Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (22 page)

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. Apple had its Nike moment, becoming the focus of anger about digital sweatshops and worker exploitation, even though Foxconn’s factories make products for almost all the major electronics firms, not just Apple.

Long before the controversy, however, Apple helped change the game in manufacturing, forging close relationships with Chinese manufacturers, constantly pushing the limits of what their factories are capable of doing. But the process involved a certain amount of bemusement as to the ways of the Asian companies.

Satzger for one was both impressed by Foxconn and amused at how they did things. “There was a lot of politics,” he said. “They would stage things for us. Lots of theatrics. They would bring managers into meetings and yell at them in front of the Apple group.”

On one occasion, the Apple group was carefully positioned outside of a conference room with big glass windows. Inside, a Foxconn executive was yelling at his staff. As the Apple group looked on, he brought his fist down on the glass conference table and shattered it.

“He completely set that up,” said Satzger.

Foxconn has a mixed reputation, but Satzger said all the engineers—everyone who dealt with Apple at a higher level—were really happy and engaged. However, the assembly plants have been the critical lightning rod, as thousands of workers perform repetitive tasks assembling the products.

The designers spent a lot of time flying out to China to work with Foxconn and other contractors. Satzger would never spend more than five days at a time there. If need be, he’d fly back to California for the weekend, then fly out again the following week. Jony, on the other hand,
would sometimes be gone for weeks, and some of the other designers for months.
Of course, they were pioneering new materials and new means of manufacture for Apple’s extraordinary products.

Over the years, the elevated status of Jony’s group would be reflected in their accommodations. According to a former operations engineer, “When all of the teams went to China, the PD [product design] guys and the ID guys, we usually all worked together in the factory. But when we left, the ID guys got picked up in stretch limos and we had to take a taxi,” the source said. “All the ID guys stayed in 5-star hotels while most of the PD guys stayed in 3-star hotels. This was different from 10 to 15 years earlier, when in the middle of the build-up to make the iMac, all the designers, including Jony and Danny Coster, lived and ate in the same hotels as the engineers and the rest of the Apple crew.”

When we are at these early stages in design . . . often we’ll talk about the story for the product—we’re talking about perception. We’re talking about how you feel about the product, not in a physical sense, but in a perceptual sense.

—JONY IVE

One morning in late 2003, just before the launch of the iPod mini, Jony and his team gathered for a biweekly brainstorming meeting. As usual, the team assembled around the studio’s kitchen table. One of the industrial designers, Duncan Kerr, did a show-and-tell. Kerr, who joined Apple’s design team in 1999 after having spent a few years working at IDEO, had a lot of engineering experience, and he loved to tinker with new technology.

Kerr had been working with Apple’s input engineering group, which was exploring alternative inputs for the Mac, with the hope of doing away with the keyboard and mouse, the mainstay of computing for more than three decades. When Kerr told the group about what he’d learned, his words were greeted by some stunned expressions.

“It was amazing,” said Doug Satzger, shaking his head in disbelief. “It was a really amazing brainstorm.”

Around the table was the core IDg: Jony, Richard Howarth, Chris Stringer, Eugene Whang, Danny Coster, Danny De Iuliis, Rico Zorkendorfer, Shin Nishibori, Bart Andre, and Satzger.

“I remember Duncan showing us how, with multi-touch, you could do different things with two fingers and with three fingers,” recalled Satzger. “He showed us on-screen rotating and zooming—and I was really surprised that we could do that stuff.”

That morning was the first time the team had even heard of multi-touch. Today it doesn’t seem exceptional, but back then, touch interfaces were pretty primitive. Most touch devices, such as Palm Pilots and Windows tablets, used a pen or stylus. Screens that were sensitive to fingers, not pens, like ATM screens, were restricted to single presses. There was no pinching or zooming, no swiping up and down or left and right.

Kerr explained to his colleagues that the new technology would allow people to use two or three fingers instead of just one, and that it would afford much more sophisticated interfaces than simple single-finger button presses.

Excited by Kerr’s explanation of what a sophisticated touch interface could do, the team members started to brainstorm the kinds of hardware they might build with it. The most obvious idea was a touch-screen Mac. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, users could tap on the screen of the computer to control it. One of the designers suggested a touch-screen controller that functioned as an alternative to a keyboard and mouse, a sort of virtual keyboard with soft keys.

As Satzger remembered, “We asked, ‘How do we take a tablet, which has been around for a while, and do something more with it?’ Touch is one thing, but multi-touch was new. You could swipe to turn a page, as opposed to finding a button on the screen that would allow you turn the page. Instead of trying to find a button to make operations, we could turn a page just like a newspaper. I was really surprised you could do this stuff.”

Jony in particular had always had a deep appreciation for the tactile nature of computing; he had put handles on several of his early machines specifically to encourage touching. But here was an opportunity to make
the ultimate tactile device. No more keyboard, mouse, pen or even a click wheel—the user would touch the actual interface with his or her fingers. What could be more intimate?

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.
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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.”
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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.
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With Jobs’s seal of approval, Jony directed Imran Chaudhri and Bas Ording, two of Apple’s most talented software engineers, to shrink the massive capacitive array into a working tablet prototype. Within a week, they came back with a twelve-inch MacBook display hooked to a big tower Power Mac, which provided the computing power to interpret the finger gestures.

They showed Jony and the designers a demonstration with Google Maps. After bringing up Apple’s Cupertino HQ, one of them spread his fingers apart on the screen, zooming in on the campus. The designers were astonished. “We could zoom in and zoom out with touch gestures onto the Apple campus!” said Satzger.

Building a finger-controlled tablet looked like a real possibility. It wouldn’t happen overnight and, thanks to market forces, another revolutionary Apple product would emerge from the pipeline first.

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 (the mobile version of the software, iOS, was still years away).

While Jony’s team worked on several tablet prototypes, Apple’s executives were worrying about the iPod. It was flying high: Apple sold two million in 2003, ten million in 2004, and forty million in 2005. But it was becoming clear that the mobile phone would one day supersede the iPod. Most people were carrying around both an iPod and a cell phone. At that stage, cell phones could store a few tunes, but it was becoming clear that, sooner rather than later, someone, perhaps a competitor, would combine the two devices.

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.

Precisely how the project that had produced Model 035 got re-tracked into making the iPhone is a matter of dispute. During an appearance at the 2010 All Things Digital conference, Jobs took credit for having come up with the idea for a touch-screen phone.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Jobs told the crowd. “It began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multi-touch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our people about it. And six
months later, they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He got scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘My God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the iPhone.”
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Others at Apple at the time have a different recollection of the beginnings of their iPhone pursuit. They say the idea came up during one of the regular executive meetings. “We all hated our phones,” recalled Scott Forstall, a software executive. “I think we had these flip phones at the time. And we were asking ourselves, ‘Could we use the technology we were doing with touch that we’d been prototyping for this tablet and could we use that same technology to build a phone, something the size that could fit in your pocket, but give it all the same power that we were looking at giving to the tablet?’”
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After the meeting, Jobs, Tony Fadell, Jon Rubinstein and Phil Schiller went over to Jony’s studio to see a demo of the 035 prototype. They were impressed by Jony’s demonstration of the 035, but expressed doubts that the technology would work for a cell phone.

The crucial breakthrough was the creation of a small test app that used only part of the 035 tablet’s screen. “We built a small scrolling list,” said Forstall. “We wanted it to fit in the pocket, so we built a small corner of it as a list of contacts. And you would sit there and you’d scroll on this list of contacts, you could tap on the contact, it would slide over and show you the contact information, and you could tap on the phone number and it would say ‘Calling.’ It wasn’t calling, but it would say it was calling. And it was just amazing. And we realized that a touch screen that was sized, that could fit into your pocket, would work perfectly as one of these phones.”

Years later, Apple attorney Harold McElhinny would describe the immense amount of work the project required. “It required an entirely new hardware system. . . . It required an entirely new user interface and
that interface had to become completely intuitive.” He also said Apple took a huge leap of faith moving into a new product category. “Think about the risk. They were a successful computer company. They were a successful music company. And they were about to enter a field that was dominated by giants. . . . Apple had absolutely no name in the [phone] field. No credibility.”
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McElhinny also said he firmly believes that had the project gone wrong, it could have destroyed the company. 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 project was led by Fadell; his group had the idea to somehow graft a phone onto a current iPod. “It was actually a natural progression of taking the iPod, which we already had, and morphing it into something else,” said the former executive.

Matt Rogers, a hotshot young iPod engineer who worked for Fadell, was given the job of creating the software for the device. As an intern, Rogers had previously impressed Fadell by rewriting some complex testing software for the iPod. As usual, the research was a big secret. “Nobody in the company knew we were working on a phone,” said Rogers.
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It was also a lot of extra work. At the time, the iPod team was also working on a new iPod nano, a new iPod classic and a Shuffle.

After six months of effort, Fadell’s team produced a prototype iPod-plus-phone that worked, more or less. The iPod’s click wheel was used as a dialer, selecting numbers one at a time like an old rotary phone. It could make and receive calls. Scrolling through an address book and selecting a contact to call was—unsurprisingly—its best feature. Apple filed a couple of patents from their experimentation. One of them
suggested that the iPod-plus-phone could create text messages with a predictive text system. Jobs, Forstall, Ording and Chaudhri, among others, were named as inventors.

But 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.”
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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. Fadell was loath to admit defeat. “The multi-touch approach was riskier because no one had tried it and because they weren’t sure they could fit all the necessary hardware into it,” he said. And Fadell had been skeptical of touch screens from the start, based on experience of devices like Palm Pilots, which were clunky and awkward.

“We all know this is the one we want to do” Jobs said, referring to the P2. “So let’s make it work.”
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Two years later, during the iPhone introduction at Macworld, Jobs jokingly flashed an image of an iPod with a rotary dial pad on its screen. This was how not to build a new phone, Jobs said, as the audience laughed. Few knew the company might well have produced just such a phone.