Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (12 page)

Jobs’s plan for switching up the teams at Apple upon his return was just as straightforward as his notions for simplifying the product portfolio.
He would cut back so that his “A” team—the company’s best designers, engineers, programmers and marketers—could concentrate on making innovative products.

Jobs already trusted his old NeXT executives, but he looked to spot existing Apple talent and elevate them in the ranks. The people survey he conducted led to a streamlining of Apple’s organizational chart. Jobs insisted on a clear chain of command all the way down the line. Everyone in the company knew to whom they reported and what was expected of them.

As Jobs told
BusinessWeek
, “Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.”
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During the process of his product and personnel reviews, Jobs called a meeting with half a dozen top analysts and journalists covering Apple. He wanted to explain to them his new game plan.

“He specifically emphasized getting back to meeting the needs of their core customers and said that Apple had lost ground in the market because they were trying to be everything to everybody instead of focusing on the real needs of their customers,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, who was in the room. “He also pointed out that Apple had broken new ground with the original Mac OS and hardware designs and that he would now make industrial design a key part of Apple’s strategy going forward.”
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Bajarin, for one, was skeptical.

“My first impression was that Apple had so many problems that I could not see how industrial design needed to be a key part of his strategy to save Apple,” Bajarin recalled. “I also was concerned that given Apple’s serious financial situation, whatever he was going to do needed to be rock solid and have an impact quickly.”

Bajarin had another recollection: “I also remember telling the people I was with that you can never underestimate Steve Jobs and that if anybody can save Apple, it would be Jobs.”
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Despite his talk about returning Apple to a design-led company, Jobs didn’t immediately visit the ID studio. Brunner’s strategy of putting the studio off campus almost backfired, because, unaware of what he already had, Jobs went to look for a world-class designer from outside the company.

He thought seriously about bringing back his old design partner, Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design, who had been working with NeXT. He called on Richard Sapper, who did the IBM ThinkPad laptop, and, incredibly, the car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose run with Apple a few years before had produced nothing. Jobs also considered the famous Italian architect and designer Ettore Sotsass, who had catapulted Olivetti to the forefront of ID in the sixties.
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Across the road, Jony Ive realized his team was in jeopardy and that he had to demonstrate to his new boss what his shop could do. He put together brochures showcasing their best design work. He included in the glossy pamphlets concepts for evolving Apple’s design language, which, with the translucent eMate, had just started moving in a bold new direction. “We generated small booklets to represent the team’s capabilities,” said a former designer on the team. “I think that played a great role in how Steve Jobs coming back perceived the team and its capabilities.”

When Jobs finally took a tour of Apple’s design studio, he was bowled over by the creativity and rigor he saw. The studio was full of eye-catching mock-ups that the previous regime had been too timid to consider. Jobs also couldn’t help but notice the computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines and a fledgling computer-aided design (CAD) group.

Mostly, though, he bonded with the soft-spoken Jony, who would later say that he and Jobs saw eye to eye immediately. “We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Jony recalled. “We were on the same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company.”

Jobs decided to keep the ID group intact, with Jony in charge. He initially made Jony report to Jon Rubinstein, head of hardware. (Eventually that would change, when design became its own autonomous division.) Even though Jony reported to Rubinstein, over the next few months Jony and Jobs began having lunch together. Jobs visited the Valley Green design studio too, often dropping by at the end of the day.
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“He would come over all the time,” said a former member of the design team. “He’d come mostly to see Jony, but also to see what was going on.” In time, Jobs become almost a fixture there.

When Jobs returned, he brought focus not just to the company but to Jony’s design group.

Jony was ostensibly in charge of the design squad, but the team’s efforts weren’t unified. Young and inexperienced as a manager, Jony wasn’t exerting much discipline or leadership. It was creative chaos, just like the rest of the company. The design department was full of talented but willful designers, each working on his or her own projects with little or no coordination.

“Each designer had his own agenda, or their own design impulse, and there was no control [over their activities],” designer Doug Satzger said. “One designer had an agenda over what a laptop should be; another had an agenda over what a printer should be. There was no consistency on what the next Power Mac tower should be. The design group was not set up so that designers could work collaboratively as a team. All the designers were independent and had their own strong design sense. It was like they were all working for different companies.”

Satzger said three designers were working on three different updates of the Power Mac, a powerful computer for professionals that came in a
tower configuration. “There was no consistency,” said Satzger. “Danny [De Iuliis] had designed a perfect cube with wheels on it. It was pretty big. Danny Coster was working on a model that consisted of various blocks thrown together, while the design of Thomas Meyerhoffer’s [another member of the ID team] for the tower was all slurpy with lines all over—it was a monolithic piece of art. And the team was going ahead with not one of them but all of them.”
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Esslinger and Brunner, in their times, had allowed designers to explore different design directions. Brunner in particular liked to treat the early design process almost as a competition. But he’d eventually choose the best ideas, and Esslinger, too, would unify the best ideas into a single design direction. Jony had worked in this kind of environment for several years, but didn’t seem willing or able to provide a strong lead.

Jobs stepped in, shutting down unpromising projects and trimming back Apple’s product line to suit his 2×2 matrix. Satzger remembers Jobs coming to the studio and telling the designers that Apple would be putting all its energies behind just four products. First and foremost would be a desktop for consumers. “Steve said, ‘My daughter is going to college, and I’ve looked at everything out there and they’re all crap. There’s a real opportunity. Our target now is to build an Internet computer.’ He was envisioning the iMac. That was the new focus.”

Jobs wanted an inexpensive computer, something that would appeal to mainstream consumers eager to try out the Internet, which was just becoming popular thanks to Netscape’s Navigator browser, cheap modems and an explosion in Internet service providers (ISPs) like AOL, which offered inexpensive Internet access plans. And he wanted it quickly. He’d cut back the company to give it breathing room, but he needed new products quickly to restore plunging sales. He was betting the company on this one product.

At the time, Apple’s cheapest computer was $2,000, more than $800
above the average Windows PC. To be competitive against cheaper Windows offerings, Jobs initially pushed for a radically stripped-back machine called a “network computer” (also known as an NC), a hot idea in Silicon Valley at the time. The NC would be a cheap, simple terminal that connected to a central server over the Internet. It had no hard drive or optical disk drives, just a screen and keyboard. It was perfect for schools and workplaces and it seemed, at first glance, ideal for consumers eager to access the Internet.

Before Jobs’s return, in May 1996, Apple had joined Oracle Corporation and thirty other hardware and software companies in the Networking Computing Alliance, which set the standard for cheap, diskless computers based on a common networking platform. Jobs’s billionaire best friend, Larry Ellison, was especially bullish on NCs as the future of the computer industry. And as a newly installed member of Apple’s board, Ellison told the press that Apple was building an NC. He’d recently launched a start-up, Network Computing Inc., to kick-start the sector.

Influenced by Ellison’s thinking, but also eager to compete with him, Jobs also talked up the NC idea. “We’re going to beat Ellison at his own game,” he told his Apple colleagues with relish.
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Just as he’d done with the first Macintosh, Jobs began by laying out certain specifications: The Mac NC should be an all-in-one product, ready to use right out of the box, in a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for $1,200 or so. “He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” recalled Apple’s marketing chief, Phil Schiller. “That meant design and engineering had to work together.”
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In September 1997, Jon Rubinstein instructed Jony to take Jobs’s Mac NC specs and prepare a dozen foam models of potential designs.

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Jony gathered the entire team in the design studio to hash it out. They started by discussing the Mac NC’s potential target market. “We didn’t
start with engineering dictates,” Jony said. “We actually started with people.”

“The iMac revolved not around chip speed or market share but squishy questions like ‘How do we want people to feel about it?’ and ‘What part of our minds should it occupy?’” Jony said later in a
Newsweek
interview.
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Jony was looking for the Mac NC’s “design story.” As his dad, Mike, had instilled in him, developing the design story was an essential first step in conceiving something entirely new. “As industrial designers we no longer design objects,” Jony said. “We design the user’s perceptions of what those objects are, as well as the meaning that accrues from their physical existence, their function and the sense of possibility they offer.”
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They discussed topics like “objects that dispense positive emotions”; one of the designers suggested a transparent gumball dispenser as an example of this. The IDg also discussed how other businesses, like the fashion industry, might approach the problem. “We talked about companies like Swatch—companies that broke the rules—that viewed technology as a way to the consumer, not the consumer as the path to the technology,” Jony said.

Later, Jony explained his thinking this way. The computer industry “is an industry that has become incredibly conservative from a design perspective,” he said. “It is an industry where there is an obsession about product attributes that you can measure empirically. How fast is it? How big is the hard drive? How fast is the CD? That is a very comfortable space to compete in because you can say eight is better than six.”
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But Jony offered a key insight: “It’s also very inhuman and very cold. Because of the industry’s obsession with absolutes, there has been a tendency to ignore product attributes that are difficult to measure or talk about. In that sense, the industry has missed out on the more emotive,
less tangible product attributes. But to me, that is why I bought an Apple computer in the first place. That is why I came to work for Apple. It’s because I’ve always sensed that Apple had a desire to do more than the bare minimum. It wasn’t just going to do what was functionally and empirically necessary. In the early stuff, I got a sense that care was taken even on details, hard and soft, that people may never discover.”
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Sitting around a table, Jony and the rest of team started sketching. Satzger remembered the table was covered with loose sheets of copy paper, colored pencils and Pilot pens. The team drew up ideas together as a collective, passing the loose sheets between them as they worked. Trying to imagine a machine that dispensed positive emotions, as they hoped the iMac would, designer Chris Stringer made a beautiful sketch of a colorful candy dispenser.

Satzger remembers coming up with the initial egg shape for the iMac, based on TVs he had previously designed for Thomson Consumer Electronics. “If you look at the shape, it’s almost exactly the same profile.”

The idea appealed to Jony and the rest of the team. Immediately, the decision was made to pursue the egg shape as the primary design direction.

The iMac had to be on the market in a matter of months or Apple would go out of business. To speed up the design process, Jony instigated a radical, integrated design process that transformed the way Apple developed its products. The workflow that the design group uses today is basically unchanged from the system Jony introduced.

The IDg needed new tools that could streamline the complex design process and allow the designers to create 3-D designs that, in turn, could be used by outside toolmakers at the factories to create the molds for the computer’s case. Marj Andresen, who worked in the product design group, was instrumental in helping Jony find sophisticated CAD
software to bring the new machine to life. The new CAD modeling process Jony helped pioneer integrated disparate computing systems, using complex software that translated files to make them interoperable.

“I was given nine months to get the tools into production,” recalled Andresen, who calls herself a “CAD/CAM therapist” because of her role supporting high-strung designers. “Nine months to get from design to production was a very short time and impossible with drawings,” said Andresen. “Our only hope was to use the design files directly. While the tools existed, the process hadn’t yet been proved on either the engineering or the tooling end. It was crazy and hectic and exciting.”

Prior to the iMac, hardware engineering (electrical design) and product design (mechanical engineering) drove the design process. “They designed the size of the enclosure due to engineering constraints and ID were tasked to develop ‘skins’ to go around this enclosure,” said Paul Dunn, a former CAD manager at Apple. “When Jobs returned to Apple, he and Jony turned this process on its head.”

Although Jony’s group had a small CAD team in the studio, it was still the early days of computer-aided design. The designers worked mostly with hand-drawn sketches and some early, relatively primitive 2-D CAD software. But Jony’s team needed to design in three dimensions, not two.

They found the answer in Alias Wavefront, a 3-D graphics package used in the aerospace, automotive and the fledgling computer-animation industry. Steve Jobs’s other company, Pixar, had used it for some special effects in
Toy Story
, released in 1995.

“Apple was producing designs much more complicated than any of our computer rivals,” said Dunn. “The surfaces on [the iMac] were more akin to the aerospace and automotive industries than the computer industry. . . . We were pushing the envelope.”
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Alias Wavefront is, in effect, a sculpting tool; it defines the outer
envelope of a product, much like a sculptor models a work in clay. As soon as the designers had a promising shape sketched out, they took it to the CAD group, who are also known as “surfacing guys.” At the time, IDg had a small group of operators; it’s now grown to about fifteen surfacing guys who are based inside the IDg studio. They run Alias (now called Autodesk Alias) on high-end Apple computers and Hewlett-Packard workstations. With Jony’s designers watching over their shoulders, the CAD operators created outlines of the proposed designs. The idea was to make sure the basic shapes and scale were sound.

The process often takes several days. When the designers and surfacing guys settle on a reasonably good shape, they send the file to one of the studio’s CNC milling machines to create a physical model. The initial models are cut from foam, and later, more detailed “hard models” are cut from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) or RenShape, a dense red foam that cuts like wood and is good for surfaces.

The design group in Jony’s early days also had an early and very expensive 3-D printer in the studio. “Apple had been at the forefront of modeling technology for many years,” said Dunn. “From the early nineties, Apple’s modeling group had a stereolithography (SLA) machine which could create complex 3-D models in several hours. The chemicals were extremely toxic, but the results were worth all the hassles.”

As Jony discovered in college, making detailed models was a key part of the design process. “When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation,” Jony said. “But when you made a 3-D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes—the entire process shifts. It galvanizes and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.”
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With this new workflow arrangement, Jony consolidated the model shop into the design studio (previously it had been under the aegis of
product design). Andresen says it was a sensible move, organizationally and operationally. “The model shop gave the ID guys a first look and feel at the product design. They were creating one-off models of what products might look like. . . . [T]hey really had the coolest stuff.”
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The modeling guys were essential to the product process. “Our model shop guys were craftsmen,” Andresen remembered. “They could build anything, but they had to learn how to use the new computer tools and to accept the design files from the engineers.”

Another important piece of software in reimagining the design process was Unigraphics, a 3-D engineering program developed by McDonnell Douglas for use in aerospace. Andresen and her group created software that allowed the 3-D models created by the surfacing guys in Alias to be imported into Unigraphics. From there, the product design group used Unigraphics to create workable products from the surfaces determined by the designers. The engineers would bring in detailed 3-D models of the product’s components, allowing them to see whether the components would fit, and if the proposed shape would work. “The designers would sit with the CAD guys and say, ‘Bring in the CRT tube. Here we need some volume for board, a place for connectors,’ and so on,” said Satzger. “Processes and interfaces were developed which allowed us to take these surfaces and import them into Unigraphics, which Product Design then used as the starting point to develop real solids and parts for manufacture,” said Dunn.