Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (23 page)

After the decision to move forward with the P2, Jony was put in charge of industrial design, Fadell of engineering and Forstall, previously
responsible for Mac OS X, was given the job of adapting the computer operating system into a brand-new operating system for the phone.

Jony’s design team worked on the iPhone without ever seeing the operating system. They initially worked with a blank screen and later, a picture of the interface with cryptic mock icons. Likewise, the software engineers never got to see the prototype hardware. “I still don’t know what the lightning icon means,” one of the designers later remarked, referring to one of the icons on the fake iOS screen.

Jony himself wasn’t left in the dark: He was kept up to speed on the latest developments in Forstall’s new operating system, and was constantly talking to Jobs and other executives. He’d give feedback and direction to the design team. Within the design studio, designer Richard Howarth was designated the design lead of the P2.

At the beginning, few of those involved were confident they would be able to develop a phone. “It was fundamental R&D in all directions,” said a former executive. It meant ramping up probably the most difficult project in the company’s history and, all the while, continuing to develop products like the MacBook and the iPod line. Important staffers were moved off their current projects, delaying some products and canceling others.

There were potentially dire consequences for the company if the project did not succeed. “Had it not succeeded, not only would we have had the detriment of the lack of those products shipping, we wouldn’t have had something else to fill in at the same time,” Forstall explained.

Jobs told the executives they could recruit anyone they wanted within the company to work on the project, but they absolutely could not go outside. “That was quite a challenge,” Forstall recalled. “The way I did it is I would find people who were true superstars at the company, just amazing engineers, and I would bring them to my office and I would sit them down and I would say, ‘You are a superstar in your
current role. Your manager loves you. You’re going to be incredibly successful at Apple if you just stay in your current role and keep on doing what you want to do. I have another offer for you, another option. We’re starting a new project. It’s so secret, I can’t even tell you what that new project is’ . . . and amazingly, some tremendously talented people accepted that challenge and that’s how I put together the iPhone team.”
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Forstall commandeered an entire floor in one of the buildings at Apple HQ and had it locked down. “We put doors with badge readers, there were cameras, I think, to get to some of our labs, you had to badge in four times to get there,” he said. It was nicknamed the “Purple Dorm.”

“People were there all the time,” Forstall said. “They were there at night. They were there on weekends. You know, it smelled something like pizza.

“On the front door of the purple dorm, we put a sign up that said ‘Fight Club’ because the first rule of
Fight Club
in the movie is you don’t talk about Fight Club, and the first rule about the purple project is you do not talk about that outside of those doors.”

Over in IDg, Jony began, as usual, with the iPhone’s story. As he later explained, it was all about how the user would
feel
about the device. “When we are at these early stages in design, when we’re trying to establish some of the primary goals—often we’ll talk about the story for the product—we’re talking about perception. We’re talking about how you feel about the product, not in a physical sense, but in a perceptual sense.”

Jony believed the iPhone would be all about the screen. In their earliest discussions, the designers agreed that nothing should detract from the screen, which Jony likened to an “infinity pool,” those high-end swimming pools with an invisible edge.

“What that did was make it very clear in our minds that the display was important, and we wanted to develop a product that featured and
deferred to the display,” he said. “Some of our early discussions about the iPhone centered on this idea of . . . this infinity pool, this pond, where the display would sort of magically appear.”
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The team made a point in exploring design ideas to avoid any approaches that would diminish the importance of the display.

Jony said they wanted the display to be “magical” and “surprising.” These were his high-end goals for any eventual design. “In the earliest stages of this design, this seemed—this was very new, and it felt there was real opportunity to develop a design story based on those sorts of preoccupations,” he later explained.
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Late in the fall of 2004, Jony’s design team began work on two distinct design directions. One, called Extrudo, was led by Chris Stringer, and it resembled the iPod mini. It was made from a flattened tube of extruded aluminum and could be anodized in different colors. Apple already had big production lines making and anodizing iPod cases in huge numbers. That was one advantage of that direction, along with the fact that Jony and team loved what could be done with extrusion.

The other design, called Sandwich, was led by Richard Howarth. Made mostly of plastic, with a plastic screen, the Sandwich design was rectangular with evenly rounded corners. It had a metal band running around the midpoint of its body, a centered display on the front face, a menu button centered below the screen and a speaker slot centered above the screen.

Jony and his team preferred the Extrudo look and gave it the most attention. They tried cases that were extruded along the x-axis, and some along the y-axis. But problems surfaced immediately. Extrudo’s hard edges hurt the designers’ faces when they put it up to their ears. Jobs especially hated this.

To make the hard edges softer, plastic end caps were added, which also helped with the radio antennas. The iPhone would have three
radios: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a cell radio. But radio waves won’t pass through a metal shell, so the plastic endcaps became essential.

The team struggled to solve Extrudo’s problems, but engineering tests made it clear this particular design direction wouldn’t work unless the plastic endcaps for the radios got bigger. But bigger caps would ruin the clean Extrudo look. “We made books and books filled with pages of designs trying to figure out how not to break up the design because of the antenna, how not to make the earpiece too hard and sharp, and so on,” said Satzger. “But it seemed like all the solutions that added comfort detracted from the overall design.”

The Extrudo design had another problem that nagged at Jobs: The metal bezel detracted from the screen. The design didn’t “defer” to the screen, which had been one of Jony’s original goals. Jony later recalled his flush of embarrassment when Jobs pointed it out.

Apple killed Extrudo; the team was left with Sandwich.

The Sandwich design did have several advantages over Extrudo, one of which was that the rounded edges didn’t hurt the designers’ ears. But the engineering prototypes came back big and chunky, and Jony’s team struggled to slim it down. They were trying to cram in a lot of technology, much of which hadn’t yet been miniaturized enough for a device as complex as the phone everyone envisioned.

By February 2006, several redesigns had come and gone. Jony was so dissatisfied with the progression that, during one of the brainstorms, he asked designer Shin Nishibori to make an exploratory version of the phone with Sony-style design cues. Later, he would contend that his request was not to copy Sony specifically, but to inject some fresh, “fun” ideas into the process.

Shin Nishibori had been a well-known young designer in Japan for years before coming to work at Apple. Traces of a Sony/Japanese influence have appeared in Nishibori’s work on Apple products since 2001, and Steve Jobs, Jony and other Apple designers had often expressed admiration for Japan’s minimalist aesthetic.

In February and March 2006, Nishibori designed and built several phones that borrowed elements seen in Sony products of the time, including a jog wheel, which was a control-wheel-cum-switch that was used on Sony’s CLIÉ personal digital assistants. Nishibori even put the Sony logo on the backs—except for one that he jokingly labeled a Jony.

Years later, at the
Apple v. Samsung
trial, one of Nishibori’s mock Sony phones would be presented as evidence that Jony’s design team hadn’t developed the iPhone on their own, as they contended, but instead copied other companies’ designs. But Apple successfully argued that the Sony/Jony design was merely Sony-style decoration on a device they’d already designed.
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As Apple’s attorneys pointed out, Nishibori’s designs are asymmetrical and none of the Sony-style buttons and switches were adopted in the released iPhone.

In early March 2006, Richard Howarth expressed his frustration with the state of the development of P2. In comparing P2 to Nishibori’s Sony-style design, Howarth complained about its size, and how Nishibori had managed to achieve a slimmer profile. “Looking at what Shin’s doing with the Sony-style chappy he’s able to achieve a much-smaller looking product with a much nicer shape to have next to your ear and in your pocket,” Howarth wrote in an e-mail to Jony.

“I’m also worried that if we start cutting volume buttons on the side, then it removes some of the purity of the extrusion idea and seems like the wrong shape for the job. We can only add so much to it before it becomes a style/a shape, rather than the most efficient construction method and that would be bad.”
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Jony’s team had also tried a curved design, which at one point looked like a promising direction. By adding a curve, more technology could be packed into the middle bulge. It’s a trick Apple has used in many of its newer products, from the iPad to the iMac.

From the beginning, Satzger remembered, the team had a “strong interest” in a design that used two pieces of shaped glass. One of the prototypes they built had a split screen. Above was the screen, below a software-driven touch pad that changed depending on function. Sometimes it was a dial pad, at other times a keyboard. But the problem of making glass convex proved too difficult.

Although Howarth was still using the Extrudo design as a comparison piece late in development, engineering tests seemed to affirm that the Sandwich-style direction would prevail. Then engineering prototypes of the Sandwich design came back with a bad report: They were too big and fat. With the realization that all the technology just couldn’t be squeezed into a pleasing shape, the decision was made to kill the Sandwich design too.

“We didn’t know enough about antennas, we didn’t know enough about acoustics, we didn’t know enough about packing everything in,” said one former executive. “It worked, but it just wasn’t attractive.”

Faced with a dead end, Jony’s team reversed course. They turned to an old model they’d made early in the process but had discarded in favor of the Sandwich and Extrudo. The discarded model looked very similar to the phone that would actually ship, with an edge-to-edge screen interrupted only by the single home button. Its gently curved back snapped seamlessly onto the screen, like the original iPod. Most importantly, it maintained Jony’s infinity-pool illusion. When the phone was off, it appeared to be a single, unbroken, inky-black faceplate; when switched on, the screen magically appeared from within.

It was a voila! moment. “We found something that we’d overlooked,” said Stringer, “something that we, once adding detail to it and really spending some time with it, decided was the absolute best choice for us at that time.” He remembered the ease with which the final, unornamented design for iPhone was chosen. “It was the most beautiful of our designs,” he explained. The front face bore neither the company logo nor the name of the product. “We also knew from our experience with iPod,” Stringer explained, “if you make a startlingly beautiful and original design, you don’t need to. It stands for itself. It becomes a cultural icon.”

In the fullness of time, Jony resurrected the Sandwich for the iPhone 4, another example of the team revisiting earlier designs and spying qualities that they’d previously overlooked. The main structural element of the iPhone 4—the steel frame between the two plates of glass—would double as the phone’s antennas. Unfortunately, that proved problematic because, if the user’s hand made a contact between a gap, effectively shorting the two antennas, the phone would drop calls. Reportedly, Apple could have easily avoided the issue if the antennas had been clear coated, but Jony didn’t want to ruin the integrity of the metal.

Beyond matters of form, the team focused on the function of the multi-touch. Most touch devices at the time used resistive touch screens, based on two thin sheets of conductive material separated by a thin gap of air. When the screen is pressed, the two layers make contact, registering the touch. Resistive screens were typically made of plastic, and were common in pen-based devices like Palm Pilots and Apple’s Newton.

Jony’s design team tried using a resistive screen for the iPhone, but were unsatisfied with the results. Pressing on the screen distorted the picture, and the screen tired the fingers because the user had to press pretty hard. It just didn’t live up to the promise of the name (“touch
screen”), which the designers thought should convey the illusion that the user was literally touching the content.

Moving on from the resistive screen, the hardware team set out to build screens based on capacitive touch, registering changes in electrical charges (or capacitance) across its surface. Human skin is electrically conductive, and a capacitive touch screen uses that characteristic to detect even the lightest touch. Apple had been using capacitive touch technology for several years with the iPod scroll wheel, laptop track pads and the Power Mac Cube, which had a capacitive on-off button. But the technology hadn’t been applied to transparent screens.

One problem was that there was no supply chain for capacitive screens. No one was producing them on an industrial scale at the time—but Apple found a small company in Taiwan called TPK that was producing them for point-of-sale displays using an innovative but limited-run technique. Jobs made a handshake deal with the company, promising that Apple would buy every screen the factory could produce. Based on this agreement, TPK invested $100 million to rapidly ramp up their manufacturing capabilities. They ended up supplying about 80 percent of the screens for the first iPhone, growing rapidly to a $3 billion business by 2013.