Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (18 page)

Before presenting ideas to Jobs or another executive, the making of realistic mock-ups are outsourced to a model shop. The goal is to create models that look as much as possible like a final, finished product, which requires specialist equipment and skills. Jony’s group frequently uses Fancy Models Corporation, a model-making company based in Fremont and run by Ching Yu, a model maker from Hong Kong. Most of the iPhone and iPad prototypes were made by Fancy Models. Each model costs in the range of $10,000 to $20,000. “Apple spent millions on models made by that company,” said a former designer.

By contrast, the CNC machines at Apple, though capable of making pretty refined models, are used mainly for fairly crude early models, or parts that are needed quickly, such as plastic shapes and smaller aluminum bits. The Apple CNC machines are rarely used to produce final models.

The models play a crucial role in deciding on the final design. When designing the Mac mini, Apple’s relatively inexpensive “headless” Mac,
Jony had about a dozen models made up of different sizes. The models ranged from very large to very small. He lined them up on one of the presentation tables in the studio. “We were there with some of the VPs and Jony,” said Gautam Baksi, a former Apple product design engineer. “They pointed at the smallest one and they said, ‘Well, obviously that is too small; that kinda looks ridiculous.’ Then they pointed at the other side and said, ‘Well, that’s too large; no one wants a computer that big. How do you find what’s right in the middle?’ And they talked through that process.”

The decision about the size of the case might seem trivial, but it would influence what kind of hard drive the Mini could contain. If the case were large enough, the computer could be given a 3.5-inch drive, commonly used in desktop machines and relatively inexpensive. If Jony chose a small case, it would have to use a much more expensive 2.5-inch laptop drive.

Jony and the VPs selected an enclosure that was just 2 mm too small to use a less expensive 3.5-inch drive. “They picked it based on what it looks like, not on the hard drive, which will save money,” Baksi said. He said Jony didn’t even bring up the issue of the hard drive; it wouldn’t have made a difference. “Even if we provided that feedback, it’s rare they would change the original intent,” he said. “They went with a purely aesthetic form of what it should look like and how big it should be.”
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Jony’s role at Apple evolved, as he became more managerial than design driven. Jony both ran the group and recruited new members. He was the conduit of information between the design group and the rest of the company, especially at the executive level. He worked very closely with Steve Jobs when he was alive—and now with Apple’s executives—to
select what products to work on and what directions they should take. Nothing is done without his input, whether it’s the color of a product or the detail of a button. “Everything is reviewed by Jony,” said one of the designers.

According to Rubinstein, “Jony is a good leader. He is a brilliant designer, and his team respects him. Jony has very good product sense.” Satzger shared this assessment.

“Jony is very effective as a leader,” Satzger reported. “He is a soft-spoken English gentlemen who had Jobs’s ear.” It was clear in the past that, in many ways, Jony was the hand implementing Jobs’s vision. If Jobs didn’t like something, he’d say so, but that was the only direction he gave. His feedback was always non-directive. He never suggested how something should be changed but rather pushed Jony and his designers to come up with a better solution.

As their relationship grew, Jony was also known to manage up. “A lot of times, it was Jony who would drive Steve,” said Satzger. “He might say to Steve, ‘I think we should change this,’ if he felt that it was important to do something different.” Nor was Jony afraid to go around his executive colleagues to Jobs directly if someone battled or challenged him or his team.

Jony is very protective of his design team, especially in context of the other departments at Apple. “He’ll take the blame personally for screw ups,” said Gautam Baksi. “He’d fall on the sword for the weakest part of the design. If it’s something not up to snuff, he’d personally say it was his fault. I never felt like he threw any of the other ID members under the bus.”

Although the ID team was close-knit, this collegiality did not necessarily extend to other people at Apple. A former engineer in the product design group, who worked with IDg for almost a decade, said interactions with Jony and his team were formal and strained, and he was constantly reminded of the primacy of the design group at Apple.

“I only spoke when I was spoken to,” said the engineer Baksi. “These guys get paid a lot more than me and could make my life hell. I went in [the ID studio] with a purpose and left immediately afterwards. I never spent any extra time in there. I didn’t socialize with the ID guys.”

Jony’s designers, however, often socialize together after work, especially those living in San Francisco. For many of the designers, social life and work are one. At Macworld, they often got a limo—sometimes full of Bollinger champagne—and headed out to dinner and for drinks afterward. A former product design engineer remembers being at a black-tie event at the Clift San Francisco Hotel. “Around midnight in rolls the ID crew for the after-party that is going on in the hotel lobby,” the engineer said. “Stringer, Ive, Whang and a bunch more were there. . . . They’re always very trendy, into trendy music.”

Many of Jony’s team have kids. Even though the design studio is off-limits to outsiders, the designers frequently bring their youngsters in. Satzger, for one, brought his children into the studio all the time. His daughter, who was interested in pursuing a design career, wrote a college essay about growing up in the Apple ID studio, about process and how things were built and why. “She was part of the group; she could be found there for eight to ten hours,” said Satzger.

Jony was the exception as he kept his wife and twin sons, Charlie and Harry, removed from the bustle of the Apple campus. Some of the designers who live in San Francisco know his family, but to the others they are a mystery. It’s an odd paradox for a man whose father had such a strong influence on his son’s interest in design.

Apple has created an art object for hardware and software to live in.

—BONO

In the early 2000s, Apple had stabilized. The Mac was a hit, and Apple had just introduced Mac OS X, a new operating system. OS X applications were in the works for editing video, storing photos and burning DVDs (iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD). What was missing was an application for digital music.

Thanks to Napster, music was rapidly turning digital and CD burners were taking off. Apple would be almost the last computer maker to add CD burners to its computers. In an attempt to catch up, the company bought a third-party MP3 jukebox program for the Mac, SoundJam MP, from a small company, Casady & Greene. Apple also hired Casady & Greene’s hotshot programmer, Jeff Robbin.

Robbin’s team relocated to Apple’s HQ and set about retooling SoundJam, stripping out a lot of features to make it accessible to first-time users. Under the direction of Jobs, Robbin spent several months simplifying the program, which Jobs introduced as iTunes at the Macworld Expo in January 2001.

While Robbin was working on iTunes, Jobs and the executives played with ideas for gadgets that could be used in conjunction with the software Apple was developing, including digital cameras and camcorders. An MP3 player seemed a particularly obvious target, partly because the early devices they saw on the market functioned poorly. In
the words of Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of hardware marketing: “The products stank.”

They were two kinds of MP3 players in the market at the time. One variety was big, ugly and bricklike, based on a traditional three-inch desktop hard drive; the other, which used expensive flash memory, stored only a few songs. Neither of them worked well with iTunes, but Jobs wondered if there was an opportunity to take advantage of the intelligence built into iTunes. He asked Rubinstein to look into it.

Meanwhile, Jony’s group was already making prototypes of MP3 players. The prototypes were purely experimental, nothing more than concepts for potential products, like Brunner’s Juggernaut project had been. Inspired by the iMac’s see-through plastic design language, the players were based on small flash memory chips, capable of storing about an album’s worth of songs. “These smaller peripheral devices were considered more like extensions of a core ecosystem,” said one former designer. “Engineering was not involved, at least not in these early stages of concept presentations.”

Jony particularly liked an MP3 player that resembled the iMac’s hockey-puck mouse, dressed out in transparent red plastic. Inspired by a yo-yo, the device had a groove around its perimeter for holding the earbud’s wires, which slotted into cutouts on the back. (It looked like a round version of the earbud packaging used with the iPhone 5.) The player was controlled by a series of buttons arranged in a circle, with a small black-and-white screen in the middle. It resembled what, eventually, would be the familiar iPod scroll wheel, but at that time was purely button based with no wheel to turn. Jony’s team made other versions, including some for watching video, but none of the prototypes were very compelling.

At the end of February 2001, Jobs and Rubinstein were in Japan for Macworld Tokyo. Rubinstein took a routine meeting with Toshiba Corporation, one of Apple’s major component suppliers. At the end of
their discussion, his hosts showed him a new hard drive, only 1.8 inches in diameter. Though tiny, it had five gigabytes of data storage—enough to hold an astounding one thousand CDs.

The Toshiba engineers didn’t know what to do with the hard drive and asked Rubinstein if they should put it in a camera. Rubinstein smiled but kept his thoughts to himself. He went straight back to the hotel and told Jobs he knew how to build Apple’s MP3 player. All he needed was a ten-million-dollar check.

Jobs told him to go for it, but with a catch: He wanted the new device delivered by Christmas that year, meaning Rubinstein had to have the product ready by August in order to make the marketing cycle for the crucial holiday shopping season. Ruby had six months to come up with Apple’s first MP3 player.

As Rubinstein remembers, his biggest initial problem was that everybody at Apple, including Jony’s ID group, was already busy with other products. As was usual with such exploratory, blue-sky projects, Apple went looking for an outside consultant.

Someone recommended Tony Fadell, a designer/engineer who specialized in handheld hardware and digital audio. Fadell had worked for General Magic, an Apple spinoff, and developed PDAs for Philips before launching his own start-up, Fuse Networks, in the late 1990s.

Fadell’s twelve-person firm was busy trying to build an MP3 stereo player, a conventional rack-mounted component with a hard drive and CD reader instead of a tape deck or FM radio. Fadell had shopped his idea around without much success, approaching the Swiss watch giant Swatch and Palm Inc. His conversations with Real Networks brought him to Rubinstein’s attention.

Rubinstein phoned Fadell on a ski slope in Aspen, Colorado, and asked him to come in and talk about a project. It was so secret, Rubinstein told him, I can’t tell you what it is. Because it was Apple calling, Fadell agreed.

Only after Fadell signed a confidentiality contract did Rubinstein tell him about iTunes and their desire to build an MP3 player to hook into it. Fadell wasn’t particularly enthusiastic—Apple hadn’t been exactly hot in 2000—but he was flat broke. He’d burned through his start-up’s cash and, because the dot-com bubble had burst, he couldn’t raise any more money. Fadell took the job just so he could pay his team at Fuse.

Rubinstein offered Fadell an eight-week contract to analyze what it would take to build an MP3 player. He had to figure out the battery, screen, chips and other components, plus what kind of team would be required to get it made. When he was done, a feasibility study would be reported to Jobs.

Fadell was assigned an internal contact, hardware marketing manager Stan Ng. The two quickly formulated the design story for the new product. “‘In your pocket’ became the mantra for the product, because that was definitely the size and form factor that hit the sweet spot,” Ng said.
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Fadell identified potential components, mostly from the cell phone industry, which was then rapidly taking off. Based on the size of the components he was looking at, he made mock-ups from glued-together Foam Core. A design emerged: a simple rectangle, about the size of a cigarette pack. Since it felt too light in his hand, he gave it heft by adding some old fishing weights he found in his garage. He flattened them with a hammer, then slid them between the model’s foam boards.

Rubinstein loved the model and, in early April, Fadell and Ng presented it to Steve Jobs and other members of the executive team, including Rubinstein, Robbin and Schiller. Fadell hadn’t met Jobs
before, but he’d been coached on how to make sure Jobs picked the right design: Present three options and save the best for last. Fadell had made drawings of the first two mock-ups and brought along his Foam Core model, which he hid under a large wooden bowl that was kept on the long table in the fourth-floor executive conference room.

Ng opened with some slides about the music market and current MP3 players, but a bored Jobs kept interrupting. Fadell took over. He laid all the potential parts on the table, including Toshiba’s 1.8-inch hard drive, a small piece of glass for the screen, various battery alternatives, a sample motherboard. He began talking about pricing curves of memory and hard drive storage, battery technologies and the different kinds of displays.

Then he stood up and showed the meeting a picture of his first concept, which was a big brick of a device with a slot for removable storage. Jobs said it was too complicated.

The next drawing was smaller and held thousands of songs, but it was based on volatile flash memory that would be wiped clean if the battery died. Jobs didn’t like that either, so Fadell went to the table, grabbed all the parts he’d shown earlier, and began snapping them together, like a LEGO model. He handed the electronic sandwich to Jobs. As Jobs turned it over in his hands, Fadell lifted the bowl and gave him the more finished prototype.

Jobs was enthusiastic. Then Phil Schiller surprised everyone when he left the room and returned with several models for an MP3 player that featured a scroll wheel. Schiller explained that a wheel was the best way to navigate quickly through any list, whether of names and addresses or songs. The more you turned the wheel, he explained, the faster the list would scroll, making it quick to get to the bottom of a very long list. He pointed out that to select something, you hit the bull’s-eye in the middle.

Schiller had gotten the idea in a meeting where he’d been examining
competing MP3 players. He’d been irritated by having to hit a tiny button hundreds of times to go up and down a menu one song at a time. “You can’t hit the Plus button a thousand times!” he said. “So I figured, if you can’t go up, why not go around?”
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He found that scroll wheels were actually fairly common in electronics, from scrolling mice to Palm thumb wheels. Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones had a dial for navigating lists of phone contacts and calls that resembled the one that eventually became a signature element in the iPod’s design.

Jobs asked Fadell if he could build Schiller’s scroll wheel. Fadell said yes, of course. The project was code-named P-68.