Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Kahney, Leander

  In April 1994, after working on it all winter, Jony handed over his design to a pair of product design engineers to make a working prototype. As the prototype took shape, a marketing manager worked up an internal product brief. The machine gained the official code name “Spartacus.” After eighteen months, everything was on track to turn it into a real product.

  Then Spartacus stumbled into its first major hurdle. To keep it slim, Jony had planned to use components from the portable PowerBook, only to find the working prototype was seriously underpowered. Portable components then lagged behind their desktop counterparts by at least a generation, so Spartacus seemed painfully slow. In particular, video was poor and, because of the flat profile, the circuitry couldn’t be enhanced with a souped-up video expansion card like its cousins in the desktop department. This loomed as a major liability because Spartacus was to be sold as a desktop computer. Consumers would expect nothing less than desktop performance.

  Jony moved to a regular desktop circuit board (developed for the Performa 6400), but a new problem arose when the marketing department told him that no one would buy a desktop machine unless it could accommodate expansion cards. Even if Brunner was right about home users, the marketing experts advised that an un-expandable desktop would be commercial suicide. To accommodate a pair of expansion cards, Jony was forced to design a special clip-on “hunchback” that covered any cards the user might add. Dubbed internally the “backpack,” the add-on would ship with every machine.

  “With the original back in place, the design is powerful yet physically lean,” Jony would say. “But with the backpack inserted, it becomes a real power system, expressing on the outside the enhanced function contained on the expansion card inside.”30 That may sound like designer doublespeak, but Jony tried to put a brave face on what was obviously a horrible kludge.

  Despite the misshapen hunchback, the design team became quite excited by the prospects of Spartacus. For an executive presentation in 1994, the group rustled up bigger and smaller versions, showing how the concept might be extended into a whole family of desktop products.

  At every step, they faced resistance from the engineers. “There were layers and layers of middle managers, many who had come from Dell or HP and didn’t understand the design-driven approach,” Brunner explained. “They were accustomed to slapping a cheap metal skin on a product, because that was the way they did it at Dell, and Dell sold a lot of computers. They didn’t really believe in what we were doing, and the very senior management of the company at the time didn’t step in. So that made for a fight at the second and third levels.”

  Eventually, Brunner figured that to get any traction, he would personally have to become the machine’s product manager. “It didn’t come out of one of the product groups, and it wasn’t going anywhere,” said Brunner. “There was this process at Apple, where they decided if something was going to get on the product road map. There was a presentation that you needed to put together and a group you needed to present to. I acted like a product marketing guy and presented this idea and got it off the ground.”

  As Spartacus was finalized for market, it was discovered that the integrated speakers presented a major problem: When the volume was cranked up, the internal CD-ROM skipped. The skipping vexed the team for several months until an engineer from Bose suggested a solution. He recommended the use of a much smaller pair of speakers on the desktop and adding a subwoofer on the floor, which could also accommodate the machine’s power brick. The fix worked, and the machine could deliver room-filling audio with only forty watts of power.

  Making the changes meant a new working prototype wasn’t ready until December 1995. Then it was decided to add a newer, updated circuit board, and a larger liquid crystal display (LCD) screen. In June 1996, Prototype Two finally emerged.

  To Jony and the rest of the design team, who had lived with various prototypes for more than three years, the dark gray enclosure with mahogany trim had begun to look old. They had other doubts too. “Some of us felt the color was too strong,” Jony recalled. “But we had all looked at the concept so much, we couldn’t decide what color it should be.”31

  An outside color consultancy was hired. They came up with the brilliant suggestion that the designers shouldn’t focus on the color of the computer; they should look at the color of the environments it would be put in. To find the right color, the consultants put together several palettes of cloth, wood, leather and carpeting, representing the colors found in a typical home. Several prototypes were painted and compared to each palette under different lighting conditions. A dozen options became three and, finally, just one, a metallic green/gold. Thanks to the metallic sheen, the bronze color had a chameleon-like effect that reflected the colors around it, helping it blend into any room. The mahogany accents were switched to black leather, which would likely wear better than wood.

  Initially, the design department loved the final result. They thought it was a great all-purpose computer with good entertainment options in a high-end, high-quality proposition. This latest model included a TV/FM tuner, which allowed it to transform from computer to stereo to TV. Tim Parsey summarized the effects and qualities of the machine: “It’s really complicated geometrically. But it doesn’t look complicated. From the front, the design is quite simple. Yet it embraces the user in a powerful way. It’s incredibly thin, yet the back tells you that it’s strong enough to support itself with ease. And every curve and detail has a purpose.”

  Jony saw a deeper virtue, observing that “it challenges our perceptions in a fundamental way.”

  In August 1996, the third working prototype finally rolled off an actual production line, proving the machine could be made in quantity. In September, tooling was completed and the final design was finished in December 1996. It was more than four years since Brunner had written his conceptual brief.

  With the much-anticipated twentieth anniversary of the Macintosh approaching, the decision was made to designate Spartacus as a special edition. Officially named the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, the new product was limited to a run of just twenty thousnd units. Apple unveiled it at Macworld in January 1997 and the first two units were given to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had just returned to the company as advisers.

  To make it more memorable, the machine was hand-delivered to customers’ homes by specially trained “concierges,” who set up the machines, installed any expansion cards (along with the ugly hunchback) and showed users how to use them.

  “I think it is the first sensible computer design that we have seen in a long time,” said Henry Steiner, Hong Kong’s most eminent graphic designer. “It is quite beautiful and desirable. It has the status value of a Porsche. The fact that the machine combines computer, television and stereo system is impressive.”

  Like the MessagePad, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM) won not only kudos but awards, including the Best of Category prize for I.D. magazine’s Annual Design Review.

  Steve Wozniak thought it was the perfect college machine “with the computer, TV, radio, CD player and more (AV even) all in one sleek machine.” He had several at his mansion in the hills of Los Gatos above Silicon Valley. By the time the machine was pulled from the market one year after launch, however, Wozniak seemed to be the only person on the planet who liked it.

  The TAM bombed in the marketplace. The machine widely missed its mark. Originally priced at $9,000, within a year the list dropped to under $2,000. It was originally intended as a mainstream product, but the marketing group turned it into a pricey special edition. It was the last straw. After all the battles to get the TAM to market, Brunner had grown tired of Apple’s dysfunctional culture.

  Bye-bye, Brunner

  Just before the release of Twentieth Anniversary Mac, Brunner quit. He went to join Pentagram, the prestigious international design firm founded in London, which had courted him earlier that year.

  Brunner’s resig
nation had been in the cards for months. Early in 1996, he had taken an extended leave of absence. Though he returned that fall, things had gone from bad to worse within Apple and the design department. Everyone was frustrated. Two other longtime designers announced they were leaving before Brunner took his departure in December.

  The decisive factor in his leaving was undoubtedly the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. After all the battles to get it to market, Brunner believed bungled positioning and pricing led to the machine’s failure. “It was never intended to be a special edition thing,” said Brunner. “It was intended to be higher-end but a mainstream product. . . . [I]t was a very provocative, forward-looking design, and it foretold what was coming six or seven years later.”

  More important, Brunner said, the process—fraught and hard fought as it had been—represented a line in the sand from the design group, an attempt to change Apple’s internal culture. “That was when we as a design group said we are not going to be a service to other parts of the organization. We are going to take these ideas and push them forward on our own. It pissed people off but it also opened people’s eyes up to what a truly design-driven process can do.”

  As the failure of the anniversary Mac indicated, Apple had become dysfunctional; it was a struggle to get products out, and there were constant battles with engineers and executives. “I quit for two reasons,” explained Brunner. “One, the job wasn’t fun, and to be brutally honest I was losing interest in it. I was spending more and more time in management meetings where I would be there for eight hours and only really needed to be there for thirty minutes. You feel like you are atrophying, you are wasting away. I’m not the kind of person that can just do the job even though you fucking hate it. Can’t do it.”

  With Brunner’s departure, Apple faced growing chaos. There was pressure once again to conduct a search for a name-brand designer, just like the company had done five years earlier. Brunner advised against looking outside for their next design leader. Most of the design team would depart, he warned, and besides, Apple already had a superstar. The job should go to his deputy, Jony Ive.

  “He had quiet leadership qualities and he was super respected,” said Brunner. “Not to put the other guys down at all, for me there was no other choice.”

  For some at Apple, Jony’s age and inexperience were at issue. He was only twenty-nine, but Brunner recommended Jony because he admired his quiet commitment. “He was very consistent, very strong, and he was very ambitious,” said Brunner. “Not in the wear-it-on-your-sleeve kind of ambition that many people have, but he was very strong and insistent. I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it well.”

  Most of all, Jony had what Brunner called “the full spectrum mentality.” He saw the big picture and the details.

  “Jony is very much the craftsman,” Brunner explained. “He loves the big picture but he also revels in the details, being in the factory and knowing exactly where every screw goes. . . . I just knew he had the qualities to be successful.”

  In other words, Jony had what it took to succeed in a corporate environment. He was willing to sit through the endless meetings and battle middle managers to get his designs made.

  “It would have been a disaster if they had hired a headhunter and hired a guy that had a name and offered him a ton of money,” Brunner said.

  Jony got the job. “It was probably one of the better recommendations I ever made,” Brunner said.

  • • •

  Jony inherited a legacy at Apple that would help him thrive. “The Brunner era (1990–95) was by far the most productive and interesting period in Apple’s design history,” Paul Kunkel would write in AppleDesign. “IDg became the most visible and prestigious corporate design group in the world, won more design awards than the rest of the computer industry combined and reached a level where further improvement meant using its own work as a yardstick rather than the competition’s.” A string of successful and groundbreaking products set the template for the future, including the PowerBook (which anticipated today’s MacBooks); the Twentieth Anniversary Mac (the flat-screen iMac); and the Newton, which was a crude precursor to the iPhone and iPad.

  Perhaps even more important, Brunner built the studio, hired great talent and set up the culture. “Bob did more than lay the foundations for Jony’s design team at Apple—he built the castle,” said Clive Grinyer. “After Bob, it was the first time that an in-house design team was cool.”32

  No design slouch himself, Brunner became a partner in the San Francisco office of Pentagram in 1996. He worked with Amazon on the original Kindle, and with Nike and Hewlett-Packard, among many others. In 2007, Brunner helped create the Beats by Dr. Dre brand of headphones, which have been a mega success. In mid-2007, Brunner founded Ammunition, a design consultancy in San Francisco, where he’s worked with Barnes & Noble, Polaroid and Williams-Sonoma. He’s won a ton of awards, and his work is included in the permanent collections of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

  But Brunner likes to joke that the only thing he’ll be remembered for is bringing Jony to Apple. “When I die, my tombstone is going to say: ‘The Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive!’”

  Chaos Reigns

  Brunner quit just in time—at least, for him. Just days after Jony took over, Apple warned that the crucial holiday buying season for 1995 would fall far short of expectations, thanks to an overabundance of cheaper, low-end systems, and a shortage of more profitable PowerBooks and high-end desktops.

  “Our warehouse was full of Yugos at a time when everyone was buying Mercedes,” said Satjiv Chalil, the VP of marketing at the time.33

  Until then Apple had appeared to be flying high. But that troubled holiday quarter would be followed by two years of plunging revenues, a free-falling stock price and a rotating door of lackluster CEOs. Apple’s tumble was quick and dramatic. In 1994, Apple commanded nearly 10 percent of the worldwide multibillion-dollar market for personal computers, making it the second biggest computer manufacturer in the world after the giant IBM.

  But in 1995, Microsoft released its new operating system, Windows 95, which took off like a rocket. Windows 95 was Microsoft’s most shameful rip-off of the Mac operating system yet, but the software made their PCs good-enough facsimiles of the Mac. Cheap, utilitarian Windows 95 machines flew off the shelves, while Apple’s overpriced, incompatible machines did not.

  Microsoft licensed its operating system to dozens of hardware makers, who competed stiffly and drove down prices. To stay afloat, Apple tried a desperate tactic. It licensed the Macintosh operating system to several computer makers, including Power Computing, Motorola, Umax and others, but the Mac market remained flat.

  In the first quarter of 1996, Apple reported a loss of $69 million and laid off 1,300 staff. In February, the board fired CEO Michael Spindler, who had taken over for John Sculley, appointing in his place Gil Amelio, a veteran of the chip industry with a reputation as a turnaround artist. But in the eighteen months that Amelio was on the job, he proved ineffectual and unpopular. Apple lost $1.6 billion, its market share plummeted from 10 to 3 percent, and the stock collapsed. Amelio laid off thousands of workers, but he was raking in about $7 million in salary and benefits while sitting on $26 million in stock, according to the New York Times. He lavishly refurbished Apple’s executive offices and, it was soon revealed, negotiated a golden parachute worth about $7 million. The Times reported employees’ view that Apple’s governance during this period was a “kleptocracy.”

  Internally, the company was extremely fractured, split into dozens of different groups, each with its own agenda, which often conflicted. To make matters worse, Apple had become an experiment in extreme democracy. In reaction partly to the tyrannical ways of Steve Jobs, the company had transformed itself into a bottom-up, rather than a top-down organization.

  There had to be consensus on every decision, involving all the interested
parties. Steering committees would be set up to guide new products to market. As product designer Terry Christensen put it: “A lot of people considered Jobs’ approach tyrannical and misguided. Funneling an entire project through one person, be it Jobs or another visionary leader, inevitably resulted in lopsided products that exhibited all the strengths and weaknesses of its creator, like the first Mac. Instead, the steering committee approach brought every discipline involved in a project together—engineering, software, marketing, product design, industrial design, manufacturing—and required discussion and consensus at every stage of development.”34

  Product development by consensus proved extremely bureaucratic. Whenever a new product was proposed, three documents had to be drawn up: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document and a user-experience document. Mark Rolston, SVP of creative at Frog, summed it up this way: “Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is ‘Here’s how people like to do things.’”35

  The three documents would be sent upstairs to be reviewed by a committee of executives. If they were approved, a team leader (the “champion”) would be assigned to the project and the design group would get a budget. Then it would go back to the marketing, engineering and user-experience groups for more work. Don Norman: “The team would work on expanding the three requirement documents, inserting plans on how they hoped to meet the marketing, engineering and user-experience needs—figures for the release date, ad cycle, pricing details and the like.”36