Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (20 page)

One of the great things about our team, about working so closely together is the feeling that we’re really only at the beginning of something, that we have only just started. We still have lots more to do.

—JONY IVE

Over the years, the genius of Jony Ive’s IDg studio has been most apparent when the team confronted special challenges. A blending of epiphany thinking and practical implementation became a signal characteristic of the Jobs-and-Jony collaboration. More often than not, the original solutions the team came up with pushed the boundaries of traditional manufacturing; the refining of the design of the original iMac is a case in point.

About eighteen months after the first iMac hit the market, Jony’s team starting to think about replacing its bulky CRT with a light, thin LCD screen. The team began work in 2000, and the project proved challenging, requiring scores of prototypes. But the finished product would be one of Apple’s most distinctive computers.

At first, Jony’s team came up with a conventional concept for a flat-screen computer, with the guts of the computer attached to the back, much like the earlier Twentieth Anniversary Mac Jony had designed. But Steve Jobs disliked what he saw as ugly and inelegant.

“Why have this flat display if you’re going to glom all this stuff on its back?” he asked Jony. “We should let each element be true to itself.”
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According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs left Apple HQ early to think it over at his home in Palo Alto. Jony dropped by and they took a walk in Jobs’s garden, which Jobs’s wife, Laurene, had planted with sunflowers. Jony and Steve were riffing on their design problem, when Jony wondered what the iMac might look like if the screen was separated from the other components like a sunflower on its stalk.

Jony became excited and started sketching ideas. “Ive liked his designs to suggest a narrative,” wrote Isaacson, “and he realized that a sunflower shape would convey that the flat screen was so fluid and responsive that it could reach for the sun.”
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A former executive tells the story differently. Jony made two prototypes. One was the ugly, inelegant flat-screen unit, the other a “goose neck” design with a separate screen and base. At the presentation, Jobs chose the gooseneck design because it was “anthropomorphic.” Like the original Mac, Jobs wanted a “friendly” computer.

Jony’s team next faced the problem of attaching the screen to the base.

First they tried a series of ball-and-socket pieces that resembled the vertebrae of a spine. The vertebrae were held together by a system of spring-loaded cables with a clamp attached to the back of the screen. When the clamp was tight, it tensioned the cables and held the vertebrae in place. When the clamp was loosened, it put slack on the cables and allowed the spine to be moved. “The display floated so that you had to grab it with two hands to release the lock, and then when you positioned it, it locked in place. It had a series of these beautiful balls and sockets, and the power and signal cables went through the neck,” said Satzger. “When you released everything it would relax, and when you tightened it, it would lock with a big cam mechanism.”

The team made scores of prototypes, which might have looked beautiful, but they turned out to be impractical. Locking and unlocking the spine clamp took two hands, making it difficult for some users, especially children, to adjust the monitor.

Temporarily stumped, Jony asked the design consultancy IDEO to come in and take a look. IDEO was supposed to evaluate the usefulness of the design, but instead their designers suggested replacing the spine with two rigid arms that resembled an anglepoise lamp. That seemed like a great idea, and much more practical.

Jony’s group made several more prototypes and found that IDEO’s two-segment arm worked well. But Satzger wondered aloud in one of the brainstorming sessions, “Why do we need that much flexibility? Why don’t we adopt a one-arm mechanism?” Satzger’s suggestion led nowhere—until Jony and Steve returned to the IDg studio after a meeting. Steve also suggested dropping the second arm.

Again, Jony’s team set to work. After a lot of engineering, the arm they came up with was of stainless steel that, thanks to an internal spring under very high pressure, balanced the weight of the screen perfectly. The screen could be moved easily with just one finger; its cables ran internally.

“We were all really excited about it,” Satzger said. “We loved it. We learned a ton of things too doing it.” Jony summed up their accomplishment, calling it “an engineering tour de force. That was an extremely difficult problem to solve. . . . [The arm] seems simple, but that simplicity belies something very complex.”
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•   •   •

Jony’s team also agonized over the bezel, the plastic frame around the display. The earliest prototypes had a very narrow bezel but the designers found that, when adjusting the display, it was almost impossible not to poke the screen, producing that rippling effect that reminds you what
the “L” in LCD stands for (liquid crystal display). When they tried a thicker bezel, Jony thought it “took away from the story of this amazingly bright, light display.”
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That led to the idea of a “halo,” a wide rim of transparent plastic that would give users something to grab without ruining the aesthetics of the screen. The halo was used to great effect in the iPod, and became one of the most recognizable design motifs of Jony’s clear-on-white era, one that would carry through to the bezel of the present iPad.

The dome base of the iMac was another feat of engineering. The iMac G4 crammed a computer, drives, and a power supply into its hemispherical base. It had a cooling system borrowed from the Cube, which sucked air in through the bottom and expelled it out of the top, but, unlike the Cube, the chips ran hot, requiring a fan. Even so, Jony remembered, “There’s not a screw or detail that’s not there for a very good reason.”
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According to Jony, the design of the iMac G4 was ingenious not because of its shape but its unexpected unobtrusiveness. Although it looked like a freaky lamp on approach, everything but the screen disappeared when the user sat in front of it. “With the new iMac, if you just sit there for ten minutes and move the display around, you quickly forget about its design. The design gets out of the way,” Jony concluded. “We are not interested in design statements. We do everything we can to simplify design.”
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As with the marketing of the iPod, Jony’s team also designed the iMac’s packaging. Boxes may seem trivial, but Jony’s team felt that unpacking a product greatly influenced the all-important first impressions. “Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging,” Jony said then. “I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”
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Though they took the process seriously, that didn’t mean they lacked
a sense of humor. As a joke, the design team designed the inside of the iMac G4’s box to look like male genitals. “You had the neck laying there and the two ball speakers next to it,” said Satzger. “People would open the box and say ‘What?’”

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iMac G4 at Macworld in January 2002,
Time
magazine featured it on the cover that week, just the second time a product launch had made the magazine’s cover.

“This is the best thing I think we’ve ever done,” Jobs said on stage as he introduced the machine. “It has a rare beauty and grace that is going to last the next decade.”

When he showed a picture of the base, he said, “Isn’t that the most beautiful bottom of a computer you’ve ever seen?”

Jony appeared in a promotional video that Jobs showed to the crowd. “The easy part was knowing we were going to use a flat panel display,” Jony said to the camera.
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“The hard part was how. Our solution appears to defy gravity. It’s just this very simple, pure frame that appears to float in space. When you look at it now, it seems so simple, it seems so obvious, and yet again, the simplest, most efficient solution has been the most elusive.”

Following Jobs’s keynote, Jony quietly walked the MacWorld show floor, trying to gauge people’s reactions. He’d worked on the various pieces of the iMac in secret for two years, and, with no public feedback, Jony worried that the marketplace might not like the imaginative new machine. “I think they like it,” he concluded later. “Yeah, yeah, people are . . . pretty enthusiastic.”
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He needn’t have worried. The iMac G4 helped reset Apple’s public image, which had suffered after the failure of the Cube. With Jony at the design helm Apple was at the top of the game again, with Jony helping set its course.

His role at Apple assured, Jony indulged his old passion for cars. He treated himself to an Aston Martin DB9, a supercar known for its association with James Bond. Jony had the car delivered to New York and drove it cross-country with his dad, Mike. It cost about $250,000, but just a month after he got it, Jony wrecked the car on Interstate 280 near San Bruno. The accident nearly killed him and his commuting partner, Daniele De Iuliis, who was riding in the passenger seat.

“Jony was going pretty fast, although he said he was not going over eighty miles per hour,” said a colleague. “Something happened in the traffic. Jony lost control of the car, which went into a spin. It sling-shotted the back end, whacked into a panel truck and knocked that over, and went straight into the median. The whole car was smashed. They were lucky to get out alive. The car was a mess; totally fucked up on all sides.”

The car’s airbags went off, filling the car with the smell of the explosive that set off the airbags. Jony found the smell unsettling as he came to. “He woke up with the smell of gunpowder in the car and that was weird. He was distressed by that,” said another source. “Ironically, the car crash alerted Apple to how important Jony is to the company, and they gave him a big pay rise.”

Jony was undeterred in his quest for speed and cool cars: He bought a second DB9. When it burst into flames parked outside his garage, he complained to Aston Martin. “Him being English and his relationship with Steve and Apple, he went to Aston Martin and they told him they’d give him a great deal,” said a source.

The company offered him a discount to move up to the Vanquish (2004–2005 model), a $300,000 grand touring car with a monstrous V12 engine. Soon after, Jony bought a white Bentley, another powerful British luxury car. He also purchased a Land Rover LR3 after one of his
colleagues in the design studio bought one. “Jony wanted one as well and got one within days,” said a source. Later, Jony added a black Bentley Brooklands to his stable. Costing about $160,000, the Brooklands was hand assembled with lots of interior wood and leather. It’s another powerful machine, capable of reaching sixty miles per hour from a standing stop in five seconds.

As well as being fast and powerful, Aston Martins are known for their innovative production methods. Their cars are built from unusual, lightweight materials like aluminum, magnesium and carbon fiber. The all-aluminum chassis is glued together rather than welded, which makes it incredibly strong and resistant to cracking. Jony would soon introduce similar production methods to Apple’s manufacturing arsenal.

•   •   •

Starting with the iMac G3, Jobs and Jony worked together more closely than ever. Ken Segall, the TBWA/Chiat/Day ad man, who continued to consult with Apple, reported that “[Jony] was in most of our biweekly meetings with Steve.” These were marketing meetings—not Jony’s thing—yet Jobs liked him there to bounce ideas off. “Steve obviously valued Jony’s thinking for more than just product design.”

His role as consigliere was cemented by their relationship outside the conference room as well. Segall also remembered: “Steve and Jony having lunch in the cafeteria—and not once in all that time did I ever see Steve there without Jony. They seemed truly inseparable.”
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Meanwhile, Jony’s relationship with Rubinstein was worsening. They fought constantly over everything.

In the wake of the first iPod release, it became evident that Jony’s role in shaping Apple’s philosophy had grown. His belief that computers and music players should be simple to use and beautiful to look at drove many decisions not only in the evolution of the iPod but in the release of new models of the iMac and iBook.

“Apple puts out something really elegant like the [iPod]. Then they relentlessly improve it,” said Dennis Boyle, one of the cofounders of IDEO. “So not only are they outstanding at putting true innovations onto the market, but also at making those products better and better. . . . They leave their competitors in the dust.”
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Within two years of launch, the iPod was made Windows compatible (it would have been quicker, but acquiescing to Windows was a big psychological barrier for Jobs), and gained the iTunes Music Store, which made it an easy matter to load the player with new content.

In continuing the process of miniaturization, which had shrunk all of the iPod’s components, the iPod mini hit the market in January 2004 with a smaller, solid-state click wheel that was touch-sensitive. The buttons at the four compass points were incorporated into the wheel itself. “The click wheel was designed out of necessity for the mini because there wasn’t enough room for [the buttons on] the full size iPod,” said Jobs. “But the minute we experienced it, we just thought, ‘Oh my God! Why didn’t we think of this sooner?’”
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Jony offered a more detailed version of the mini’s development. Originally conceived as a small iPod, the first versions, which used the same materials and design language, weren’t working. “It was just completely wrong,” Jony said. “Then we started to explore very different materials and approaches. We realized we could make this in aluminum. Unlike with stainless steel, you could blast it and then anodize it—which is a form of dyeing—and then you could do color in an unusual way.”
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That first foray into aluminum would influence a whole generation of products. Like the iMac before it, the iPod mini would come in a range of colors. It was a big hit; the fastest-selling iPod up to that time, especially with women. It was the first iPod that people started wearing on their bodies, outside their pockets, with a strap or a clip. Some
treated it like an accessory, a piece of fashion jewelry. The mini also kick-started the trend of having a small, dedicated iPod just for the gym or running.

In just four years, Apple took the iPod from the 6.4 oz. original to the 4.8 oz. nano. In the process, storage was increased sixfold, a color screen and video playback were added and battery life was extended to four hours. And the price was reduced by $100. Eventually, Apple was selling a player at every $50 price point between $50 and $550, including the shuffle, which dispensed with the screen, an exercise in ballsy minimalism that perhaps only Jony and Jobs could have pulled off.

Some of the gains were a function of manufacturing improvements. In an interview with the British edition of
GQ
, Jony expounded upon the advances he’d achieved with the first aluminum shuffle. Machined from extruded aluminum, the shuffle clipped together with barely a gap between the parts. “The way the parts fit together is extraordinarily tight,” Jony said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a product produced in such volume at that price, which has been given so much time and care.”
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The world was taking notice not only of Apple’s products but of the company’s talented head designer. Jony had been winning prizes and awards since his teens, but in the early 2000s, the awards really poured in. In July 2002, the Industrial Designers Society of America honored Jony and Apple with the design world’s highest honors, the gold Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) for the original iPod, declaring the music player “the most memorable design solution” of the year.
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In June 2003, the London Design Museum announced that Jony was the winner of its inaugural Designer of the Year Award. His prize was £25,000, plus a golden gong. The distinction seemed a foregone conclusion. “Designer of the Year doesn’t really come close to describing what Ive has achieved in the decade since he joined Apple,” wrote Marcus
Fairs in
ICON
magazine. “There are few designers who have had the commercial, critical and sociological impact of Ive and his small team at Apple.”
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Jony took every opportunity to include his colleagues at awards ceremonies, a clear acknowledgment that the work he was being celebrated for was always a group effort. At the London Design Museum he was joined at the party by his design group, who paid him the compliment of dressing “exactly like Ive, had crewcuts like Ive, and said as little as Ive,” said
ICON
. Jony told reporters he found awards “nice” but “slightly awkward in that it’s a hard thing to receive when there’s a team of you.”
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“One of the great things about our team, about working so closely together,” Jony added, “is the feeling that we’re really only at the beginning of something, that we have only just started. We still have lots more to do.”
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Jony’s and Apple’s success was quite obvious. As he noted on a trip to London, everywhere he looked, he saw the white earbuds. Having labored for years when Apple had just a small share of the computer market, he found it gratifying to see one of his designs become dominant.

Jonathan Glancey, design critic for the
Guardian
, said Jony’s genius had been “to make imaginative what was previously lackluster, to give a glamorous, desirable and human face to a technology that has been . . . the domain of joyless office managers and electronic professionals (transforming) a humourless technology into something desirable and sophisticated.”
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Canada’s
Saturday Post
called the iPod “the defining device of this generation’s iWant-iNeed-iWish gadgetophiles.” Its ubiquity and “no beige please, we’re British” design philosophy granted it permanent icon status.
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Toward the end of the year, Jony’s growing reputation was
recognized by the government of his native England. On the heels of the cultural era known as “Cool Britannia,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown called out Jony as a model for English design innovation. The
Guardian
reported that Brown sought to use the nation’s large number of design graduates “to make [UK] products more desirable than low-cost competition, and thus fend off the challenge from China and India.”
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In the mid-nineties, according to the report, one in sixty-four graduates were in design programs. A decade later, the number was one in sixteen. “Design is not incidental to modern economies but integral; not a part of success but the heart of success; and not a sideshow but the centrepiece,” Brown said. His government commissioned official reports to find the economic potential of design in its industries and found that design-centered companies “saw a turnover rise by fourteen percent and profits by nine percent.”
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No doubt Jony’s father, Mike, had made a huge contribution to the rise of design in his native land and he was honored thusly. In 1999, in recognition of his contributions to British design education, Mike Ive was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

In 2003, Jony was appointed a member of Royal Designers for Industry; in 2004, he was awarded the RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal; and in 2005, he won what was to be the first in a string of prestigious awards from the British Design & Art Direction (D&AD). In 2006, he was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (a higher award than his father’s OBE).

Jony didn’t make a public comment about the award at the time, but in a statement, Apple said: “We are as proud as could be that Jony is receiving such a prestigious commendation.”
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•   •   •

Although his designs were drawing much notice, bigger work (quite literally) was still ahead. The year 2003 saw the release of the
seventeen-inch PowerBook. It was a monster laptop, but none of Apple’s marketing materials mentioned Jony’s proudest innovations, which included its internal frame and a clutch mechanism in the lid hinge.

The variable-rate clutch he devised had less resistance in the near-closed position, allowing the lid to be opened with one hand without the bottom of the laptop lifting off the desk. A consuming attention to detail contributed to the user experience, even though few users have any idea how much work went into it.

Jony was proud of the PowerBook’s construction, and dismantled one for his 2003 Designer of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum. “We took [it] to pieces so you can see our preoccupation with a part of the product that you’ll never see,” Jony said. “I think—I hope—there’s an inherent beauty in the internal architecture of the product and the way we’re fabricating the product: laser-welding different gauges of aluminium together and so on. Very often people assume that it’s only if it’s a smaller volume production—batch production—that people will really be caring about all of the details. I think one thing that is typical about our work at Apple is caring about the smallest details. I think sometimes that’s seen as more of a craft activity than a mass-production one. But I think that’s very important.”
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Richard Powell, founder and director of the famous design firm Seymourpowell, liked what he saw. “When you talk to Jony Ive, his eyes sparkle with the memory of a design challenge overcome, a problem solved, a material found. He becomes animated about a surface perfected and a process explored. For Ive, nothing is left to chance; everything must be deeply considered.”
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Powell saw Jony’s focus as defining. “Innovation,” he wrote, “is rarely about a big idea; more usually it’s about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and better way. Jony’s fanatical drive for excellence is, I think, most evident in the stuff beyond the obvious; the stuff you
perhaps don’t notice that much, but which makes a difference to how you interact with the product, how you feel about it.”

•   •   •

The iPod was becoming a monster hit, suddenly as important to Apple as the Mac line. In 2004, the iPod was spun off into a separate division and Rubinstein, formerly head of all hardware, put in charge. In executive meetings, Jobs and his team started wondering what else the company might get into. An Apple-branded car and digital cameras were some of the ideas knocked around.
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In 2005, Jobs promoted Jony to senior vice president of industrial design, elevating him to the same senior level as Rubinstein. Jony had reported to Rubinstein, with whom he fought constantly. Now Jony answered only to Jobs.