Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (16 page)

After the iMac, iBook and Power Mac, the last machine in Jobs’s 2×2 product plan was a notebook for professionals.

Jony instructed De Iuliis and two other designers to rethink the professional laptop just as they had the consumer laptop. He wanted a new user experience, an honest use of materials and a machine that was easy to manufacture. He set them up in a special studio off site in a warehouse in San Francisco where they installed thousands of dollars of computers. Just six weeks later, they presented Jony with a notebook that fulfilled two out of three of his requests.

The Titanium PowerBook G4 was the lightest and thinnest full-featured notebook yet to appear on the market. It had the first wide-screen laptop display, a big, beautiful expanse of screen that was ideally suited for working on high-end professional software, which often features numerous floating palette windows. But it would be a challenge to manufacture, and the new PowerBook would have an enclosure made from formed titanium shells separated by a plastic gasket. The whole machine was made rigid by a complex internal frame combined with several strengthening plates.

After coming up with the basic concept in just six weeks, Jony’s team
spent months sweating every detail. 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.
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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.”
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Detailing was a continual part of the design process, not something done at the end to make a product look pretty. It was as integral as anything else, and typical of Jony’s approach. “It doesn’t go from thought to sketch to model to production even though, in simplistic
terms, that is the general sequence of events,” said Stringer. “We’ll go back and forth. We’ll go all the way to model, we’ll go to working with the PD and operations groups on the engineering side.”
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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.”

The magnetic latch on the Titanium PowerBook was a good example of jewelry. To release the latch, there was a high-quality stainless steel button that when depressed would pop open the lid a bit, allowing users to get their fingers underneath it to open it. It was another artisanal touch that delighted owners, much the same as the popping lid Jony designed for the Lindy Newton.

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.”

Jony predicted the PowerBook would be a hit when it was announced at the 2001 Macworld Expo in San Francisco. “People will have a visceral reaction to its weight and volume,” he said.
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Indeed they did. It sold out immediately and remained a hard find for months. The factories couldn’t keep up with demand.

Although the PowerBook was an expensive machine, it attracted many new customers to the Apple platform, including geek cognoscenti. It showed up at a lot of high-tech conferences, and became the preferred
machine of alpha geeks like Linux creator Linus Torvalds. It also did a lot for rehabilitating Apple’s reputation among movers and shakers in the tech industry. The iMac had been great, but it was a cute plastic toy for ordinary consumers. The Titanium PowerBook, on the other hand, was regarded as a serious machine for professionals.

It was also the design team’s first foray into metal and advanced metallurgical manufacturing techniques. Titanium is notoriously difficult to work with. Bare, untreated titanium has a beautiful luster, but it picks up fingerprints and scratches easily. Jony chose to paint the PowerBook, but over time, the paint wore off around the keyboard and palm rests, which attracted complaints.

Despite its popularity, there were other problems too. The case’s complex internal frame was made out of several different metals, and to make things like the magnetic latches work, parts of the case had to be made out of steel. The more parts, the more materials, the more problems. Over time, the different parts of the case tended to separate as the machine took knocks and bumps. Eventually these problems would lead the design team to pioneer a radical new manufacturing technique for its portables.

Along with the exotic metal PowerBook, Jony’s design team created a new plastic portable for the consumer and education markets. The new version of the iBook was designed in bright white plastic and had two USB ports, attributes memorialized in its name: Dual USB “Ice” iBook.

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.

Thanks to a clever L-shaped hinge, the display opened to rest unexpectedly far back from the keyboard, making the product feel expansive and accessible when in use but compact when closed. “When the iBook’s closed, it’s this smooth, rugged little pod,” said Jony in a promo video. “But as you open it, the geometry of the hinge moves the display away and down, which reveals this full-sized keyboard and large comfortable palm rest.”
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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.

A clean, plain, small rectangular box, the Ice iBook cemented the shift in Jony’s design language from multicolored plastics toward plain black-and-white polycarbonate designs. (Although the first white computer was technically the “Snow” iMac in the summer of 2001, the shift to white plastic really gained notice with the Ice iBook, which also looked utterly unlike any other laptop at the time.)

“The new iBook is clearly from the same family as the PowerBook G4, but it certainly has its own distinct character,” said Jony. “It’s warmer. It’s happier. I really think it’s a much friendlier design.”
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Jony would transition most of Apple’s consumer products, including the iMac and iPod, to black-and-white polycarbonate casings. Most of
the professional products, on the other hand, were redesigned using anodized aluminum.

In 2000, having filled all four of the 2×2 quadrants, Jony and the design group attempted their most ambitious product to date: the Power Mac Cube.

The Cube was the team’s first shot at the ultimate computer, an attempt to cram the power of a desktop computer into a much smaller case. Jony saw putting a lot of components into a tower design as lazy: Why give the consumer a big ugly tower just because it’s the easiest option for the engineers and designers? They aimed to make the new machine by combining untested plastic casting with advanced miniaturization. Like many of Apple’s products, it was an exercise in simplification, removing everything that could be removed. It represented a major breakthrough in miniaturization, innovative design thinking and manufacturing.

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.

The Cube used air convection for cooling instead of a noisy fan. Air entered through vents in the bottom and cooled the chips inside, exiting through vents in the top. It operated in virtual silence.

Like the Power Mac G4 tower before it, access was a key consideration. The guts of the G4 Cube were designed to be easily removed for access
to internal components; its entire core could be pulled out through the bottom with a beautifully made pop-up handle. 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 new machine would be configured with a 450 MHz G4 chip, 64 MB memory and 20 GB storage. Priced at $1,799, the basic model included an optical mouse, pro keyboard and Apple-designed Harman Kardon stereo speakers, but no monitor. Also available exclusively on the Apple online store was a higher-spec model G4 Cube with a more powerful processor and additional memory and storage, which went for $2,299.

“The Power Mac G4 Cube was a breakthrough product,” said Satzger. “It contained a lot of interesting new technology and beautiful mechanics. It was really exciting.”

Some customers went crazy for the Cube. The Cube looked “sophisticated and expensive,” said the Ars Technica Web site.
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“Holy s**t, they’ve done it again,” said Lee Clow, chief creative officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day.
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But the public reaction to the new machines was cooler than Jony and Jobs had hoped.

Consumers viewed the Cube as basically a mid-range Power Mac G4 tower at a higher price. It was $200 more expensive than a comparable G4, and didn’t come with a monitor. The price was a lot higher than anything in the Windows world.

It also suffered from its own
Doonesbury
moment: 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. “Something that is not ‘important’ enough to really fix, but which will grate on those that care deeply about the appearance of their hardware . . . the very same people that are most attracted to a system like the Cube!”
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In September 2000, just a few months after the Cube’s debut, Apple announced sales were slower than expected. It was later revealed that Apple sold a paltry 150,000 units, only one-third of the volume Apple had projected. At the end of 2000, Apple reported earnings that were “substantially below expectations” for the last quarter, with a $600 million revenue shortfall.
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It was Apple’s first unprofitable quarter in three years.

For Apple watchers, the news was ominous. Despite a string of hits, Apple was still on shaky ground, battling powerful foes like Microsoft and Dell, which were at the peak of their power. “Frankly, I can’t say I’m surprised by these numbers at all, but they do show a much bleaker picture than what has been depicted in the press,” said Kevin Knox, an industry analyst at the Gartner group. He went further, concluding “They are disastrous.”
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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.

For Jony’s group, the Cube didn’t represent all bad news. Though the machine performed poorly in the marketplace, it had its admirers internally because it represented breakthroughs in manufacturing techniques and miniaturization.

The machine reflected a new mastery of packing desktop components into laptop-sized spaces, which would be crucial in making the dome-shaped iMac and later flat-screen models. Just as important, it pushed Apple into new manufacturing techniques that would benefit later products like the iPod. Satzger explained: “Basically, we did not accept standard molding practice in plastics. We started getting into machining plastic. On the Cube, the screw holes and the vent hole were precision machined.”

Such machining would come to define products like the MacBook and iPad, which are machined out of slabs of aluminum. The Cube was an early foray into machining products on a mass scale. In a wider context, the machining experiments represented a fundamental shift in how products are mass produced.

“For a long time at Apple, the engineering team often told the designers, ‘You can’t do that,’” said Satzger. “But the design team challenged everything—with plastics, metal, every material.”

Even though the Cube didn’t sell well and even became a symbol of form over function, its creation spoke for the growing power and influence within Apple of Jony Ive and his design team.