case, with a detachable keyboard and mouse that plugged in the back. In addition, it shouldn’t take up too much space on a desk, so Jobs and his design team decided it should have an unusual vertical orientation, with the disk drive below the monitor, instead of to the side like other machines at the time.
As Jony would do in the next generation at Apple, Jobs paid close attention to every detail. Even the mouse was designed to reflect the shape of the computer, with the same proportions, and a single square button that corresponded to the shape and placement of the screen. The power switch was put around the back to stop it being switched off accidentally (especially by curious kids), and Manock thoughtfully put a smooth area around the switch to make it easier to find by touch.
At the time, Apple’s cheapest computer was $2,000, more than $800 above the average Windows PC. To be competitive against cheaper Windows offerings, Jobs initially pushed for a radically stripped-back machine called a “network computer” (also known as an NC), a hot idea in Silicon Valley at the time. The NC would be a cheap, simple terminal that connected to a central server over the Internet. It had no hard drive or optical disk drives, just a screen and keyboard. It was perfect for schools and workplaces and it seemed, at first glance, ideal for consumers eager to access the Internet.

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Jobs’s billionaire best friend, Larry Ellison, was especially bullish on NCs as the future of the computer industry. And as a newly installed member of Apple’s board, Ellison told the press that Apple was building an NC. He’d recently launched a start-up, Network Computing Inc., to kick-start the sector.

Influenced by Ellison’s thinking, but also eager to compete with him, Jobs also talked up the NC idea. “We’re going to beat Ellison at his own game,” he told his Apple colleagues with relish. Just as he’d done with the first Macintosh, Jobs began by laying out certain specifications: The Mac NC should be an all-in-one product, ready to use right out of the box, in a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for $1,200 or so.
The iMac had to be on the market in a matter of months or Apple would go out of business. To speed up the design process, Jony instigated a radical, integrated design process that transformed the way Apple developed its products. The workflow that the design group uses today is basically unchanged from the system Jony introduced.
Although Jony’s group had a small CAD team in the studio, it was still the early days of computer-aided design. The designers worked mostly with hand-drawn sketches and some early, relatively primitive 2-D CAD software. But Jony’s team needed to design in three dimensions, not two.

They found the answer in Alias Wavefront, a 3-D graphics package used in the aerospace, automotive and the fledgling computer-animation industry. Steve Jobs’s other company, Pixar, had used it for some special effects in Toy Story, released in 1995.
The design group in Jony’s early days also had an early and very expensive 3-D printer in the studio. “Apple had been at the forefront of modeling technology for many years,” said Dunn. “From the early nineties, Apple’s modeling group had a stereolithography (SLA) machine which could create complex 3-D models in several hours. The chemicals were extremely toxic, but the results were worth all the hassles.”

As Jony discovered in college, making detailed models was a key part of the design process. “When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation,” Jony said. “But when you made a 3-D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes—the entire process shifts. It galvanizes and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.”
Another important piece of software in reimagining the design process was Unigraphics, a 3-D engineering program developed by McDonnell Douglas for use in aerospace. Andresen and her group created software that allowed the 3-D models created by the surfacing guys in Alias to be imported into Unigraphics. From there, the product design group used Unigraphics to create workable products from the surfaces determined by the designers.
When Jony first showed Jobs the egg-shaped machine in the studio, he rejected it. But Jony persisted. He agreed with Jobs that it wasn’t quite right, but suggested it had a sense of fun. It was playful. “It has a sense that it’s just arrived on your desktop or it’s just about to hop off and go somewhere,” he told Jobs.

The next time Jony showed the egg shape to Jobs, the boss went nuts for it. Jobs started carrying the Foam Core model around campus, showing it to people to gauge their reaction. At the same time, he was cooling to the idea of a stripped-down network computer. Competing NCs already on the market, such as Microsoft’s WebTV and Apple’s own Pippin, sold by Bandai as @Mark in Japan, were getting zero traction in the marketplace.

Jobs ordered the NC be upgraded to a real computer with, among other things, a bigger hard drive and an optical drive.
Jony’s group made models in a reddish blue, almost purple, and in orange, but the solid plastic looked cheap, so someone suggested the case be transparent. Jony immediately approved of the idea. “It came across as cheeky,” he said. “That’s why we liked translucency.” Transparent plastic had already started to creep into some of Apple’s products, like printer trays and covers; the clamshell-shaped eMate, designed by Thomas Meyerhoffer, was made entirely of transparent plastic. At the time, Meyerhoffer told Macweek that translucency gave the eMate a sense of accessibility by allowing users to see inside. Once Jony decided to make the iMac transparent, he realized the internals would have to be designed with care, too, since they would now be visible. Jony was particularly worried about the electromagnetic shielding that went around some of the internal components, which in opaque products was usually hidden in a big, ugly sheet metal box.

Jony had the designers bring all the different transparent-colored items they could find into the studio for inspiration. “We had a taillight from a BMW,” said Satzger. “A lot of kitchen accessories. An old transparent thermos. Cheap flatware for picnics. We had a whole product shelf, full of these transparent products. We studied the qualities, the depth of a transparent product. The textures on the inside. The thermos was a big inspiration. It was a deep shiny blue, with a shiny thermos flask reflecting inside.”

Indeed, the final iMac, with its silver internal shielding visible through the transparent shell, resembles the transparent thermos married to a car taillight.
The iMac was code-named Columbus because it represented a new world. As Jony later expressed it, “With the first iMac the goal wasn’t to look different, but to build the best integrated consumer computer we could. If as a consequence the shape is different, then that’s how it is. The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”
Over the years, Apple had acquired a lot of legacy technologies, those elements that are becoming obsolete but aren’t quite there yet. The fast-moving technology industry is full of them. At the time, Apple’s legacy technologies included various parallel and serial ports for connecting mice, keyboards, printers and other peripherals. Like most computer makers, Apple tended to accommodate as many legacy technologies as possible. The company was loathe to lose a sale for the lack of a connector to hook up some old printer.

Jobs decided to make the iMac the first “legacy-free” computer. He ditched the old ADB, SCSI and serial ports, and included only Ethernet, infrared and USB. He also abandoned the floppy drive, a decision that drew more controversy than any other. These changes reflected Jobs’s simplification philosophy, which would soon come into play in many products. Jony, too, would become a master of the approach, agreeing with Jobs’s mantra: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
To make the ports accessible, Jony located them on the side of the machine. “One of the things that makes the backs of most computers look so agricultural is the ton of cables pouring out,” said Jony. “We moved the connectors to the side, which, functionally, makes them much easier to get to and keeps the back quite simple. The back of my computer may as well be its front in terms of what you see.”

Characteristically, Jony sweated the details, including the power cable, which he also wanted to be transparent. “You know how, when you take a shower, condensation forms on the glass? We wanted that same kind of exquisite matte surface finish on the cable.”
The transparent mouse made Jony particularly proud. “If you know how mice work, it’s quite intriguing,” he said. “You see through the Apple logo, like a little window on the top of the mouse, into this little mouse factory. You see the ball moving on twin axles—well, it’s actually pretty complicated and intriguing what goes on inside the mouse besides the ball rolling. We’ve tried fairly hard to layer what you can see inside. For the most part you just get a sense of what’s inside—a sense of materials reflecting light and a sense of forms and shapes. It’s only occasionally that you get a more literal view of what’s going on inside.”

On the downside, Jony’s perfectly round mouse proved to be an ergonomic nightmare. It was skittish on tabletops and difficult to orient properly; it was always pointing in the wrong direction and was too small for many adults. Users had to pinch their hands into a claw to use it, giving them cramps. Jobs was told that the mouse would be a problem, but in his race to market, he ignored the advice.
Apple set up a special factory in South Korea, where the iMac would be assembled in partnership with LG.
Jobs told them that he was betting the company on the computer, so it needed a great name. He suggested “MacMan,” a name, Segall said, to “curdle your blood.”

The new computer was a Mac, Jobs said, so the name had to reference the Macintosh brand. The name had to make clear the machine was designed for the Internet. The name also had to be adaptable for several other upcoming products. And the name had to be found quickly, since the packaging needed to be ready in a week.

Segall came back with five names. Four were ringers, placeholders for the name he loved—iMac. “It referenced the Mac, and the ‘i’ meant internet,” Segall says. “But it also meant individual, imaginative, and all the other things it came to stand for.”

Though Jobs rejected all five names, Segall refused to give up on iMac. He went back again with three or four new names, but again pitched iMac. This time, Jobs replied: “I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it.”

Segall heard nothing more about the name from Jobs personally, but friends told him that Jobs had the name silk-screened onto prototypes of the new computer, testing it out to see if he liked the look.

“He rejected it twice but then it just appeared on the machine,” Segall recalled. He came to believe that Jobs changed his mind just because the lowercase “i” looked good on the product itself.

“It’s a cool thing,” Segall remembered happily. “You don’t get to name too many products, and not ones that become so successful. It’s really great. I’m really delighted. It became the nomenclature for so many other products. Millions of people see that work.”

Over the last few years, the debate about dropping the “i” prefix has come up several times at Apple, Segall reported. “They’ve asked: ‘Should the company drop the ‘I’?’ But there’s a desire to keep it consistent: iMac, iPod, iPhone. It’s not as clean as it should be, but it works.”
Apple’s factory in Singapore produced the iMac’s motherboard, but the other components, including the revolutionary case, were made and assembled by LG in the specially set-up factory in South Korea.
“We flew direct from Seoul to San Francisco and an Apple truck came by at the airport and took them away. So they went from the factory to the airport, to Cupertino and to the Apple campus,” said Homayounfar. “They fired them up and got Steve to come and look at them. He cherry-picked the best ones and we were ready for the launch announcement.”

There were still bumps in the road ahead, however. The day before the launch, while practicing his presentation with a hastily assembled prototype, Jobs pressed a button on the front of the tray. The tray slid out.

“What the fuck is this?” he asked.
The iMac went on sale in August 1998 for $1,299. It sold 278,000 units in its first six weeks, and would sell 800,000 by the end of the year, making it the fastest-selling computer in Apple history.
Over the next few years, the iMac sparked an explosion of see-through plastic products, from Swingline staplers to the George Foreman grill. It was impossible to visit stores like Target without seeing see-through cameras, hair dryers, vacuum cleaners, microwaves and TVs, aisle after aisle of translucent plastic products with bulbous, organic shapes. The trend was especially pronounced in personal electronics with portable transparent CD players, pagers and boom boxes.

“What’s one of the hottest things in product design today?” asked USA TODAY in December 2000. “Translucence.” The paper called it “electronics voyeurism.”
The designers set to work building the cases and all their details, including CD drive lips, speaker enclosures, the back cover and the foot of the machine. A factory in China quickly built fifteen iMacs (with fake insides) in different colors.

Satzger chose mature, rich colors: a deep blue, “Amber beer,” “Blue glue,” and “green leaf.” Amazingly, he met the deadline, three weeks to the day.

“Oh, my God,” said Jobs when he walked into a room full of colorful new iMacs.

“Steve walked in and looked at all the models,” Satzger recalled. “He took the yellow one, picked it up and placed it in the corner of the room, turned round and said, ‘It looks like piss. I don’t like yellow.’...”
The new multicolored iMacs—code-named Lifesavers—were put into production and hit the market in January 1999, just four months after the original iMac went on sale. The five colors were given consumer-friendly names: strawberry, blueberry, tangerine, lime and grape. Their arrival was a significant first as the multicolored iMacs introduced the concept of fashion to an industry previously preoccupied with speeds and feeds.

The Lifesaver Macs were the first in a long series of rapid upgrades to the iMac. Over the next several years, the iMac would get faster chips, bigger hard drives, wireless networking and—perhaps most important, though few realized this at the time—an even wider range of colors and designs. With the second-generation iMac, the color options were updated to graphite, ruby, sage, snow and indigo, with some patterned machines toward the end, including “Flower Power” and “Blue Dalmatian.”
The shell also had an integrated carrying handle, which made the device look like a colorful plastic purse. A handle on a laptop made sense, just as it had on the Macintosh SketchPad that Jony helped design for Bob Brunner’s Juggernaut project. But again, it served a dual purpose: adding portability while encouraging a connection with the machine, making it less intimidating.

“The iBook has been designed to encourage users to touch it,” Jony explained. “The use of curved surfaces and rubberized materials give it an intimate, tactile feel.”
To start, the iBook’s case was made from a hard polycarbonate plastic bonded to thermoplastic polyurethane, the latter a rubbery compound that softened the case’s edges and made it resistant to bumps. The polycarbonate case was also bonded to the guts inside.
When the iBook did launch, one wag said it looked like “Barbie’s toilet seat,” a name that stuck. But the iBook was quickly a big hit with consumers, students and educators alike.
The iBook would also gain a place in history for popularizing Wi-Fi, the now ubiquitous wireless networking technology. Apple didn’t invent Wi-Fi, but it was the first computer maker to recognize its potential, like it did with USB ports on the iMac.
Apple had engineers involved with standards bodies (the committees that standardize technologies, like Bluetooth or USB, across the industry), and one of them alerted the executives to a new wireless networking technology called 802.11. As Schiller remembered, “We decided, really fast track . . . to change the physical design of all of our products to include antennas and card slots and to make a complete holistic solution to make 802.11 come out.” They decided to call their system of networking cards and base stations “Airport.”
The PowerBook featured a clever latch for the screen that descended from inside the lid as it was closed. To the delight of users, the latch seemed to pop out as if by magic, appearing at just the right time as the lid was nearly shut. New owners would open and close the lid obsessively just to see the latch appear and disappear.

The latch mechanism used a small magnet in the bottom half of the PowerBook’s body that pulled the latch out of a thin slot in the lid. It was a harbinger of things to come, as magnets would be used in a lot of clever ways in subsequent products, including the iPad 2, which would be awakened and put to sleep by a magnetic “Smart Cover.” One of the later flat-screen aluminum iMacs even had its screen attached by magnets, which allowed easy access to its guts.

Like the power button on the back of the original Macintosh, the PowerBook’s magnetic latch was the kind of detail that turned a good product into a great one. As Jerry Manock, the designer of the original Macintosh said, it’s the artisanal details that count. Jony would agree.

“The decisive factor is fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff; the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked,” said Jony.

Years later, designer Chris Stringer described the ID studio’s obsessive attention to small things. “We’re a pretty maniacal group of people,” he said. “If we design a button, there might be fifty models of the home button or a volume switch. We look at the edge detail and [ask] how far out does it protrude? Does it have a shaft? Is it round? Is it metal? Is it plastic? The size, length, width, height. Every single detail is very cleverly crafted.”
In design, details like buttons and latches that make a design pop have a name: They’re called “jewelry.” In the auto industry, door handles and radiator grilles have the same name and the same effect. The new Apple products took these elements to a new level. “We really focused on the jewel pieces,” said Satzger. “We strove for really high quality. We wanted beautiful finishing, really high-quality surfaces on them.”
Jony’s team instructed the supplier of the PowerBook’s power button to make several samples before getting the contract. Each sample contained twelve slightly different power buttons, all machined in stainless steel. “You can barely see the difference between them,” said Satzger, smiling apologetically at the group’s fastidiousness. “The subtleties are crazy.”
For the Ice iBook, Jony’s continued concern for durability prompted him to combine a polycarbonate shell with an internal magnesium frame. Critical components such as the hard drive were shock-mounted with rubber gaskets, like the engine in a car. Elements susceptible to damage, such as doors, external buttons and latches, were eliminated. Instead, the entire product was almost hermetically sealed by its external surfaces. Even the sleep-state light-emitting diode (LED) indicator did not penetrate the external skin and only became visible when the unit was asleep, as it gently cycled from dim to bright.
The Ice iBook was made of transparent polycarbonate, with a white coating of paint applied to the inside surface. The transparent outer shell created a “halo” around the product, which gave the surface a surprising depth. It also made the product appear smaller than it actually was. It was scratch resistant, because the paint was on the inside. Painting the inside surface of the plastic may have been inspired by Jony’s experiment at RWG, where he painted slides with gouache to create his spectacular mock-up sketches. The halo would be a popular effect used on many other products, most notably the iPod, and it persists in the glass screen of the latest iPhone and iPad.
The Cube was actually a rectangle formed from a single piece of crystal-clear plastic that was translucent at the base, giving the impression that the eight-inch Cube was suspended in air. It had a vertical slot-load DVD drive on the top, which popped up the DVD like a piece of toast. Some compared the Cube to a box of Kleenex. The analogy greatly amused Jony and the designers, and they took to using empty Cubes in the design studio as tissue dispensers.
To turn the Cube on, there was a touch-sensitive button that appeared to be printed on the surface of the transparent case. It seemed magical, as though the button floated in air, detached from the computer with no visible means of operation. It was an early use of capacitive touch (the technology that would eventually make the iPhone possible). Customers loved it.
The transparent case developed hairline cracks, an issue that got a lot of attention in the press. On some machines, tiny cracks appeared in the clear plastic case, especially around the DVD slot and a pair of screw holes in the top. It was a relatively minor cosmetic flaw, but it drove some customers crazy. “They are the worst kind of cosmetic problem,” wrote the Ars Technica Web site in its review.
In July 2001, Apple issued a press release saying the Cube had been “put on ice.” It wouldn’t continue to be sold, but it wasn’t officially discontinued either; it was suspended. The release said there was “a small chance” an upgraded model of the computer would be introduced in the future. That never happened and, five years later, the Cube was replaced by the Mac mini, a much cheaper “headless” Mac, which clearly targeted first-time, budget-conscious consumers.
A glass cube measuring about twelve feet by twelve feet, it’s the only private office in the studio. The front wall and door are made of glass with stainless steel fittings, just like the ones in Apple’s stores. Except for a small shelf system, Jony’s office is bare with plain white walls, featuring no pictures of his family or design awards, just a desk, chair and lamp.

His leather chair is a Supporto chair from the UK office furniture manufacturer Hille. Designed in 1979 by the award-winning designer Fred Scott, the leather and aluminum chair is recognized as a design masterpiece. Jony himself cited it as one of his favorite designs (“the Supporto is a wonderful chair,” Jony told ICON magazine), and he selected it for the new Industrial Design Centre in Cupertino, California, and for his designers, all of whom sit at Supporto desks with leather chairs.

Jony’s desk was custom-made by London-based designer Marc Newsom, one of his best friends. The desk is usually bare except for his seventeen-inch MacBook and several colored pencils used for drawing, which are typically arranged neatly on his desk. He doesn’t use an external monitor or other peripheral equipment.
Music is an important part of the design studio’s atmosphere. There are about twenty white speakers in the room, with a pair of thirty-six-inch-high concert subwoofers. “When you walked into this concrete and steel, highly reflective room, the sound was immediately deep and loud,” Satzger remembered. “All kinds of music from around the world is played. It’s really lively. We had so much music on that thing, you could pick anything.”

Jony is a big fan of techno—music that drove Jony’s boss, Jon Rubinstein, to distraction. “They played loud techno-pop in the design studio,” he said. “I like quiet so that I can focus and think properly. But the ID guys liked it.”
Jony’s ID group has become a tightly knit team, as many of them have worked together for decades. They no longer design Apple’s products alone, but each product has a designated design lead, the designer who does most of the actual work, plus one or two deputies.

Weekly meetings ensure the design process is collaborative. Two or three times a week, Jony’s entire team gathers around the kitchen table for brainstorming sessions. All of the designers must be present. No exceptions. The sessions typically last for three hours, starting at nine or ten a.m.

The brainstorms begin with coffee. A couple of the designers play barista, making coffee for the group from a high-end espresso maker in the kitchen. Daniele De Iuliis, the Italian from the United Kingdom, is regarded as the coffee guru. “Danny D was the person who educated us all on coffee and grind and the color of the crema, how to properly do the milk, how temperature is important and all that stuff,” said Satzger, who was one of his keenest disciples.

When it’s time to get down to it, the brainstorms are freewheeling, creative roundtables where everyone is expected to contribute. Jony runs the brainstorms, but he doesn’t dominate them.

“Jony’s always been involved in every design session,” said one designer.
Sketching is fundamental to their workflow. “I end up sketching everywhere,” said Stringer. “I’ll sketch on loose-leaf paper. I’ll sketch on models. I’ll sketch on anything I can put my hands on, quite often on top of CAD outputs for want of better things to do.” Stringer likes CAD printouts, he’s said, because they already have the shape of the product. “You’re working with something that already has the perspective set up and the views in a way that you can sort of add in lavish detail upon them,” he said.

Jony is also an inveterate sketcher. He is a good at it, but emphasizes speed over detail. “He always wanted to get a thought down on paper so that people could understand it really quickly,” said Satzger. “Jony’s drawings were really sketchy, with a shaky hand. His drawing style was really interesting.”
Jony’s group frequently uses Fancy Models Corporation, a model-making company based in Fremont and run by Ching Yu, a model maker from Hong Kong. Most of the iPhone and iPad prototypes were made by Fancy Models. Each model costs in the range of $10,000 to $20,000. “Apple spent millions on models made by that company,” said a former designer.
Jony’s role at Apple evolved, as he became more managerial than design driven. Jony both ran the group and recruited new members. He was the conduit of information between the design group and the rest of the company, especially at the executive level. He worked very closely with Steve Jobs when he was alive—and now with Apple’s executives—to select what products to work on and what directions they should take. Nothing is done without his input, whether it’s the color of a product or the detail of a button. “Everything is reviewed by Jony,” said one of the designers.
Thanks to Napster, music was rapidly turning digital and CD burners were taking off. Apple would be almost the last computer maker to add CD burners to its computers. In an attempt to catch up, the company bought a third-party MP3 jukebox program for the Mac, SoundJam MP, from a small company, Casady & Greene. Apple also hired Casady & Greene’s hotshot programmer, Jeff Robbin.

Robbin’s team relocated to Apple’s HQ and set about retooling SoundJam, stripping out a lot of features to make it accessible to first-time users. Under the direction of Jobs, Robbin spent several months simplifying the program, which Jobs introduced as iTunes at the Macworld Expo in January 2001.
Jony particularly liked an MP3 player that resembled the iMac’s hockey-puck mouse, dressed out in transparent red plastic. Inspired by a yo-yo, the device had a groove around its perimeter for holding the earbud’s wires, which slotted into cutouts on the back. (It looked like a round version of the earbud packaging used with the iPhone 5.) The player was controlled by a series of buttons arranged in a circle, with a small black-and-white screen in the middle. It resembled what, eventually, would be the familiar iPod scroll wheel, but at that time was purely button based with no wheel to turn. Jony’s team made other versions, including some for watching video, but none of the prototypes were very compelling.
At the end of February 2001, Jobs and Rubinstein were in Japan for Macworld Tokyo. Rubinstein took a routine meeting with Toshiba Corporation, one of Apple’s major component suppliers. At the end of their discussion, his hosts showed him a new hard drive, only 1.8 inches in diameter. Though tiny, it had five gigabytes of data storage—enough to hold an astounding one thousand CDs.

The Toshiba engineers didn’t know what to do with the hard drive and asked Rubinstein if they should put it in a camera. Rubinstein smiled but kept his thoughts to himself. He went straight back to the hotel and told Jobs he knew how to build Apple’s MP3 player. All he needed was a ten-million-dollar check.

Jobs told him to go for it, but with a catch: He wanted the new device delivered by Christmas that year, meaning Rubinstein had to have the product ready by August in order to make the marketing cycle for the crucial holiday shopping season. Ruby had six months to come up with Apple’s first MP3 player.
As Rubinstein remembers, his biggest initial problem was that everybody at Apple, including Jony’s ID group, was already busy with other products. As was usual with such exploratory, blue-sky projects, Apple went looking for an outside consultant.

Someone recommended Tony Fadell, a designer/engineer who specialized in handheld hardware and digital audio. Fadell had worked for General Magic, an Apple spinoff, and developed PDAs for Philips before launching his own start-up, Fuse Networks, in the late 1990s.

Fadell’s twelve-person firm was busy trying to build an MP3 stereo player, a conventional rack-mounted component with a hard drive and CD reader instead of a tape deck or FM radio. Fadell had shopped his idea around without much success, approaching the Swiss watch giant Swatch and Palm Inc. His conversations with Real Networks brought him to Rubinstein’s attention.

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Only after Fadell signed a confidentiality contract did Rubinstein tell him about iTunes and their desire to build an MP3 player to hook into it.
Rubinstein offered Fadell an eight-week contract to analyze what it would take to build an MP3 player. He had to figure out the battery, screen, chips and other components, plus what kind of team would be required to get it made. When he was done, a feasibility study would be reported to Jobs.

Fadell was assigned an internal contact, hardware marketing manager Stan Ng. The two quickly formulated the design story for the new product. “‘In your pocket’ became the mantra for the product, because that was definitely the size and form factor that hit the sweet spot,” Ng said.
A design emerged: a simple rectangle, about the size of a cigarette pack. Since it felt too light in his hand, he gave it heft by adding some old fishing weights he found in his garage. He flattened them with a hammer, then slid them between the model’s foam boards.
...Phil Schiller surprised everyone when he left the room and returned with several models for an MP3 player that featured a scroll wheel. Schiller explained that a wheel was the best way to navigate quickly through any list, whether of names and addresses or songs. The more you turned the wheel, he explained, the faster the list would scroll, making it quick to get to the bottom of a very long list. He pointed out that to select something, you hit the bull’s-eye in the middle.

Schiller had gotten the idea in a meeting where he’d been examining competing MP3 players. He’d been irritated by having to hit a tiny button hundreds of times to go up and down a menu one song at a time. “You can’t hit the Plus button a thousand times!” he said. “So I figured, if you can’t go up, why not go around?” He found that scroll wheels were actually fairly common in electronics, from scrolling mice to Palm thumb wheels. Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones had a dial for navigating lists of phone contacts and calls that resembled the one that eventually became a signature element in the iPod’s design.

Jobs asked Fadell if he could build Schiller’s scroll wheel. Fadell said yes, of course. The project was code-named P-68.
For reasons that no one seems to remember, P-68 came to be known among insiders as “Project Dulcimer.”
To meet the tight production deadline, Fadell matched up the drive from Toshiba with a cell phone battery and screen from Sony; a stereo digital-to-analog converter from a small Scottish company, Wolfson Microelectronics; a FireWire interface controller from Texas Instruments; a flash memory chip from Sharp Electronics; a power management/battery charging chip from Linear Technologies Inc.; and an MP3 decoder and controller chip from PortalPlayer.
The earliest prototypes were built in reinforced Perspex boxes about the size of shoe boxes, which made them easy to debug. The big shoe boxes also helped disguise the fact they were working on a music player, because the team couldn’t tell anyone what they were working on, even inside the company. To further obscure what they were doing, the teams put the buttons and screen in different places each time a new prototype was made. One engineer noted that it was all a silly subterfuge; a single look inside revealed immediately it was a small pocket device.

Jony’s role, as he recalled later, was to help fulfill the design brief they’d been handed for Project Dulcimer. It was, in short, to create something “very, very new.”
Jony named Richard Howarth the lead designer, and they used Fadell’s chunk of Foam Core as a reference. The big challenge was to design the user interface. Locating the screen was an issue, and so was whether or not to use buttons. The method of selecting songs was critical. The process inevitably reduced and reduced, resulting in a device with four buttons mounted on a dial.

Jobs worked on the interface with Tim Wasko, a veteran user interface (UI) designer who’d been at NeXT. Wasko was also working with Robbin on the UI for iTunes. He’d previously impressed Jobs with the metallic interface he created for QuickTime 4, which Jobs eventually adopted in most of Apple’s software, so he was given the job of figuring out the UI for the iPod.

He started by mapping out all the options a user would face when selecting a song: the artists, their albums and finally all the songs on a particular album. “When I diagrammed it out it was a series of lists connected to each other,” he said. “It was a question of pressing a button to go down to the next list, and pressing another button to come back up.”

Wasko created a demo in Adobe Director, a multimedia authoring program, that was pretty simple and straightforward. Before he showed it to Jobs, he replaced the original cursor keys from a keyboard with a USB jog wheel for editing video. The jog wheel had a central dial for scrubbing through video, and several buttons above and below it. Wasko drew paper labels for the four buttons on the bottom (play/pause, backward, forward and menu) and ignored the buttons on top. It worked great. Jobs was delighted with the system but pushed Wasko to get rid of the fourth button. Wasko should have known better. “If you give Steve one thing, he’s going to hate it, even if it’s great,” remembered Wasko. “So you have to make some other crap to put on the table.”

Wasko had brought nothing to sacrifice, and so he tried to find a way to get rid of one of the buttons. He labored for weeks but he just couldn’t find a way to navigate the hierarchy with just three buttons. “We worked our butts off on that thing,” he said.

Jobs finally acquiesced to the extra button, and Wasko took his Mac and jog wheel over to show Jony at the ID studio. “It was a quick meeting,” Wasko said. “They already knew it was going to be a wheel. I just showed Jony how the interface worked.”

Jony started experimenting with different places to put the screen and scroll wheel, but the options were limited. His team initially wanted to put four buttons above the wheel, just below the screen, but then decided to put the buttons around the scroll wheel instead. This made them easy to press with a thumb while turning the wheel.
To the consternation of a lot of users and reviewers, at least at first, an on-off button was omitted. The idea of pressing any button to turn the device on—and then to have it turn itself off after a period of inactivity—was a stroke of minimalist genius.
Other standard features of portable consumer electronics disappeared too, among them the battery compartment. Most gadgets had removable batteries, meaning they need a battery door, plus an internal wall to seal the device’s guts from the user when the battery door is opened. Jony dispensed with both. A tighter, smaller product resulted, and Apple’s research had already shown that no one changed their batteries anyway, even if they said they did. The sealed battery would cause an outcry, of course, because users (and reviewers especially) had come to expect a replaceable battery as a standard feature. But dispensing with it allowed the iPod’s case to be just two pieces, comprising a stainless steel back, called the “canoe,” which snapped into an acrylic face via an internal latching mechanism. Fewer parts also meant fewer “tolerances” (gaps) in manufacturing the product (when adjacent components are supposed to be flush, the design must allow for a tolerance; with fewer parts, alignment issues diminish).

Jony would use the same basic schema for subsequent sealed products, including several generations of iPods, the iPhone, iPad and MacBooks. “They are basically a screen and a back cover—just two parts,” said Satzger. “It’s a better product. A much better product.”

The stainless steel back turned out to be a contentious choice: It looked great right out of the box, but was easily scratched and dented. Even if it wasn’t the most obvious choice of material, the stainless steel worked, according to design consultant Chris Lefteri. “It is actually a completely irrational use of that material in that context,” he said, noting that most other companies would have picked more durable plastic. “To put stainless steel on the back of a portable music player makes no logical sense, because it scratches easily, it dents, it is very heavy—but it absolutely worked.” One Apple executive said Jony’s group chose steel simply because it was the thinnest, strongest material they could quickly work with.
The white color of the iPod was Jony’s idea. Jony regarded Apple’s Kubrickian white stage as a reaction to the crazy color stage, which itself was a reaction to beige. “Right from the very first time, we were thinking about the product, we’d seen [the iPod] as stainless steel and white,” he said. “It’s just so . . . so brutally simple. It’s not just a color. Supposedly neutral—but just an unmistakable, shocking neutral.” White also sent a message that the machine wouldn’t dominate the user, unlike black tech products that tended to come off as “technical” or “nerdy.”

“Shockingly neutral white” became the new normal for all of Apple’s consumer products at the time. The new iMac and iBooks, as yet unreleased, were also fashioned in white plastic. “There was a whole new design language going through the shop,” said the former executive. Product designer Satzger’s recollections agree: “The iPod was white because the second-generation iBook was white. Most of the things Jony Ive did historically at design school back in England were white, and he started pushing white at Apple.”

Initially, Jobs’s instincts were against white products. Satzger at one point developed a keyboard in arctic white; when Jobs hated it, he’d presented different shades, none of them strictly white. His range of whites for plastic materials included shades he called cloud white, snow white, and glacial white. Another was moon gray, which appeared white but was actually gray. When Satzger showed Jobs a moon gray chip, he could offer reassuringly, “It’s not white.” A sly move, as Jobs approved the moon gray keyboard. Likewise, the iconic iPod headphone cables weren’t white, but moon gray. “Moon gray and seashell gray were shades developed by us at Apple that were so close to white as to appear almost white, but were in fact gray,” explained Satzger.
Prior to launch of the new player, nothing was left out of consideration, including the new product’s packaging. The packaging became almost as important as the overall product design. Previously, boxes were designed primarily for shipping, but with the iPod, the design team focused on the customer, rather than the transport company. The decision was made to design separate shipping containers and retail boxes so the customer wouldn’t be taking home his or her iPod in a plain-Jane shipping box. The result was an elaborate box that cradled the iPod like a piece of jewelry. “The iPod was the first product where we thought about the packaging as almost as important as the overall product design,” Satzger explained. “Packaging, it’s just as important as everything else.”
When Jobs first pulled the iPod from his jeans pocket, the reaction from the audience was muted. It didn’t seem that exciting, especially when the audience learned of its price: $499. Nearly $500 for an MP3 player—and one that worked only on the Mac, not Windows—seemed unrealistically high. Early reviewers were just as skeptical, with one saying that iPod stood for “Idiots Price Our Devices.” The iPod sold only modestly at first and didn’t take off until two years later, when it was made fully compatible with Windows. Still, the seeds of the iPod’s success were sown with the first device and Jony was confident in the new product.
“[The iPod] was the first cultural icon of the 21st century,” said Dr. Michael Bull, a lecturer at the University of Sussex whose studies have earned him the nickname “Professor iPod.” “Roland Barthes argued that, in medieval society, cathedrals were the iconic form. Then, by the 1950s, it had become the car. . . . I argue that 50 years later, it was the iPod, this technology that let you fit your whole world into your pocket. It was representative of a key moment in the social world of the 21st century.”
As with the marketing of the iPod, Jony’s team also designed the iMac’s packaging. Boxes may seem trivial, but Jony’s team felt that unpacking a product greatly influenced the all-important first impressions. “Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging,” Jony said then. “I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”

Though they took the process seriously, that didn’t mean they lacked a sense of humor. As a joke, the design team designed the inside of the iMac G4’s box to look like male genitals. “You had the neck laying there and the two ball speakers next to it,” said Satzger. “People would open the box and say ‘What?’”
...Jony indulged his old passion for cars. He treated himself to an Aston Martin DB9, a supercar known for its association with James Bond. Jony had the car delivered to New York and drove it cross-country with his dad, Mike. It cost about $250,000, but just a month after he got it, Jony wrecked the car on Interstate 280 near San Bruno. The accident nearly killed him and his commuting partner, Daniele De Iuliis, who was riding in the passenger seat.

“Jony was going pretty fast, although he said he was not going over eighty miles per hour,” said a colleague. “Something happened in the traffic. Jony lost control of the car, which went into a spin. It sling-shotted the back end, whacked into a panel truck and knocked that over, and went straight into the median. The whole car was smashed. They were lucky to get out alive. The car was a mess; totally fucked up on all sides.”

The car’s airbags went off, filling the car with the smell of the explosive that set off the airbags. Jony found the smell unsettling as he came to. “He woke up with the smell of gunpowder in the car and that was weird. He was distressed by that,” said another source. “Ironically, the car crash alerted Apple to how important Jony is to the company, and they gave him a big pay rise.”

Jony was undeterred in his quest for speed and cool cars: He bought a second DB9. When it burst into flames parked outside his garage, he complained to Aston Martin. “Him being English and his relationship with Steve and Apple, he went to Aston Martin and they told him they’d give him a great deal,” said a source.

The company offered him a discount to move up to the Vanquish (2004–2005 model), a $300,000 grand touring car with a monstrous V12 engine. Soon after, Jony bought a white Bentley, another powerful British luxury car. He also purchased a Land Rover LR3 after one of his colleagues in the design studio bought one. “Jony wanted one as well and got one within days,” said a source. Later, Jony added a black Bentley Brooklands to his stable. Costing about $160,000, the Brooklands was hand assembled with lots of interior wood and leather. It’s another powerful machine, capable of reaching sixty miles per hour from a standing stop in five seconds.

As well as being fast and powerful, Aston Martins are known for their innovative production methods. Their cars are built from unusual, lightweight materials like aluminum, magnesium and carbon fiber. The all-aluminum chassis is glued together rather than welded, which makes it incredibly strong and resistant to cracking. Jony would soon introduce similar production methods to Apple’s manufacturing arsenal.
In continuing the process of miniaturization, which had shrunk all of the iPod’s components, the iPod mini hit the market in January 2004 with a smaller, solid-state click wheel that was touch-sensitive. The buttons at the four compass points were incorporated into the wheel itself. “The click wheel was designed out of necessity for the mini because there wasn’t enough room for [the buttons on] the full size iPod,” said Jobs. “But the minute we experienced it, we just thought, ‘Oh my God! Why didn’t we think of this sooner?’”

Jony offered a more detailed version of the mini’s development. Originally conceived as a small iPod, the first versions, which used the same materials and design language, weren’t working. “It was just completely wrong,” Jony said. “Then we started to explore very different materials and approaches. We realized we could make this in aluminum. Unlike with stainless steel, you could blast it and then anodize it—which is a form of dyeing—and then you could do color in an unusual way.”

That first foray into aluminum would influence a whole generation of products. Like the iMac before it, the iPod mini would come in a range of colors. It was a big hit; the fastest-selling iPod up to that time, especially with women. It was the first iPod that people started wearing on their bodies, outside their pockets, with a strap or a clip. Some treated it like an accessory, a piece of fashion jewelry. The mini also kick-started the trend of having a small, dedicated iPod just for the gym or running.

In just four years, Apple took the iPod from the 6.4 oz. original to the 4.8 oz. nano. In the process, storage was increased sixfold, a color screen and video playback were added and battery life was extended to four hours. And the price was reduced by $100. Eventually, Apple was selling a player at every $50 price point between $50 and $550, including the shuffle, which dispensed with the screen, an exercise in ballsy minimalism that perhaps only Jony and Jobs could have pulled off.
Canada’s Saturday Post called the iPod “the defining device of this generation’s iWant-iNeed-iWish gadgetophiles.” Its ubiquity and “no beige please, we’re British” design philosophy granted it permanent icon status.
Former design team leader Bob Brunner gave his view on the travails: “Apple designers spend ten percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming. They spend ninety percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas.” It’s little wonder, then, than Jony’s star was ascendant in a company where design and materials had become the industrial equivalent of conjoined twins.
The intimacy of design and manufacturing is what led apple to China. Apple’s shift to manufacturing its products in China has been credited to Tim Cook, the company’s CEO and Jobs’s chosen successor.

Jobs himself had been managing Apple’s suppliers and factories when he hired Cook in 1998 as senior vice president of operations. Raised in Robertsdale, Alabama, Cook was formerly an operations executive at Compaq and had spent twelve years at IBM. With his cool demeanor, he bonded immediately with the volatile Jobs, who had already rejected a number of candidates for the operations manager role, walking out of at least one interview within five minutes. But the formidable CEO connected with Cook and offered him the job, giving him an office near his own.
Jobs’s streamlining of Apple’s product line to just four products simplified things. Instead of four motherboards for desktops, there was now just one. The machines in his 2×2 product matrix shared as many common parts as possible, and instead of using exotic Mac-only technology, they used industry standard parts shared by other PC manufacturers.
When Apple introduced the iMac in 1998, it was initially made at the three Apple factories, though LG made the iMac cases and monitors. In February 1999, the company shifted streams, outsourcing the iMac entirely to LG and selling off Apple’s factories. In 2000, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. took over iMac production. The electronics manufacturer, based in Taiwan, is better known internationally as Foxconn.

Cook would do the same thing with laptops, shifting production from Apple factories to Quanta Computer in Taiwan (for the PowerBook) and Alpha Top Corporation in Taiwan (the iBook). By moving production to outside partners, Cook solved one of Apple’s biggest headaches: inventory, namely, stock sitting in storage. The more parts and machines Apple had in its warehouses, the more money the inventory cost the company. Warehouses full of unsold machines had nearly sunk Apple in 1996, so the new normal had become the less inventory, the better. Cook once referred to inventory as “not only evil, but fundamentally evil.”
Within seven months of Cook’s arrival, Apple had reduced its on-hand inventory from thirty days to six. By 1999, inventory had been reduced to just two days, beating by far the industry’s gold standard, Dell. Thanks to improved operations, Cook was credited with playing a big part in stemming Apple’s losses and returning it to profitability.

Over the years, Cook fine-tuned the system until it was capable of delivering millions of products in secret just in time for massive product launches, accounting for much of Apple’s massive growth. In overseeing Apple production lines, Cook successfully managed not only to keep inventory low but to keep profit margins high at Apple. The company could never have grown so rapidly and so large without such operational excellence.
Another reason Apple shifted manufacturing to China was that the design team started designing products in aluminum, and that’s where the supply chain was located.
For better and for worse, Apple has become the poster child for the ills of offshore manufacturing. Foxconn assembly plants in particular have attracted criticism; after a rash of worker suicides in 2009, negative international attention resulted in investigations that exposed a host of labor abuses.

Foxconn had as many as half a million workers in some of its plants, assembling iPhones and iPads by hand. The workers, mostly young, lived in dormitories, ate in shifts in gigantic communal canteens and often worked eighty- to one-hundred-hour weeks.
The input engineering team had built a giant experimental system to test multi-touch. It was a big capacitive display about the size of a Ping-Pong table, with a projector suspended above it. The projector shone the Mac’s operating system onto the array, which was a mass of wires.

“This is going to change everything,” Jony told the design team after he saw it. Jony wanted to show the system to Steve Jobs, but he was afraid his boss would pour cold water on it because it was still raw and unpolished. Jony reasoned that he had to show the work in progress to Jobs in private, with no one else around. “Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I didn’t show him stuff in front of other people,” Jony said. “He might say ‘This is shit,’ and snuff the idea. I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad because I know it was so important.”

Jony followed his instincts and showed Jobs the system in private. The gambit worked, and Jobs loved the idea. “This is the future,” said Jobs.
Multi-touch might have been new to Jony’s design team, but it wasn’t new in academia. The origins of the technology stretched back to the sixties, when researchers worked out the first crude electronics for touch-based sensors. Systems that could detect multiple touches simultaneously were invented in 1982 at the University of Toronto, and the first workable multi-touch screens appeared in 1984, the same year Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh. The marketplace didn’t see multi-touch products until the late nineties. Among the first were a gesture-based input pad for computers and a touch-sensitive keyboard-cum-mouse, from a small Delaware company called FingerWorks.

Early in 2005, Apple quietly acquired FingerWorks and immediately pulled its products from the market. News of the buyout didn’t leak for more than a year, when the two FingerWorks founders, Wayne Westerman and John Elias, started filing new touch patents for Apple.

After Chaudhri and Ording’s crude mock-up showed that a finger-controlled tablet would work, Jony’s industrial design team set about building more finished prototypes. Bart Andre, who also has a mechanical bent, and Danny Coster led the design work. One of the prototypes they created, known internally as “Model 035,” formed the basis for a patent filed on March 17, 2004.

Model 035 was a large, white tablet that looked like the lid of one of Apple’s white plastic iBooks from the time. Though it lacked a keyboard, it was based on iBook components. The 035 had no home button and a significantly thicker and wider base than would the 2010 iPad. But the two devices share rounded edges and a black bezel surrounding the screen. It ran a modified version of Mac OS X.
In 2005, Apple teamed up with Motorola to release an “iTunes phone” called the ROKR E1. It was a candy-bar-shaped phone that could play music purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Users could load songs through iTunes and play them through an iPod-like music app. But the limitations of the phone doomed it from the start. It could hold just one hundred songs, transferring songs from a computer was slow and the interface was horrible. Jobs could barely conceal his disdain for it.

On the other hand, the Motorola ROKR phone made it apparent to all concerned that Apple needed to make its own phone. Customers wanted the experience of a full iPod on their phones, but, given Jobs’s insistence on Apple standards, another company could hardly be trusted to get it right.
To mitigate the risk, Apple’s executives hedged their bets. They would develop two phones in parallel and pit them against each other. The secret phone project was code-named Purple, shortened to just “P.” One phone project, based on the iPod nano, got the code name P1; the other phone, led by Jony, was a brand new multi-touch device based on the 035 tablet, code-named P2.
...the P1 had too many limitations. Just dialing a number was a pain, and the device was too limited. It couldn’t surf the Net; it couldn’t run apps. Fadell said later that the iPod-plus-phone was a “heated topic” of discussion at Apple. The biggest problem was that it had forced the team into a design corner. Using the existing device limited their design options in a way that was not optimal to the task. “[The P1] had a little screen and this hardware wheel and we were stuck with that... but sometimes you have to try things in order to throw it away.”

After six months of work on the iPod-plus-phone P1, Jobs killed the project. “Honestly, we can do better, guys,” he told the team.
Jony’s design team worked on the iPhone without ever seeing the operating system. They initially worked with a blank screen and later, a picture of the interface with cryptic mock icons. Likewise, the software engineers never got to see the prototype hardware. “I still don’t know what the lightning icon means,” one of the designers later remarked, referring to one of the icons on the fake iOS screen.
“On the front door of the purple dorm, we put a sign up that said ‘Fight Club’ because the first rule of Fight Club in the movie is you don’t talk about Fight Club, and the first rule about the purple project is you do not talk about that outside of those doors.”
Late in the fall of 2004, Jony’s design team began work on two distinct design directions. One, called Extrudo, was led by Chris Stringer, and it resembled the iPod mini. It was made from a flattened tube of extruded aluminum and could be anodized in different colors. Apple already had big production lines making and anodizing iPod cases in huge numbers. That was one advantage of that direction, along with the fact that Jony and team loved what could be done with extrusion.

The other design, called Sandwich, was led by Richard Howarth. Made mostly of plastic, with a plastic screen, the Sandwich design was rectangular with evenly rounded corners. It had a metal band running around the midpoint of its body, a centered display on the front face, a menu button centered below the screen and a speaker slot centered above the screen.

Jony and his team preferred the Extrudo look and gave it the most attention. They tried cases that were extruded along the x-axis, and some along the y-axis. But problems surfaced immediately. Extrudo’s hard edges hurt the designers’ faces when they put it up to their ears. Jobs especially hated this.

To make the hard edges softer, plastic end caps were added, which also helped with the radio antennas. The iPhone would have three radios: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a cell radio. But radio waves won’t pass through a metal shell, so the plastic endcaps became essential.

The team struggled to solve Extrudo’s problems, but engineering tests made it clear this particular design direction wouldn’t work unless the plastic endcaps for the radios got bigger. But bigger caps would ruin the clean Extrudo look. “We made books and books filled with pages of designs trying to figure out how not to break up the design because of the antenna, how not to make the earpiece too hard and sharp, and so on,” said Satzger. “But it seemed like all the solutions that added comfort detracted from the overall design.”

The Extrudo design had another problem that nagged at Jobs: The metal bezel detracted from the screen. The design didn’t “defer” to the screen, which had been one of Jony’s original goals. Jony later recalled his flush of embarrassment when Jobs pointed it out.

Apple killed Extrudo; the team was left with Sandwich.
By February 2006, several redesigns had come and gone. Jony was so dissatisfied with the progression that, during one of the brainstorms, he asked designer Shin Nishibori to make an exploratory version of the phone with Sony-style design cues. Later, he would contend that his request was not to copy Sony specifically, but to inject some fresh, “fun” ideas into the process.

Shin Nishibori had been a well-known young designer in Japan for years before coming to work at Apple. Traces of a Sony/Japanese influence have appeared in Nishibori’s work on Apple products since 2001, and Steve Jobs, Jony and other Apple designers had often expressed admiration for Japan’s minimalist aesthetic.

In February and March 2006, Nishibori designed and built several phones that borrowed elements seen in Sony products of the time, including a jog wheel, which was a control-wheel-cum-switch that was used on Sony’s CLIÉ personal digital assistants. Nishibori even put the Sony logo on the backs—except for one that he jokingly labeled a Jony.
From the beginning, Satzger remembered, the team had a “strong interest” in a design that used two pieces of shaped glass. One of the prototypes they built had a split screen. Above was the screen, below a software-driven touch pad that changed depending on function. Sometimes it was a dial pad, at other times a keyboard. But the problem of making glass convex proved too difficult.
...Apple found a small company in Taiwan called TPK that was producing them for point-of-sale displays using an innovative but limited-run technique. Jobs made a handshake deal with the company, promising that Apple would buy every screen the factory could produce. Based on this agreement, TPK invested $100 million to rapidly ramp up their manufacturing capabilities. They ended up supplying about 80 percent of the screens for the first iPhone, growing rapidly to a $3 billion business by 2013.
In 1960, Corning had created a nearly unbreakable reinforced glass they called “muscled glass” or Chemcor. The key to its manufacture was an innovative chemical process in which glass is dipped into a hot bath of potassium salt. Smaller sodium atoms leave the glass, and are replaced by bigger potassium atoms from the salt. When the glass cools, the bigger potassium atoms are packed in so tightly they give the glass exceptional damage resistance. The glass can withstand pressures of 100,000 pounds per square inch (normal glass handles about 7,000). Chemcor’s market future seemed bright, but it never took off. Other than its use in some airplanes and American Motors Javelin cars, the material sold poorly and Corning discontinued it in 1971.

When Apple’s operations group came calling in 2006, they found Corning had been thinking about bringing back the old superglass for a couple of years. They’d seen Motorola use glass for its RAZR V3 phone and begun to explore ways to make Chemcor thin enough to be suitable for cell phones.
Apple released the iPhone in mid-2007. By the end of the year, 3.7 million iPhones had been sold. By the first quarter of 2008, the sales volume of iPhones exceeded sales of Apple’s entire Mac line. And by the end of 2008, the company was selling three times as many iPhones per quarter as it was selling Macs. Revenue and profits were through the roof.
The plastic back of the iPhone 3G looks simple, but was extremely hard to manufacture. Jony and the team wanted to use a similar shell for the iPad (comprising a strong blend of polycarbonate and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), but it proved to be more difficult to manufacture at the larger iPad size, as the larger shell would shrink and warp when it came out of the mold. To stop it from shrinking at the edges, the shell was molded larger than it needed to be and machined down to size.

Even after molding, the shell still had to be polished to remove the part lines, then painted and machined again to prevent the paint shrinking around openings. The manufacturing process gained additional steps, with the openings painted over, then machined out before the installation of the buttons, the speaker grilles and the Apple logo on the back. The use of the plastic had made the entire process problematic. “You have to set those machining processes in the right order because if you machine before you paint, the chemistry of the paint relaxes the surface tension of the plastic and then the sink goes into other areas that you already machined,” Satzger said. “It’s just easier to do it with aluminum than with plastic.”
The iPad went to market in April. In less than a month, Apple sold one million iPads in half the time it took the iPhone to reach that same mark. By June 2011, just over a year after its release, twenty-five million had been sold. By most measures it became the most successful consumer product launch in history.
In the first quarter of 2013, the iPad mini accounted for about 60 percent of all iPad sales.
Given the thin profile of the iMac, traditional welding methods couldn’t be used to join the front and the back. Enter the need for so-called friction stir welding (FSW), a solid-state welding process invented in 1991. It’s actually less of a weld than a recrystallization, as the atoms of the two pieces are joined in a super strong bond when a high-speed bobbin is moved along the edges to be bonded, creating friction and softening the material almost to its melting point. The plasticized materials are then pushed together under enormous force, and the spinning bobbin stirs them together. The result is a seamless and very strong bond.

In the past, FSW required machines costing up to three million dollars apiece, so its use was confined to fabricating rocket and airplane parts. More recent advances allowed CNC milling machines to be retrofitted to perform FSW at a much lower cost. That opened the door for Apple, which has many CNC machines at its disposal.

In addition to its other advantages, FSW produces no toxic fumes and finished pieces that require no extra filler metal for further machining, making the process more environmentally friendly than traditional welding.
The new manufacturing methods are driven partly by Jony’s desire to make Apple greener. Those desires got a kick start in 2005, when Apple got into a public spat with Greenpeace International. The global environmental campaigner slammed Apple for its lack of a recycling program and its use of a host of toxic chemicals in its manufacturing processes. Steve Jobs dismissed the charges at first but, in 2007, announced a total overhaul of Apple’s environmental practices. Since then the company has improved its environmental profile, reducing toxins in manufacturing, including mercury, arsenic, brominated flame retardants and polyvinyl chloride.

In a further attempt to improve its environmental profile, Apple lowered power requirements of many products, earning high Energy Star ratings and gold ratings from the Electronic Product Environment Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which tries to measure products’ environmental impact over their lifetime, taking into account energy use, recyclability and how the products are designed and made. Apple has also reduced the size of its packaging, permitting more packages to be loaded into freight and saving fuel. And the newest MacBooks are touted as 100 percent recyclable, while Apple products in general use aluminum and glass, materials that are easily recycled and reused.

Even so, Apple still doesn’t get the highest marks from Greenpeace because the company is so secretive. In 2012, Greenpeace gave Apple a score of 4.5 out of a possible 10, putting Apple in the middle of the pack of tech companies (an improvement, actually, as it started at the bottom). Overall, Greenpeace credits Apple with increased environment responsibility but points out that “Apple misses out on points for lack of transparency on GHG [greenhouse gas] emission reporting, clean energy advocacy, further information on its management of toxic chemicals, and details on post-consumer recycled plastic use.”
Jony regularly gets calls from other companies and headhunters, offering him lucrative opportunities to design everything from cars to shoes. But he’s emphatically said no to the question of whether he would leave Apple. “The thing is, you could transplant me and this design group to another place and we wouldn’t work at all,” he said.
Though design is sometimes thought of as a lonely, isolating process, Jony travels the world regularly. Although he will sometimes spend weeks with suppliers in Asia, on most trips, he’s in and out quickly. In 2013, he traveled to Amsterdam for a day, during which he went aboard Steve Jobs’s boat (designed by Philippe Starck and custom-built in Holland) and opened the new Apple store there.

In 2012, Jony and his wife and twin sons upgraded to a new San Francisco home, purchasing a seventeen-million-dollar spread on San Francisco’s “Gold Coast,” also known as Billionaire Row. Despite his image as a soft-spoken everyman in jeans and T-shirt, he’s often photographed at exclusive venues with other well-suited high rollers. When at home in San Francisco, he’s been known to attend the symphony and he socializes with the Silicon Valley elite. He’s been photographed at celebrity dinners with valley bigwigs such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and the CEOs of Yelp, Dropbox and Path.

Occasionally, Jony gets involved in side projects. He designed some striking Soundstick speakers for Harman Kardon, which are part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. In 2012, he designed on commission a one-shot camera for Leica, which was to be auctioned for charity. Jony and Jobs were both fans of the storied camera maker, and when announcing the iPhone 4, Jobs compared it to “a beautiful old Leica camera.”
Jony Ive was never a fan of skeuomorphism, according to one unnamed Apple designer speaking to the New York Times. In an interview with the UK’s Telegraph, Jony visibly “winced” when the subject came up, but refused to be drawn into a detailed discussion. “My focus is very much working with the other teams on the product ideas and then developing the hardware and so that’s our focus and that’s our responsibility,” he said. “In terms of those elements you’re talking about, I’m not really connected to that.” Cook’s reshuffle corrected that.

Apple’s management shake-up represented a major design shift in software and, by the time iOS 7 was released in 2013, most of Forstall’s skeuomorphic references were nowhere to be seen.

The mobile software was flat and modern looking. Gone were references to felt and leather, as well as 3-D effects like highlights and shadows. “No virtual cows were harmed in the making of this,” joked Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, as he showed off iOS 7’s calendar app during the launch event. He added that other apps were cleaner, too, because “We just completely ran out of green felt. And wood too. This has to be good for the environment.” The iOS 7 design was minimal, bearing a curious resemblance to the phony operating system that Jony’s group used when designing the iPhone and iPad hardware in the mid-2000s. They had the same flat look, and some of the icons were very similar. The reversion back to the mock-up OS hinted at the animosity between Jony and Forstall, suggesting that Jony’s instincts for software design had been downplayed to Forstall’s for several years.