Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (15 page)

The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are. When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.
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—JONY IVE

Steve Jobs loved the iMac, but as soon as it hit the market, he changed his mind about the color. In his typically binary fashion, he decided he hated the Bondi Blue. “I love the product but we’ve picked the wrong color,” he told the design team. “It’s not bright enough. There’s not enough life to it.”
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Jony directed Doug Satzger, the design group’s official lead for color and materials, to start a new color investigation. Satzger was given two weeks to present new options. He found an unused room on Apple’s campus and assembled dozens of different-colored plastic items, among them kitchen flatware, transparent thermoses, brightly-colored plastic plates, just as the team had done for the Bondi Blue iMac. He arranged them by color: blue items on this table, red items on another. When he was ready, Satzger and a freelance contractor he was working with presented the results to Jony and Steve.

It didn’t go well.

“Steve walks into the room and [says] there’s way too much stuff in there,” remembered Satzger. “He looks at me and he says, ‘You suck.’” Satzger could later laugh at the memory, but, at the time, it wasn’t funny. Jobs was anything but amused.

Jobs was upset because the choices were overwhelming. “We gave him way too much information, and it wasn’t focused on how we could apply it to the iMac. So he looks at me and says, ‘When can I see some colors on a product that’s similar to the iMac?’

“I asked for three weeks. Jony looked at me and was like ‘What? are you crazy?’”

The task was daunting. In the allotted time, Satzger worked like a dog to come up with nearly complete models in a variety of new colors for Jobs.

“One great difficulty that we had was transferring opaque colors into transparency,” he said. “If you have a concept of a yellow, for instance, it is not very easy to make a transparent version of that yellow. What we did was take test tubes full of water and added food colors and other dyes to end up with fifteen different colors, which we took to the manufacturers to make. We did it that day, that day with Steve. And if their color house couldn’t make them we went to other manufacturers.”

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.’

“He chose some colors that he liked but then turned to us and said, ‘I really like these colors, they remind me of Life Savers. But there is still
something missing—a color for the girls. I want to see a pink. When can I see a pink?’ So we went back again and created five different pinks in ten days, of which Steve approved one—Strawberry.”

Jony was amazed at the speed with which Jobs gave his approval to the new colors. Jobs’s decisions meant five different cases would have to be made at the factory, and retailers would have five new SKUs to stock. But such logistics weren’t even discussed. The decision was driven purely by design: Steve Jobs wanted new colors. The logistics could be worked out later.

“In most places that decision would have taken months,” Jony later remarked. At the old Apple, too, executives would have stopped to ask questions about manufacturing and distribution—not now. “Steve did it in a half hour.”
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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.”

Apple would continue to sell multicolored iMacs until March 2003, when they were superseded by an even crazier design, the iMac G4
(which looked like a bulbous Luxo lamp). But for four years, the iMac launch and continuing development defined the game plan that Apple would use to such devastating effect with later products like the iPod: They created a breakthrough product, then quickly and relentlessly polished it with rapid new releases. The iMac was aggressively updated, not just with new technology, but new colors and price points. In five years, with variations in chip speeds and other hardware, there were at least thirty-two models in more than a dozen colors or patterns.

In the months after the iMac launch, the A team also perfected a new methodology for developing products. Called the Apple new product process, or ANPP, it would emerge as one of the keys to Apple’s success.

Not surprisingly, in the world according to Steve Jobs, the ANPP would rapidly evolve into a well-defined process for bringing new products to market by laying out in extreme detail every stage of product development.

Embodied in a program that runs on the company’s internal network, the ANPP resembled a giant checklist. It detailed exactly what everyone was to do at every stage for every product, with instructions for every department ranging from hardware to software, and on to operations, finance, marketing, even the support teams that troubleshoot and repair the product after it goes to market. “It’s everything from the supply chain to the stores,” said one former executive. “It’s hooked into all the suppliers and the suppliers’ suppliers. Hundreds of companies. Everything from the paint and the screws to the chips.”
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The ANPP involves every department from the outset, including functions like marketing, whose work will only be seen after the product is launched. “It’s very important at Apple that the needs of the customer
and needs to compete in the marketplace are considered when we create a product right from the beginning,” said Apple’s head of marketing Phil Schiller. “[M]arketing is an equal member of the team creating our products, along with the engineering and operations team.”
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Modeled in part on the best practices of HP and other Silicon Valley companies, the ANPP system, which Jobs had initiated at NeXT, was perfected in the early days of Jobs’s return to Apple. While such a procedure might seem to imply a hidebound approach, it was a worthy, pioneering move for Apple. One insider at the time described it this way: “It’s a very well-defined process, but it’s not onerous or bureaucratic. It allowed everyone to be more creative where it mattered, not less. Look at the results. Apple is a very fast company.”
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The system applied to Jony’s department, too, as the designers now had to tick off all of the steps, from investigation and concept to design and production. Sally Grisedale, former manager of Apple’s advanced technology group (which worked closely with the design group), said it was the systematic documentation that set Apple’s ANPP apart.

“It’s all written down. It has to be. There are so many moving parts,” she said. “Even when I was there, all the processes were worked out. That’s why [Apple] was such a perfect company to work for, because they had booklets on how they do it, and they helped you, when building the software or the hardware. It had to be really systematic. So it was a very rude awakening for me to go a different company like Excite or Yahoo because they had none of that! Nothing written down. Like, Process? Are you kidding? Just ship it and get it out there!”
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Another inspiration for the ANPP was the modern engineering management system known as “concurrent engineering,” which permits different departments to work in parallel (unlike the old model, under which projects get passed from one team to another in serial).

Big, complex engineering organizations like NASA and the European
Space Agency were early proponents of concurrent engineering. It’s a complex but flexible methodology that tends to catch problems early, because it takes into account the entire production process and the full lifetime of the product, from manufacture to servicing and recycling. Jony has expressed admiration for the designers of space satellites, likely because of their use of concurrent engineering.

At the old Apple, the engineers would work on a product before passing it to the designers to skin it. This wouldn’t work for Jobs’s new Apple, with the increased primacy of the ID studio.

“The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” Jony has observed. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”
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After the success of the iMac, Jobs and his A team set about filling the three empty quadrants in his 2×2 product road map. With a consumer desktop on the market, they still needed a professional desktop and portables for consumers and professionals. These machines, released over the next couple of years, allowed the company to grow and the design team to be more ambitious in pioneering new technologies, materials and manufacturing methods.

For Jony’s design team, the iMac was succeeded by an assignment to create a powerful desktop computer for professional users, in particular photo editors, video editors and scientists. They were the remnants of Apple’s old user base—creative professionals associated with the desktop publishing segment—who, having helped establish Apple during the late 1980s and early 1990s, stayed committed to the company and kept it afloat.

The Power Mac G3 brought the iMac design language to a tower design. Known as the “Blue and White” Power Mac, it sported a blue and white plastic case. Again, the designers incorporated a handle or, more accurately, handles, as there was one on each corner. In the case of the G3, the handles were actually designed to move the machine (rather than to make it less intimidating to users), and they were consistent with Jony’s new design language.

The G3 was a quiet success. It never attracted the attention or adulation of the iMac, but it sold in respectable numbers and maintained Apple’s presence in the business market, which at the time was more important than the consumer sector.

In design terms, its successor was more interesting. The Power Mac G4 tower was based around the PowerPC “G4” chip. Apple referred to the Power Mac G4 as “not only the fastest Mac ever” but also “the fastest personal computer ever.”
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The gray case also represented an interim step toward the aluminum that later came to dominate Apple’s professional line.

Initially, the Power Mac G4 tower was slate gray graphite, subsequently replaced by a dazzling metallic “quicksilver” case. Satzger remembered working on the quicksilver case, which taught him an important lesson about the new Apple.

At the last minute before the machine went to production, there had been a change in various hardware features, as well as in the color of the case. In the rush to build it, there was a color mismatch between the doors on the front face and the rest of the case. Jobs, of course, didn’t like it. Satzger pushed back, saying that there wasn’t time to fix it. According to Satzger, “Steve said simply, ‘Don’t you think you owe it to yourself and to me, to do better?’ I said yes and we went back and did it again, and it was better. It was always better.”

The quicksilver case was also the cause of a big fight between Jony
and Rubinstein. Jony wanted special screws on the handles that had a particular shape and finish. But Rubinstein said the cost would be “astronomical” and would delay the machine’s delivery. Delivering products on time was Rubinstein’s responsibility, and so he vetoed Jony’s screws. But Jony went over Rubinstein’s head to Jobs and around him to the engineers in product design.

“Ruby [Rubinstein] would say, ‘You can’t do this, it will delay,’ and I would say, ‘I think we can.’ And I would know, because I had worked behind his back with the product teams,” Jony later recalled.
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The argument over screws illustrated a growing rift between Jony and Rubinstein. Over the next several years, their clashes would become more frequent and more fraught.

“[Jony’s] focus was design,” said Rubinstein, speaking by phone in 2012. “Design was all he cared about. And so although design is extremely important, we also had to tackle electrical engineering, manufacturing, service and support. There are many different constituencies that all had a voice—not necessarily a vote, but a voice—and my job was to balance everybody’s needs. And at some point, compromises always had to be made.”
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Not in this case, though. Jony got his way: The screws on the G4 were made from highly polished stainless steel.

The design team next turned their attention to the third quadrant of Steve’s 2×2 product plan to be filled: a portable for consumers.

“The brief was simple,” said one of the designers. “Bring the iMac to laptops.”

The initial ideas for the iBook were all over the map. They came from brainstorming sessions, not from focus groups or market surveys. “We
don’t do focus groups—that is the job of the designer,” said Jony. “It’s unfair to ask people who don’t have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.”
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At the time, laptops tended to be boxy, black and starkly utilitarian. “We were given a lot of freedom,” Satzger said, though everyone understood the new machine would echo the iMac’s curves and colorful, translucent plastic body. What emerged looked nothing like its competitors, not only in its use of curvaceous lines but because it screamed color and fun. Jony initially drew its curvy “clamshell” design that resembled an undersea creature, then handed it off to Chris Stringer to be the design lead.

The designers also incorporated a clever innovation, novel for computers at the time: The iBook “awakened” as the lid was lifted. This feature required the design team to labor on a latchless mechanism to keep the lid tightly closed when the iBook wasn’t in use, because the last thing they wanted was for the computer to wake up in someone’s knapsack and drain the batteries.

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.”
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The manufacturing of the iBook—case, handle and lid—all introduced serious challenges. 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. “It was a question of shape and layering—layering plastics and sheet metal below,” said Satzger. “But the product was massive. There were lots of manufacturing challenges. We spent a lot of time in Taiwan working on layering materials. There was a ton of problems.”

The complex clamshell shape created a huge molding headache. To make the shell and get it out of the mold afterward, the mold had to pull apart in multiple directions and, initially, the case was plagued with micro-cracks that formed as the plastic cooled. Nor was the carrying handle easy to manufacture. It was made from a special plastic from DuPont called Surlyn, molded over a magnesium core to give it strength. Surlyn is a tough, impact-resistant plastic used in golf balls, but to make a handle of it required a molding technique called metal injection molding. First, the metal part was inserted into the molding tool; then the colored Surlyn plastic was molded around it. But metal and plastic have different cooling rates, so the part would shatter as soon as the mold was opened. The team spent weeks at the factories in Asia tweaking the molds and chemical mixes of the different plastics, but eventually overcame all of the problems.

The game-changing latchless lid also proved to be an issue—ultimately solvable—which Jony’s team labored for months to figure out. They came up with the solution of making a special hinge that held the lid tightly shut when closed. Getting rid of the latch was not initially seen as a “wow” factor but part of the team’s relentless drive to make products with fewer and fewer parts—again, a defining characteristic of Jony’s design vision. “Less parts means better tolerancing and better part-to-part relationships,” said one designer. In other words, the product goes together better.

These features—the rubbery skin, the carrying handle and hinge—and the consequent complexities delayed the iBook for months, but
advance word on the iBook was strong. The new machine was much sought after, and electronics stores started taking preorders in advance of its debut.

When the iBook did launch, one wag said it looked like “Barbie’s toilet seat,” a name that stuck.
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But the iBook was quickly a big hit with consumers, students and educators alike. More than a quarter million units shipped in the first three months after its release. Over the next few years, different enhancements of the clamshell iBook were issued, adding more color choices, extra memory and FireWire ports.

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. While Wi-Fi was available for other laptops, it required an add-on card with an ugly antenna sticking out the side. The iBook neatly solved this problem by providing built-in Wi-Fi.

While the iBook was in development, Apple started looking at home networking. The Internet was rapidly gaining users, and it was obvious that consumers would need networking technology at home. Apple’s competitors were looking to offer answers too: Compaq was pushing networking through home power outlets and Intel was considering phone jacks. “We looked at it and thought, ‘These are really stupid ideas,’” said Phil Schiller. Schools were a critical Apple market, and neither power-line networking nor individual phone lines would work there, so the company took another approach.

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.”
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The clamshell model of the iBook was discontinued in 2001, replaced by a reinvented version of the notebook in white polycarbonate. But the iBook changed the game. Many of its innovations live on in products today, including the placement of the interface ports on the sides instead of the back; the latchless lid; and, of course, Wi-Fi, now standard on every laptop, tablet and smartphone.

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With the success of the iMac and iBook, power at Apple inevitably shifted toward Jony’s industrial design group. Rubinstein was forced to bring in a stream of new engineers who were able—and willing—to execute the designs issuing from Jony’s group.

“There was a lot of turnover,” said a former hardware executive. “We more or less replaced the entire mechanical engineering group. A lot of old-timers quit. They couldn’t take the pace. We reduced product development from three years to nine months, made it one of the fastest companies in tech.”

Rubinstein elaborated: “We brought in new people to run mechanical engineering—the product design group, PD—so that ID would have partners who could execute the designs that they were coming up with. And likewise we also brought in Asian suppliers who could execute the designs, since it is equally essential to have the requisite manufacturing capability.”
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In the old Apple, the engineers called the shots. In the new Apple, the product design team, which was responsible for making sure designs can actually be manufactured, deferred to the design group.

“ID has the final say on everything,” said Amir Homayounfar, who
worked at Apple for ten years, ending his career as a program manager in the product design group. “We were working for them.”

Marjorie Andresen went further. According to her, Jony’s group was becoming the most powerful voice in the company.

“The biggest thing you had to understand about working with ID was that it was never an option to tell them no,” she said. “Even if what they wanted to do seemed expensive, ridiculous or even impossible you had to make it happen. . . . Whatever it took to get the job done.”