He loves coming in here because it’s calm and gentle. It’s a paradise if you’re a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don’t run into major disagreements.
On this day Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret over something like this, but Jobs got involved as well. Ever since he had a special power supply made for the Apple II, Jobs has cared about not only the engineering but also the design of such parts.
His name is listed on the patent for the white power brick used by the MacBook as well as its magnetic connector with its satisfying click. In fact he is listed as
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one of the inventors for 212 different Apple patents in the United States as of the beginning of 2011.
Ive and Jobs have even obsessed over, and patented, the packaging for various Apple products.
U.S. patent D558572, for example, granted on January 1, 2008, is for the iPod Nano box, with four drawings showing how the device is nestled in a cradle when the box is opened. Patent D596485, issued on July 21, 2009, is for the iPhone packaging, with its sturdy lid and little glossy plastic tray inside.
Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to
“impute”—to understand that people do judge a book by its cover—and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it’s an iPod Mini or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening up the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in an inviting fashion. “Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging,” said Ive. “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.”
Ive, who has the sensitive temperament of an artist, at times got upset with Jobs for taking too much credit, a habit that has bothered other colleagues over the years. His personal feelings for Jobs were so intense that at times he got easily bruised. “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say,
‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one,’”
Ive said. “And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs.” Ive also has bristled when outsiders portrayed Jobs as the only ideas guy at Apple. “That makes us vulnerable as a
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company,” Ive said earnestly, his voice soft. But then he paused to recognize the role Jobs in fact played. “In so many other companies, ideas and great design get lost in the process,” he said. “The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn’t been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
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THE iMAC
Hello (Again)
Back to the Future
The first great design triumph to come from the Jobs-Ive collaboration was the iMac, a desktop computer aimed at the home consumer market that was introduced in May 1998. Jobs had certain specifications. It should be an all-in-one product, with keyboard and monitor and computer ready to use right out of the box. It should have a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for $1,200
or so. (Apple had no computer selling for less than $2,000 at the time.) “He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” recalled Schiller. “That meant design and engineering had to work together.”
The initial plan was to build a “network computer,”
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a concept championed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, which was an inexpensive terminal without a hard drive that would mainly be used to connect to the Internet and other networks. But Apple’s chief financial officer Fred Anderson led the push to make the product more robust by adding a disk drive so it could become a full-fledged desktop computer for the home. Jobs eventually agreed.
Jon Rubinstein, who was in charge of hardware, adapted the microprocessor and guts of the PowerMac G3, Apple’s high-end professional computer, for use in the proposed new machine. It would have a hard drive and a tray for compact disks, but in a rather bold move, Jobs and Rubinstein decided not to include the usual floppy disk drive. Jobs quoted the hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s maxim, “Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” He was a bit ahead of his time, but eventually most computers eliminated floppy disks.
Ive and his top deputy, Danny Coster, began to sketch out futuristic designs. Jobs brusquely rejected the dozen foam models they initially produced, but Ive knew how to guide him gently. Ive agreed that none of them was quite right, but he pointed out one that had promise. It was curved, playful looking, and did not seem like an unmovable slab rooted to the table. “It has a sense that it’s just arrived on your desktop or it’s just about to hop off and go somewhere,” he told Jobs.
By the next showing Ive had refined the playful model. This time Jobs, with his binary view of the world, raved that he loved it. He took the foam prototype and began carrying it around the headquarters with him, showing it in confidence to trusted lieutenants and board members. In its ads Apple was celebrating the glories of being able to think different, yet until now nothing had been proposed that was much different from existing computers. Finally, Jobs had something
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new.
The plastic casing that Ive and Coster proposed was sea-green blue, later named bondi blue after the color of the water at a beach in Australia, and it was translucent so that you could see through to the inside of the machine. “We were trying to convey a sense of the computer being changeable based on your needs, to be like a chameleon,” said Ive. “That’s why we liked the translucency. You could have color but it felt so unstatic. And it came across as cheeky.”
Both metaphorically and in reality, the translucency connected the inner engineering of the computer to the outer design. Jobs had always insisted that the rows of chips on the circuit boards look neat, even though they would never be seen. Now they would be seen. The casing would make visible the care that had gone into making all components of the computer and fitting them together. The playful design would convey simplicity while also revealing the depths that true simplicity entails.
Even the simplicity of the plastic shell itself involved great complexity. Ive and his team worked with Apple’s Korean manufacturers to perfect the process of making the cases, and they even went to a jelly bean factory to study how to make translucent colors look enticing. The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis.
Topping off the design was the handle nestled into the iMac. It was more playful and semiotic than it was functional. This was a desktop computer; not many people were really going to carry it around. But as Ive later explained:
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Back then, people weren’t comfortable with technology. If you’re scared of something, then you won’t touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there’s this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It’s approachable. It’s intuitive. It gives you permission to touch. It gives a sense of its deference to you. Unfortunately, manufacturing a recessed handle costs a lot of money. At the old Apple, I would have lost the argument. What was really great about Steve is that he saw it and said, “That’s cool!” I didn’t explain all the thinking, but he intuitively got it. He just knew that it was part of the iMac’s friendliness and playfulness.
Jobs had to fend off the objections of the manufacturing engineers, supported by Rubinstein, who tended to raise practical cost considerations when faced with Ive’s aesthetic desires and various design whims. “When we took it to the engineers,” Jobs said,
“they came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn’t do it. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said,
