Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (24 page)

While Apple’s operations group was working out how to manufacture the iPhone, Jony’s design team was having doubts about their original choice of material for the screen.

Jony and his team planned to use plastic, mostly because it was shatterproof. Although all of the iPhone prototypes had plastic screens, the designers were never happy with it.

“The original plastic face had this weird flexibility to it,” said Satzger. “It was a matte finish. If it goes to glossy plastic, you see this waviness
to it, which makes it look really crappy.” Jony instructed the team to try textured plastic, but that didn’t work either. In a gutsy next move, they decided to try glass, despite the facts that glass breaks easily and no one had made a consumer electronic device with such a big piece of glass.

The story of the shift to glass is variously remembered: Although Jony’s group was already investigating glass, Jobs is credited by some as initiating the move to glass. As the story goes, he’d been using an iPhone prototype, which he kept in his pocket with his keys. He was reportedly furious that they scratched the screen.

“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” Jobs said later. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
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A deeper version has it that the development took more like six months in advance of launch, not six weeks. Apple’s operations group was charged with finding the strongest glass available. The search led them to Corning Incorporated, a glass manufacturer headquartered in upstate New York.

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.
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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.

Jony’s ID group came up with spec: The glass needed to be 1.3 mm to fit into the iPhone design. Jobs told Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks, they had six weeks to create as much of it as they could. Weeks replied they didn’t have the capacity and actually, Chemcor had never been created in this way or in such volume. “None of our plants make the glass now,” he told Jobs. But Jobs cajoled the CEO. “Get your mind around it,” he said. “You can do it.”
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Almost overnight, the company completely remade its manufacturing processes, based in Kentucky, changing several of its LCD-making plants to muscled glass, by then renamed Gorilla Glass. In May 2007, Corning was making thousands of yards of Gorilla Glass.

Corning’s glass, in combination with the aluminum back, marked another change in Jony’s design language. It was a striking, almost shocking, minimalism in hard metal and glass.

To hold the glass screen in place, Jony’s team came up with a shiny stainless steel bezel, which doubled as a structural element. The bezel would give the iPhone strength, but it also needed to look good.

Jony’s team worried that the glass would smash if the phone was dropped. “We were putting glass in close proximity to hardened steel,” said Satzger, who pointed out that, “if you drop [the phone], you don’t have to worry about the ground hitting the glass. You have to worry about the band of steel surrounding the glass hitting the glass.”

The solution was a thin rubber gasket between the glass screen and the stainless steel bezel. But the gasket created a gap that, at least at first, the designers hated for a very personal reason. “Because many of us in the ID team rarely shaved and had beard stubble, it used to yank our facial hair when we held the device up to our faces,” said Satzger, laughing at the memory. The team played around with gap size until they got it right.
“We designed several increments of gap size between the metal and glass until we got one that didn’t yank our face hair.”

One morning in the fall of 2006, Jobs gathered the iPhone leaders in Apple’s boardroom to talk about the state of iPhone development. Fred Vogelstein of
Wired
described the scene as a horror show of bad news.

“It was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, ‘We don’t have a product yet.’”
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The fact that Jobs seemed calm—instead of bringing his usual fire and brimstone—spooked everyone in the room. Vogelstein said one executive described the moment as “one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill.”

Because the iPhone announcement was going to be the main event at Macworld in a few weeks, any sort of postponement would have been disastrous. “For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers,” Vogelstein wrote. “Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.”

The problem was that everything was new and nothing worked. The touch screen was new, so were the accelerometers. The proximity sensor,
which turned off the screen when the user held the phone up to their face, developed a problem in a late prototype: It worked for most people, but it didn’t work if the user had long dark hair, which confused the sensor.

“We nearly shelved the phone because we thought there were fundamental problems that we can’t solve,” Jony told a business conference in London. “You have to detect all sorts of ear-shapes and chin shapes, skin color and hairdo . . . that was one of just many examples where we really thought, perhaps this isn’t going to work.”
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But just weeks before Macworld, Jony’s team had a prototype that worked well enough to show AT&T. In December 2006, Jobs traveled to Las Vegas to show it to the wireless carrier’s CEO, Stan Sigman, who was “uncharacteristically effusive,” calling the iPhone “the best device I have ever seen.”
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The arrival of the iPhone at Macworld was the culmination of more than two and half years of intense hardship, learning and dedication to bring it to market. As one Apple executive summed it up, “Everything was a struggle. Every. Single. Thing was a struggle for the entire two-and-a-half years.”

When launch day came in mid-summer 2007, Jony joined the whole design team at the flagship Apple retail store in San Francisco. “We were excited,” said Stringer. “We had something new. There was an incredible buzz. . . . And there was an enormous crowd outside. We wanted to feel that enthusiasm and see people, see their eyes when they get these new products, the first people to get them. When the doors opened, there was mayhem. It was like a carnival.”
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Stringer was overwhelmed with emotion. “We were obviously very, very proud. We’d worked really hard. It was—there was an enormous number of people that put in personal sacrifice and it was paying off in spades. It was a beautiful day.”

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The iPod had been regarded by a lot of pundits as Apple getting lucky, a fluke, a one-shot. When Apple entered the cutthroat cell phone market, it was predicted the iPhone would flop. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer famously said it would never get any market share. But the iPhone was a hit from the start, and Apple used its old playbook of rapidly adding features and models.

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.

When Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, he invited his old friend Alan Kay to the launch. Jobs and Kay knew each other from Xerox PARC, and later Kay had been appointed an Apple fellow, a kind of elder statesman, and worked for a decade inside Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in the late nineties. Kay is famous for prophesizing the “Dynabook,” a tablet computer that would provide a window into all the world’s knowledge—back in 1968.

On iPhone launch day, Jobs turned to Kay and casually asked, “What do you think, Alan? Is it good enough to criticize?” The question was a reference to a comment made by Kay almost twenty-five years earlier, when he had deemed the original Macintosh “the first computer worth criticizing.” Kay considered Jobs’s question for a moment and then held up his moleskin notebook. “Make the screen at least five inches by eight inches and you will rule the world,’“ he said.
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The world would not have to wait very long for the iPad.

I can’t think of a product that has defined an entire category and then has been completely redesigned in such a short period of time. It is really defined by the display. There are just no distractions.

—JONY IVE

While Jony’s group was secretly working on the iPad, Steve Jobs was telling the public and press that Apple had no intention of releasing a tablet. “Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already,” he said publicly. But Jobs was dissembling. “Steve never lost his desire to do a tablet,” said Phil Schiller.
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In fact, while Jony’s design team was developing the iPhone, they were also actively working on tablets. Jobs was just waiting for the right time to bring a tablet to market.

One incentive to move forward was the appearance of netbooks, a category of small, inexpensive, low-powered laptops that launched in 2007. They quickly started to eat into laptop sales and, by 2009, netbooks accounted for 20 percent of the laptop market. But Apple never seriously considered making one. “Netbooks aren’t better than anything,” Steve Jobs said at the time. “They’re just cheap laptops.”
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Nonetheless, the subject came up several times in executive meetings.

During one such high-level executive meeting in 2008, Jony proposed that the tablets in his lab could be Apple’s answer to the netbook. Jony suggested that a tablet was basically an inexpensive laptop without the
keyboard. The idea appealed to Jobs, and Jony was given the go-ahead to transform the prototypes into a real product.

Crucially, mobile technology had advanced significantly in just a few years since the iPhone had been launched. By then, the 035 tablet prototype from 2004 seemed big and unwieldy. But thanks to new screens and batteries, everyone understood that a tablet could be much lighter and slimmer. One of the major reasons the iPad hadn’t been green-lighted sooner was that the components like the screen and battery weren’t ready. “The technology was not there yet,” said a former Apple executive.

Jony began by ordering twenty models made in varying sizes and screen-aspect ratios. They were laid out on one of the studio’s project tables for Jony and Jobs to play with. “That’s how we nailed what the screen size was,” Jony has said.
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They had done the same thing earlier in finding the right size for the Mac mini and other products.

“Steve and Jony liked to do that with almost all products,” said a former engineer in the operations group. “They started off making a bunch of ‘appearance’ models and they’d make them in all sorts of sizes to find what they want.”

But, as often happens, recollections seem to vary. According to an executive at Apple at the time, the screen size was also strongly influenced by a simpler piece of equipment: a standard piece of paper. “The size of the tablet was that of a sheet of paper,” he explained. “It was conceived as a legal note tablet, and we thought that was the right size. It was targeted at education and schools and e-reading.” Hardware was still another factor, as the guts of the iPad would be based not on the iBook but the iPod touch. Early on, the iPad was understood to be, in effect, a scaled up touch-screen iPod.

Jony’s ultimate goal was to make a device that needed no explanation and was fully intuitive. It was to be a “breathtakingly simple, beautiful
device, something that you really want, and something that’s very easily understandable,” Stringer said. “You pick it up, you use it, something that . . . needs no explanation.”

That said, producing the “breathtakingly simple” can require an immense investment of time and creative energy.

Jony’s design team explored two different design directions for the iPad, directly akin to the twin design directions they pursued with the iPhone.

Based on the Extrudo design, the first approach built upon a case that resembled the extruded aluminum iPod mini. It was just bigger and flatter. The design lead on this version was Chris Stringer, who also worked on the Extrudo iPhone. As with the phone designs, Stringer’s Extrudo iPad was made of a single piece of extruded, milled aluminum. It, too, had plastic caps for the Wi-Fi and cell phone radios. In this case, though, sharp edges weren’t much of a concern; no one was going press a tablet up to his or her face.

Jony’s IDg team experimented with some “picture frame” models, larger than some of the iPad prototypes, which had kickstands to prop them up. (Kickstands would also feature prominently in competing tablets from Microsoft and other manufacturers in the future.) Jony’s team didn’t pursue the idea, although adding a kickstand would appear later in the iPad 2’s magnetic cover, which could be folded back into a stand.

The designers found Stringer’s Extrudo iPad suffered the same limitation as the Extrudo iPhone: The bezel detracted from the screen. As Jony put it, “How do we get out of the way so there aren’t a ton of features and buttons that distract from the display?”
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Again, Jony wanted
the infinity-pool illusion because he understood the screen was all-important and that nothing should detract from it.

Meanwhile, Richard Howarth brought his experience with the Sandwich iPhone models to his prototypes, making several versions of Sandwich-style iPads. The early Sandwich iPad models resembled more svelte versions of the 035 prototype. Made of shiny white plastic with a boxy shape, they are clearly in the same design family as Apple’s plastic MacBooks, released early in 2006—which makes sense given that they were designed largely by Howarth. Like the plastic MacBook, the device at that point remained fairly big and chunky. Still, Jony’s team was clearly homing in on how to present the screen, and the bezel was plain and unobtrusive.

As the design progressed, the new models got thinner, the edges sharper. Some had aluminum backs, but Jony’s team seemed to be veering in the direction of the Sandwich. Yet something bothered Jobs: Somehow the iPad wasn’t quite casual enough.

Jony spotted the problem. The iPad needed a cue, some sign that it was friendly and could be picked up easily with just one hand. As usual, Jony wanted to invite users to touch the device, pick it up and hold it and have a tactile experience.

The logical next step seemed to be adding handles, and Jony’s team experimented with them in an attempt to ease picking up the iPad. One of the later prototypes featured a pair of large plastic handles, making it look like a particularly inelegant TV dinner tray. When they realized the handle approach clearly wasn’t working, Jony’s team started exploring a tapered back that swept away underneath the screen, opening a gap for fingers to slide underneath.

As Jony’s team homed in on the iPad design, they were also completing work on the second-generation iPhone. Marketed as the iPhone 3G, to highlight its compatibility with new 3G cell phone
networks, the 2008 follow-up dispensed with the original’s aluminum back plate in favor of a hard, polycarbonate plastic. Not surprisingly, then, the two simultaneous development projects shared numerous elements, as the iPad would also get a polycarbonate back, colored black or white, with a stainless steel bezel to marry the back plate to the screen.

Just as they agreed upon a design, however, production problems forced Jony to change it.

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.”

Jony’s team went back to the drawing board and designed an aluminum back. They were comfortable with the material; they already had the process and the production lines down. The new aluminum back wasn’t as tapered as Jony would have liked. To give the iPad
stiffness, the designers had to add a thin sidewall that gave it strength but made it thicker and bulkier than the planned plastic version.

When they were done, however, Jony’s team was excited by the stark minimalism of the device. “We had tried so many things,” remembered Chris Stringer. “But at the end of the day, we realized it needed to be its own self. We can’t copy ourselves. We wanted a unique form . . . a very anonymous object, not playing along with the lines of consumer electronics at all.”
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The iPad they produced didn’t feel like anything else. As Stringer put it, “It felt like a new object.”