Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (26 page)

The unibody process is revolutionizing high-tech manufacturing. At Apple, the move toward robot workflow has, in a sense, revived Steve
Jobs’s long-cherished dream once manifested in his 1980s Macintosh factory in the Bay Area with its automated production line. Machining used to be used strictly for prototyping, and no one employed it on an industrial scale until Jony came along. But others have been quick to recognize its importance. Dennis Boyle, one of the cofounders of IDEO, said machining products on an industrial scale is “a dream for product designers.”
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“Companies have always traditionally avoided machining because it costs more than other techniques,” he said, “but Apple has figured out a way. . . . Apple has proved that if a company invests at the highest level and takes Ive and his team’s designs and really sticks to them without compromising on how they look and feel, then it can create products that are so sought after, so beautiful and elegant, that they can make them a success. From a design and engineering point of view, Apple is at the absolute pinnacle of creating products that are as close to flawless as can be done.”

Unibody represents a giant financial gamble by Apple. When it started investing seriously around 2007, Apple contracted with a Japanese manufacturer to buy all the milling machines it could produce for the next three years. By one estimate, that was 20,000 CNC milling machines a year, some costing upward of $250,000 and others $1 million or more. The spending didn’t stop there, as Apple bought up even more, acquiring every CNC milling machine the company could find. “They bought up the entire supply,” said one source. “No one else could get a look in.”
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This spending on tooling ramped up with the iPhone and iPad, which relied more on machining with each generation. According to Horace Dediu of Asymco, an analyst firm, the original iPhone cost $408 million in equipment investment. But by 2012, as the iPhone 5
and iPad 3 (both unibody products) went to production, Apple’s capital expenditures ballooned to even more mind-boggling levels. Apple spent $9.5 billion on capital expenditures, the majority of which was earmarked for product tooling and manufacturing processes. By comparison, the company spent $865 million on retail stores. Thus, Apple spent nearly eleven times as much on its factories as on its stores, most of which are in prime (that is, expensive) real estate locations.
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Another manufacturing innovation made necessary by Jony’s design desires—in this case, to get razor-thin edges on the 2012 iMacs—is friction welding. Given the thin profile of the iMac, traditional welding methods couldn’t be used to join the front and the back. Enter the need for so-called friction stir welding (FSW), a solid-state welding process invented in 1991. It’s actually less of a weld than a recrystallization, as the atoms of the two pieces are joined in a super strong bond when a high-speed bobbin is moved along the edges to be bonded, creating friction and softening the material almost to its melting point. The plasticized materials are then pushed together under enormous force, and the spinning bobbin stirs them together. The result is a seamless and very strong bond.

In the past, FSW required machines costing up to three million dollars apiece, so its use was confined to fabricating rocket and airplane parts. More recent advances allowed CNC milling machines to be retrofitted to perform FSW at a much lower cost. That opened the door for Apple, which has many CNC machines at its disposal.

In addition to its other advantages, FSW produces no toxic fumes and finished pieces that require no extra filler metal for further machining, making the process more environmentally friendly than traditional welding.

The new manufacturing methods are driven partly by Jony’s desire to make Apple greener. Those desires got a kick start in 2005, when Apple got into a public spat with Greenpeace International. The global environmental campaigner slammed Apple for its lack of a recycling program and its use of a host of toxic chemicals in its manufacturing processes. Steve Jobs dismissed the charges at first but, in 2007, announced a total overhaul of Apple’s environmental practices. Since then the company has improved its environmental profile, reducing toxins in manufacturing, including mercury, arsenic, brominated flame retardants and polyvinyl chloride.

In a further attempt to improve its environmental profile, Apple lowered power requirements of many products, earning high Energy Star ratings and gold ratings from the Electronic Product Environment Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which tries to measure products’ environmental impact over their lifetime, taking into account energy use, recyclability and how the products are designed and made. Apple has also reduced the size of its packaging, permitting more packages to be loaded into freight and saving fuel. And the newest MacBooks are touted as 100 percent recyclable, while Apple products in general use aluminum and glass, materials that are easily recycled and reused.

Even so, Apple still doesn’t get the highest marks from Greenpeace because the company is so secretive. In 2012, Greenpeace gave Apple a score of 4.5 out of a possible 10, putting Apple in the middle of the pack of tech companies (an improvement, actually, as it started at the bottom). Overall, Greenpeace credits Apple with increased environment responsibility but points out that “Apple misses out on points for lack of transparency on GHG [greenhouse gas] emission reporting, clean energy advocacy, further information on its management of toxic chemicals, and details on post-consumer recycled plastic use.”
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Although Jobs got public credit for the greening of Apple, one source inside the company said a lot of the impetus came from Jony, who was “really stung” by Greenpeace’s initial criticism.

“Jony felt that Apple had very positive stories about its environmental impact,” the source said. Jony’s commitment to not making junk products certainly puts him in a stronger environmental light: His products tend to be used and cherished for years, just the opposite of throwaway products with their more immediate and detrimental environmental impact.

Another criticism cast at Jony and the company concerns the decision to seal many of their products. That means that, in most cases, Apple products aren’t user serviceable, as they require special tools and skills even to change a battery. Environmental activists like Kyle Wiens of iFixit point out a sealed device is more likely to be junked than one that can be more easily repaired by the nonprofessional.

The iPad, Wiens said, is “deeply immoral. It’s glued shut and the battery will be inoperable after five hundred charge-discharge cycles. It is expressly designed to be thrown away. Reparability isn’t a concern and so designers aren’t going to design that in.”
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Apple insiders disagree. They point out Apple’s products are certainly designed to be repaired, though not by their owners. “Apple has a special service process,” Satzger explained. “Not a lot of other companies have the ability to service their own products, so they design them to be serviced by places like Best Buy.”

Satzger argued that that means Apple equipment is in fact more serviceable. “For repair work, Apple takes back all its products and handles servicing through the company’s stores. Repairs and servicing are taken into account from the outset of a product’s design. . . . Apple’s service process is exquisitely refined for their own products.”
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Apple, as one of the world’s richest and most powerful companies, has clearly taken a leadership role in manufacturing. If their commitment to their global workforce and to environmental concerns remains less certain, it’s clear that Jony Ive will have a voice in shaping those policies into the foreseeable future.

[Jony Ive] has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. There’s no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out. That’s the way I set it up.

—STEVE JOBS

Steve Jobs had surgery for a pancreatic tumor in July 2004. As he was recovering from his first bout with cancer, he asked to see two people. One was his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs; the other was Jony Ive.

After nearly eight years of working together almost daily, Jony and Jobs had a special and intimate relationship. The pair had been nearly inseparable, attending many of the same meetings, eating lunch together and spending afternoons at the studio going over future projects.

Jobs’s first surgery didn’t fully cure him and he later underwent a second round of surgery, taking a leave of absence from Apple to undergo a liver transplant in Memphis, Tennessee, in May 2009. Jobs flew home on his private jet with his wife, where he was met by Jony and Tim Cook at San Jose Airport. The question of Apple’s future was very much in the air, as the announcement of Jobs’s leave had led many in the press to predict that Apple was doomed without him. It seemed to be the consensus of the punditocracy that the fate of Apple rested solely on Jobs’s shoulders.

Jony drove Jobs home from the airport and confided on the journey that he was disturbed by newspaper opinion pieces that staked Apple’s survival to Jobs.

“I’m really hurt,” Jony told Jobs. He was worried about Jobs’s health, and the health of the company they both loved. As Jony told Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson, the perception that Jobs was the engine of Apple’s innovation was damaging, he said. “That makes us vulnerable as a company,” Jony said.
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That Jony’s ego wasn’t always sublimated to Jobs’s and to Apple is hardly surprising. On another occasion, Jony also complained about Jobs’s habit of stealing his ideas. “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one,’” Jony told Isaacson. “And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs.”
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Nonetheless, Jony acknowledged, he could have never accomplished what he has without Jobs. “In so many other companies, ideas and great design get lost in the process,” he said. “The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn’t been here to push us, work with us and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.”
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During 2011, with Jobs on leave that, in the end, proved to be his last, a rash of news stories claimed that Jony was threatening to leave Apple at the end of a three-year stock deal. Jony and his wife reportedly wanted their twin boys to be educated in Britain. The UK newspaper the
Guardian
published a story about Jony’s impending departure, giving it the headline “Apple’s Worst Nightmare”
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; London’s
Sunday Times
ran a feature saying that Jony was “at loggerheads” with Apple over his desire to move from Cupertino back to Britain, where he owned a home in Somerset. One story suggested Jony would commute between Britain and California.
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Threatening
was probably the right word; Jony didn’t quit. According
to an unnamed friend quoted in the British newspaper article, Jony was “just too valuable to Apple and they told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them.” To cement his connection with Apple, the company reportedly paid Jony a $30 million bonus and offered him shares worth a further $25 million. At the time, Jony’s personal fortune was estimated at $130 million.

In retrospect, the facts suggest Jony had no intention of moving. He sold a mansion he owned in Somerset close to his parents because he wasn’t using it. Jony appeared more committed to Apple than ever.

Jony regularly gets calls from other companies and headhunters, offering him lucrative opportunities to design everything from cars to shoes. But he’s emphatically said no to the question of whether he would leave Apple. “The thing is, you could transplant me and this design group to another place and we wouldn’t work at all,” he said.
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On August 24, 2011, Apple announced that Steve Jobs was resigning as CEO, but would remain with the company as chairman of the board. Tim Cook officially took over the day-to-day running of the company.

The news shouldn’t have been a surprise but it was. Jobs had been on medical leave since January, and he was obviously a very sick man, appearing emaciated during his few public appearances that year. Even in the face of such a harsh reality, however, everyone found it difficult to imagine an Apple without Steve Jobs.

Many pundits weighed in, arguing that Jony should take over. He had a public profile (Cook did not) because of all the promotional videos he’d appeared in and the awards he’d scooped up. But few serious Apple observers pegged him as the next CEO—not even Jony himself. As one former member of his design team said of Jony’s attitude toward being CEO, “Jony doesn’t care about all those aspects of running a
company.” Explaining that Jony had no interest in the business side of Apple—just as he had hated the business side at Tangerine—the designer concluded, “He just wants to focus on ID.”

“All I’ve ever wanted to do is design and make; it’s what I love doing,” Jony told one interviewer. “It’s great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing but then to be able to practise that and be preoccupied with that is another.”
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As the master of Apple’s global supply chain, Tim Cook was, in fact, much the logical successor. In just thirteen years, Cook had constructed a complex apparatus that allowed the company to build superb gadgets—albeit of Jony’s design—at unparalleled speed, volume, efficiency and profitability. Cook might not possess Jobs’s charisma, but he was a logistics titan who had been effectively running the company ever since Jobs had gone on his most recent medical leave. He also had experience, serving as interim CEO during Jobs’s absences in 2004 and 2009. According to Apple insiders interviewed for this book, Cook is generally affable, a consensus player who wants everyone to buy in, which makes him easier to work with than willful personalities like Jobs.

Jobs died just over a month after his resignation, on October 5, 2011. The man who once said in a speech at Stanford University that “death is very likely the single best invention of life” was about to be eulogized at just fifty-six. His funeral two days later in Alta Mesa was attended by just four of his colleagues from Apple: vice presidents Eddy Cue (software) and Katie Cotton (communications), CEO Cook and Jony. The memorial service held for Jobs at Stanford University ten days after that, though still private, drew former U.S. president Bill Clinton, former vice president Al Gore, Bill Gates, Google CEO Larry Page, U2 frontman Bono and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch. Jony had a chance to publicly mourn his mentor and friend three weeks after Jobs’s death. At
a staff memorial service held on Apple’s Cupertino campus, Jony gave the most heartfelt (and humorous) speech of the day, filling his eight-minute tribute to Steve—his “best and most loyal friend”—with personal anecdotes. By turns Jony was funny, touching and insightful, as he described Steve’s passion and enthusiasm, his sense of humor and his great joy in doing things right.

Jony’s eulogy started with an aside. “Steve used to say to me a lot, ‘Hey Jony, here’s a really dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us both completely silent.”

Jony remembered that Jobs “constantly questioned, ‘Is this good enough? Is this right?’” He saw Jobs’s great triumph as “the celebration of making something great for everybody, enjoying the defeat of cynicism . . . the rejection of being told a hundred times, ‘You can’t do that.’”

Jony closed by telling the massed Apple employees at the memorial, “We worked together for nearly fifteen years—and he still laughed at the way I said ‘aluminium.’ For the last two weeks, we’ve all been struggling to find ways to say good-bye. This morning, I simply want to end by saying, ‘Thank you, Steve. Thank you for your remarkable vision which has united and inspired this extraordinary group of people—for all that we have learned from you and for all that we will continue to learn from each other, thank you Steve.’”