Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (25 page)

On January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs went public with Apple’s newest game changer. He announced the iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, positioning it as a device that exists between an iPhone and a laptop, a highly portable, handheld slate with a touch-screen interface. He distinguished it from netbooks, describing the iPad as a device more “intimate than a laptop,” conveying the sense that the iPad was at the intersection of both technology and art.

The iPad went to market in April. In less than a month, Apple sold one million iPads in half the time it took the iPhone to reach that same mark. By June 2011, just over a year after its release, twenty-five million had been sold. By most measures it became the most successful consumer product launch in history. In 2011, shipments of iPads rapidly overtook those of netbooks, sixty-three million versus fewer than thirty million, according to research firm Canalys.
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At Apple HQ, some of the faces who initiated this growth were also changing. In November 2008, Tony Fadell had stepped down as senior vice president of the iPod division, the job he took over from Rubinstein. According to an Apple press release, Fadell and his wife, Danielle
Lambert, who was vice president of the company’s human resources department, were “reducing their roles” to “devote more time to their young family.”
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But two former Apple employees say Fadell was another victim of Jobs’s close relationship with Jony.

“Tony got canned,” said one source. “He was paid off with his salary for a number of years plus so many millions to leave. Tony was canned because he was battling with Jony. He went to Steve so many times bitching about Jony, but Steve had such a tremendous amount of respect for Jony and their relationship that he sided with Jony, not Tony.”
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Less than a year after the iPad’s initial launch, in March 2011, Apple surprised the world by announcing a sequel. The new version would be not only a big upgrade in terms of the hardware capability but a wholesale design turnover.

The iPad 2 was thinner and lighter than the original. It gained key new features like front and back cameras, as well as thoughtful touches like a magnetic cover that turned the iPad off and on. The design marked a big advance in manufacturing (with the unibody process), which allowed Jony to fashion the deeply beveled back he originally wanted, but in metal, using Apple’s new unibody manufacturing process. “By reducing what were essentially three surfaces to two, we got rid of the structural wall around the perimeter of the product and eliminated the edge. It’s not only more comfortable to hold, but with the breakthrough we made through unibody engineering, it’s rigid, sturdy and even more precise.”
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Once again, Jony was extremely proud of his group’s efforts. “I can’t think of a product that has defined an entire category and then has been completely redesigned in such a short period of time. It is really defined by the display. There are just no distractions.”
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In March 2012, Apple followed up with the third-generation iPad, which added a high-density retina display, a faster chip and better cameras. In October of the same year, the fourth-generation iPad was launched with a much faster processor and cell connection, as well as a tiny lightning connector to replace the original thirty-pin connector, which was long in the tooth and had become a legacy technology.

In their constant iterations, Apple was beating the “fast followers” at their own game. Fast followers take a winning product, make it cheaper and get it on the market very quickly. Sometimes the products are cheap knockoffs, but often they are good-enough rivals, as myriad Android phones contest. But by upgrading the iPad quickly and aggressively, and making it significantly better with each version, Apple was staying ahead of their competitors.

The fourth-generation iPad was joined by the iPad mini in 2012, which shrank the screen to just under eight inches, and was enthusiastically snapped up by users. “The Mini gives you all the iPad goodness in a more manageable size, and it’s awesome,” wrote David Pogue, an influential tech reviewer with the
New York Times
. “You could argue that the iPad Mini is what the iPad always wanted to be.”
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In the first quarter of 2013, the iPad mini accounted for about 60 percent of all iPad sales.
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From the initial launch and almost overnight, iPads appeared at cafés and on cross-country flights. Apple executives had predicted several times that the iPad would one day replace the PC, but that switch started happening quicker than anyone expected. In the first year, Apple sold nearly fifteen million iPads. By the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple sold more iPads in just three months than any of its rivals sold PCs. By 2015, tablets (most of them iPads) will have more market share than the entire traditional PC market, according to estimates by the market research firm Interactive Data Corporation. The post-PC era, led by Jony and Apple, is upon us.

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.

—DENNIS BOYLE, COFOUNDER, IDEO

In 2008, Jony took the stage at an Apple event to talk about something special: Apple’s new “unibody” manufacturing process. His very appearance was a clear sign from the company of the importance of this design breakthrough.

Jony began by talking about the old MacBook Pro, which was one of the lightest and strongest laptops on the market at the time. Its robust strength resulted from a complex structure of internal frames and strengthening plates screwed and welded together. As Jony spoke, a series of slides played behind him, showing the multiple parts layered, bonded and finally mated with a plastic gasket that ran around the middle.

“For years,” Jony told the audience, “we have been looking for a better way to make a notebook.” He paused and smiled before continuing. “And we think we found it.”
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Jony went on to explain the manufacture of the MacBook Air, Apple’s new razor-thin laptop. Instead of taking multiple sheets of metal and layering them, the new process began with a thick block of metal and, in a reversal of the old process, produced a frame by removing material rather than by adding it. Multiple parts were replaced by just one—hence the name unibody.

Jony’s slides illustrated the various stages. Pronouncing aluminum the British way (aloo-min-ium), he said, while smiling: “One of the fantastic things about aluminum is how recyclable it is. So at each of these distinct stages, we are continually collecting the material, and cleaning it and then recycling it.”
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Although he revealed none of the most essential secrets of the process, he clearly reveled in its fantastic, robot-controlled production. “We started with a solid slab of aluminum, high grade aluminum, that weighed over 2.5 lbs and we end with this remarkably precise part that now only weighs a quarter of a pound. And it’s not only incredibly light, it’s very, very strong.”

The process represented the realization of something else close to Jony’s design soul. By melding great design with state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, Apple had produced something remarkable and new. “That one part,” continued Jony, “just that single part, forms the structure for the MacBook Air. It really is this highly precise aluminum unibody enclosure that made this product possible.”

At that moment, the MacBook Air was the only Apple machine made with the unibody process. However, Apple was about to move almost all of its major products, including the Mac, iPhone and iPad, to unibody.

The change would be a watershed, albeit one that in the excitement surrounding the launch of various products, went largely unacknowledged by the public.

Several months earlier, Jony had laid out all of the parts of a dismantled MacBook Pro on top of one of the big display tables in the design studio at Apple. On the table next to it he had spread out the parts of one of the new unibody MacBooks.

Arranged neatly, the parts of the old MacBook Pro took up almost the entire tabletop. In contrast, the many fewer parts of the unibody machine made for a striking comparison. Jony called his designers over to appreciate the difference.

As part of his characteristic drive to reduce and simplify, Jony wanted to reduce the number of parts and therefore the number of part-to-part joints. Previously, when IDg had done a similar dismantling of an original iPhone, the team counted nearly thirty interfaces where parts meet. After the iPhone underwent a unibody makeover, the number of interfaces shrank to just five.

Jony and his team had initiated the process that led to the unibody much earlier. They’d first explored machining—a manufacturing process that removes raw material to make a part, that may involve drilling, turning, boring and so on—in 2001 with the Power Mac G4 Quicksilver and slowly increased its use with subsequent products like the Cube, Mac mini and various aluminum iPods. But Jony’s team got really serious about machining in 2005 for the iPhone. At that time, they visited various watch manufacturers to see how precise, long-lasting time-keeping products were made.

“We started researching watch companies just to understand machining metals, finishing metals, product assembly,” recalled Satzger.
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What they found was a remarkably high standard of manufacturing. Most importantly, they realized the watch industry used highly machined parts in their high-end products.

While the solution made sense, the Apple investigators also learned that watches are made in relatively small batches. But now the plan gradually evolved to go full bore and use machining as the main manufacturing process for all of Apple’s major products.

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The “unibody process” is a blanket name for a number of machining operations. Machining in general has long been time- and labor-intensive. It relies on big, slow machines like drills and milling machines, but modern CNC machines have greatly sped up and automated the process.

Traditionally, machining has rarely been used in mass production, which is more likely to rely on fast and efficient methods like stamping and molding to turn out products in the millions. Machining is usually associated with one-shot products or small batches. The prototypes made in Jony’s design studio are machined, individually carved using CNC milling machines. In industry, machining has usually been employed only by specialized manufacturers with high standards and deep pockets; think aerospace, defense, high-end watches and designer cars, like the Aston Martin. It is the way to make the best parts possible, the pinnacle of refinement and precision. But it takes time and money.

“Machining enables a level of precision that is just completely unheard of in this industry,” said Jony. “We have been so fanatical in the tolerances of how we machine and build these products, in many ways I think it is more beautiful internally than it is externally. I think that testifies to just our care, to how much we care.”
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Jony saw the unibody process as the key to shrinking the iPhone, iPad and MacBook. In all of these products, a single part forms the back plate and the frame. All the screw bosses are cut into it, for attaching other components, and condensing even more parts into one. Unibody allowed Jony’s team to make the iPhone 5 about three millimeters thinner than the iPhone 4S. That may not sound like much, but it trimmed about 30 percent of the thickness off an already thin product.

For a laptop body, the first part of the process is to create a block of extruded aluminum from a billet (a big round tube) of raw aluminum.
The billet is put through a giant hot press that, as if making flat noodles from a ball of dough, creates an extrusion into a sheet of aluminum.

The aluminum sheet then begins a trip through thirteen separate milling operations to get it into its final shape. The metal is cut into rectangular blocks the size of the laptop. It goes into the first CNC machine, where a laser drill creates a series of registration holes that guide the next cutting operation, a rough “hogging out” that removes the majority of the unwanted material.

This step is followed by a series of increasingly precise milling operations that create the finished part. The key caps and input ports are cut out. Screw bosses are cut and internal struts and ribs are shaped.

The next stage is the laser drilling of perforations for indicator lights. The inside of the case, where the light will be located, is milled thin enough to allow a laser drill to perforate minute holes through the metal. The laser drill is extremely accurate and fast, vaporizing metal with each pulse. The perforations are so tiny, the metal appears to be solid from the outside, but in actuality, they’re big enough to allow the LED behind to shine through. It’s an innovative practice for building magic into the product through precision.

“What is intriguing about that small design detail, is it is a phenomenal piece of design,” said designer Chris Lefteri. “An obvious thing to do there would be to make a hole in the metal, insert an LED, and place a piece of plastic over the top. Although that would do the job adequately, what Apple did instead was machine a series of virtually invisible holes in the body of the computer, so that suddenly lights appeared inside the holes. That is a craftsman-like approach to the industrial production process.”
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The laser drills are also used to make speaker grilles and other small openings, before a blast of fluid clears any debris. Apple uses lasers to etch serial numbers and other technical info onto the case, and may use
them to inscribe personal inscriptions on the backs of iPods. Because there’s no physical contact with the aluminum, the “drills” used for this process never dull or wear out, and they are easily configured and reconfigured through the CNC controls.

After laser drilling, the unibody is passed to a CNC grinding machine that smooths burrs, rough patches and any surface imperfections. The cases are then “blast finished”—sprayed with dry particulates such as ceramic, silica, glass or metal under high pressure—to give the surfaces a textured, matte finish. Then the part is anodized, clear coated or polished, depending on the finish.

The entire unibody process is very much a trade secret, so Apple reveals few details. How much of the process is automated is not clear, though at least part of the assembly is done by robots. While most Apple products have been assembled by hand by legions of workers, it appears the unibody process may enable the company to shift toward automated assembly.

“There’s a lot of focus on robotics and robotic control,” said a former mechanical engineer who worked as a liaison among ID, product development and operations, and spent months in the factories. The engineer declined to elaborate, citing confidentiality agreements, but said that many of Apple’s products are now primarily made and finished on CNC machines with robots moving parts between machining cycles.
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“I have literally seen buildings where as far as the eye can see, where you can see machines carving, mostly aluminum, dedicated exclusively for Apple at Foxconn,” said Guatam Baksi, a product design engineer at Apple from 2005 to 2010. “As far as the eye can see.”
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