Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (14 page)

Andresen remembers the time fondly. “It was fast, it was exciting and it felt like everything we were doing was really really critical. Time to market was drummed into our heads and we did anything and everything we could in order to save time getting products from concept to customer. ID—and Jonathan—was where it all started.”

As the iMac neared completion, Jony’s IDg worked day and night to perfect every detail. Shaking his head at the memory, Saltzer said, “We were working 24-hour shifts.”

To help choose a name for the Columbus product, Jobs asked an old advertising buddy, Lee Clow from TBWA\Chiat\Day, to fly up from Los Angeles. Clow was accompanied by Ken Segall, one of his advertising executives. Jobs led them into a private room. In the middle of a conference table sat a big lump covered by a cloth.

Jobs whipped off the cloth to reveal a see-through plastic teardrop, the first Bondi Blue iMac. The ad men had never seen anything like it. They were stunned.

“We were pretty shocked but we couldn’t be frank,” Segall recalls. “We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, ‘Jesus, do they know what they are doing?’ It was so radical.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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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.

Jony and Danny Coster visited the factory several times with engineers from the product design group to fine-tune the case molds. Visiting the factory is standard design practice, but Jony’s team went above and beyond, spending far more time at the plant than is usual in order to get the iMac perfect. Most of the workers lived in dorms and ate in a big, on-site cafeteria. Jony and Danny often ate in the cafeteria, too, but stayed in a nearby hole-in-the-wall hotel. On their last visit before the iMac was released, they stayed for two weeks.

“We were in the factory most of the time, from 8 a.m. in the morning until 8 to 9 p.m. or even 1 or 2 a.m.,” said Amir Homayounfar, a manager on the product design team. “They would basically bring samples throughout and the CAD guys and the tooling engineers would make further modifications and then we’d be back for more.”
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At first, the cases came out of the molds with lots of burrs and sharp edges. “To make it basically as perfect as possible,” Homayounfar said, “we would go through that iteration multiple times until Jony and Danny were satisfied with the samples. Perfection was the goal.”

As launch day approached, Jony and Danny returned to the factory with twenty-eight engineers to prepare a batch of samples. The team worked long into the night, all weekend, getting the machines ready. “We were all there scrubbing these plastic cases with sandpaper to get thirty units to ship back to the U.S. for the launch of the iMac,” said Homayounfar. “Thirty Apple guys plus the entire LG factory.”

Jony needed thirty Apple employees at the factory because each person would check an iMac as luggage on the plane. “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. He had been expecting a slot-loading drive, which were just starting to appear on high-end stereos.
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No one said a thing, but Jobs flew into a full-on rage. Rubinstein had chosen a tray drive to keep pace with rapidly changing CD technology. With writeable CD drives on the horizon, Rubinstein knew a slot-loading drive would put the iMac a generation behind. He insisted that Jobs had been aware of this, but Jobs became so upset, he nearly canceled the launch.

“It was my first product launch with Steve and the first time I saw his mind-set of ‘If it’s not right we’re not launching it,’” remembered Schiller. Jobs was mollified only when Rubinstein promised to replace the CD drive in the next release.
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On May 6, 1998—the following day—Jobs unveiled the iMac at a packed Flint Center in Cupertino. It was the same venue where Apple introduced the original Macintosh fourteen years earlier.

The event drew a big crowd of technology press. The auditorium was buzzing with excitement as a giant inflatable beach ball bounced around and people took their seats. “I haven’t seen this much energy around Apple since 1989,” said Bajarin, the analyst who had been at Jobs’s design meeting several months before.
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Jobs kicked off the show by showing a new TV ad poking fun at Intel.
On screen, a steamroller flattened several Pentium notebooks as the theme from the old
Peter Gunn
TV show blasted. The audience howled.

Jobs detailed the shortcomings of PCs for consumers: They were slow, complex and unattractive. “This is what they look like today,” Jobs said, as a beige computer was projected onto the backdrop behind him. “And I’d like to take the privilege of showing you what they are going to look like from today on.”
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He strolled over to a pedestal in the middle of the stage and pulled a black cloth off an iMac, which gleamed and sparkled under the auditorium spotlights. Jobs looked like he’d been expecting applause, but the audience, previously excited, reacted in stunned silence.

“The whole thing is translucent,” Jobs gushed. “You can see into it. It’s soooo cool! . . . The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guy’s.”

As a cameraman walked around the iMac onstage, showing it from all angles, the audience started to respond. “It looks like it’s from another planet,” Jobs said proudly, eliciting a laugh from the crowd. “A good planet. A planet with better designers.”

Jony and most of the design team were sitting in the audience. “I was very proud of the iMac on its release, because I had had the chance to have a lot of influence on it and had done a lot of work on many of the parts,” Satzger said. “I was sitting among a crowd of Apple employees when Jobs pulled off the sheet to reveal the iMac, and all these Apple people were exhibiting surprise. I realized that none of them had seen it yet. They were working on legal, sales, operations, even software people, and none of them had been shown the machine, had been allowed to see it. That was a shock to me.”
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The iMac began shipping on August 15, 1998. Jobs had bet the future of Apple on the machine, and, during the summer leading up to its release, Apple spent one hundred million dollars on advertising. To
prime the pump with the press, Apple’s PR department told reporters to expect the biggest launch in Apple history.

Apple’s comprehensive advertising campaign blanketed TV, print and billboards with colorful, witty ads. The campaign emphasized the iMac’s funky design and ease of use. One amusing TV ad depicted a race to set up a new iMac for surfing the Web versus a PC. The spot pitted a seven-year-old and his dog against a Stanford PhD student. (No prizes for guessing who won.) Another advertising theme, entitled the “Un-PC,” contrasted the nest of cords associated with most computers with the iMac’s clean, uncluttered design.

A week before its release, Apple announced 150,000 preorders for the iMac, and Apple’s stock soared to more than forty dollars a share, its highest in three years. The company arranged special launch events at big-box computer stores (the first Apple stores were several years in the future), which were attended by some of the company’s executives, including Jony.

Despite the hype, the first reviews were surprisingly negative, sometimes brutally so. The iMac was too radical a break with the past, they said. Tech reviewers, who, counterintuitively, tend to be rather a conservative bunch, complimented the funky design, but complained about the legacy-free technology. There was an uproar in the tech press about the lack of a floppy drive. Most articles obsessed about it. Many said the machine was stillborn without it. “The iMac will only sell to some of the true believers,” wrote Hiawatha Bray in the
Boston Globe
. “The iMac doesn’t include a floppy disk drive for doing file backups or sharing of data. It’s an astonishing lapse from Jobs, who should have learned better . . . the iMac is clean, elegant, floppy-free—and doomed.”
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The lack of a floppy put Jony on the defensive. “I can’t give you the best Apple answer on the lack of the floppy,” he said. “I can give you my answer: ‘When you move on, you leave some things behind. The floppy drive,
which I will argue until I’m blue in the face, is really antiquated technology. I’ve heard the complaints, but if there’s not some sort of friction in a move forward, your step is not as consequential as you’d like to believe it is.’”
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Other familiar complaints about the Mac also surfaced, including the relatively high price, the incompatibility with Windows and the paucity of software compared to Microsoft’s dominant platform. “Doubts about software availability make it difficult for customers to pony up the money for a Mac when a Windows-based machine is often cheaper,” the Associated Press said. “And with about three percent of the computer market, the Mac is simply seen as a fringe product by many shoppers.”
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Nonetheless, Apple’s fan base was pumped. “It’s just wildly different,” Hal Gibson, executive director of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, said. “And when Apple does that, something daring, that’s very exciting.”
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Many retailers were also enthusiastic. “We’ll sell lots of them. This is the sexiest computer I’ve ever seen,” said Jim Halpin, president and CEO of CompUSA, at the time the biggest computer retailer in the United States.

The reaction from consumers was unmistakable. 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. Just as Jobs had hoped and predicted, the iMac sold well to first-time computer buyers and unhappy PC users, with an impressive 32 percent of the sales going to first-timers and another 12 percent to “switchers.”

Reporter Jon Fortt, writing in the
San Jose Mercury News
, noted that Apple’s focus on the needs of the consumer made the iMac a hit. “What made the original iMac cool was not its color or shape. It was Apple’s demonstrated willingness to open the possibilities of Internet computing to an audience that had been ignored by the brainiacs who design PCs.”
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At the end of the quarter, Apple announced its third consecutive
profit since Jobs’s return; the $101 million exceeded everybody’s expectations and prompted a raft of Apple-is-back stories.

The iMac saved Apple and cemented Steve Jobs’s reputation as a technology seer and leading arbiter of consumer trends. Business, design, advertising, TV, movies and music would all eventually feel the effect of the iMac. The iMac was also Jony’s coming-out party, the first product that gained him public attention. Overnight, Jony was celebrated as one of the world’s most daring and original designers.

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.”
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Several rival companies released Windows PCs that copied the iMac. Apple sued and shut down knockoffs from eMachines and Future Power.

No longer business tools hidden away in office cubicles, computers, thanks to the iMac, became fun and fashionable. Suddenly, people were proud to put an iMac in either their living room or on the reception desk at work. According to British design historian Penny Sparke, “The iMac . . . broke the mold of computers, which hitherto were masculine objects. Then they became much more desirable objects. It was a real breakthrough.”
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Apple’s strategy of selling to individual consumers, rather than corporations, paid off. “There is a parallel here with the 1950s, when design had a lot of momentum,” noted Susan Yelavich, assistant director for public programs at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution. “A whole new generation of products has technology as the underpinning. But, unlike in the past when technology was used in the office, today it is in and around the home.” She pointed out another key distinction: The advent of the iMac meant “office products [were] being marketed to teens.”
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The iMac shifted the computer conversation entirely. Suddenly, thanks to the iMac, prosaic details like CPU speed became less important than good looks, ease of use or custom options.

Jony argued that it was the iMac that changed the equation. “The response to the iMac makes clear that there is a widespread conception that stuff is too complicated and divorced from human concerns,” said Jony. “All the attributes that are emotive have been ignored. It’s about time that changed.”

There were many who accused Apple of cynically designing the iMac to look different just to get attention. Bill Gates, for one, offered, “The one thing Apple’s providing now is leadership in colors. It won’t take long for us to catch up with that, I don’t think.”
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Jony countered that the iMac wasn’t designed to look different, but the machine ended up being different as a natural consequence of the design process. “I think a lot of people see design primarily as a means to differentiate their product competitively,” he said. “I really detest that. That is just a corporate agenda, not a customer or people agenda. It is important to understand that our goal wasn’t just to differentiate our product, but to create products that people would love in the future. Differentiation was a consequence of our goal.”
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Jobs had made the sudden independence of design possible at Apple.
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs told
Fortune
shortly after retaking the reins at Apple. “But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.”
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The creation of the iMac also forged a bond between Jobs and Jony that would evolve into one of the most fruitful creative partnerships in the modern era. Between them, they changed Apple’s engineering-driven culture into a design-driven one. “The real strength of the ID team became Steve’s connection with Jony,” said Satzger. “Without Steve being there, the places we [the ID team] were going were just crazy.”

“In a company that was born to innovate, the risk is in not innovating,” Jony said. “The real risk is to think it is safe to play it safe. Steve has a clear vision of what it is going to take to get back to the company’s roots, what it would take to get at the essence of Apple, what it takes to structure the company to be something that can design and make new things.”
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