Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Kahney, Leander

  At the time, Apple’s hardware was all over the place. The company’s different divisions—the Apple II division, the Mac division, Lisa peripherals—were all using different designers with different ideas. Apple’s products looked like they came from four different companies, not one. It drove Jobs crazy.

  Jobs had Manock set up a design competition, in which potential candidates were asked to draft seven products, each named after a dwarf from Snow White. The name was inspired by the storybook Manock was reading to his young daughter; Jobs loved that it conjured up images of products that were distinctive, friendly and with personality.

  Almost from the start, the front-runner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German industrial designer then in his mid-thirties. Like Jobs, Esslinger was a college dropout. He had gained notice designing TVs and other consumer electronics for Sony and Wega, a German company that Sony eventually bought. One of his TV designs for Wega was in bright green plastic, which the CEO of the company nicknamed “frog.” This no doubt influenced Esslinger to name his company Frog Design, which is also an acronym for Esslinger’s homeland: Federal Republic of Germany.

  In May 1982, Esslinger flew to Cupertino to meet Jobs. They were alike—both natural entrepreneurs, brash and opinionated—and they bonded over a love of Braun and Mercedes. Jobs was particularly impressed that Esslinger had worked for Sony, a design-centric company that Jobs wanted Apple to emulate.

  A master at pitching his ideas and philosophy, Esslinger also knew how to work hard. His group labored through four major design phases, and after months of work, put on an overwhelming show for Apple’s brass. While the other contenders in the competition made a handful of models, Esslinger’s group turned out forty beautifully finished models, two or three variations for each product. The other groups pitched designs in dark plastic with hard edges (like Sony’s stereo components from the eighties), but Esslinger’s designs were simple and sophisticated, made from lightly textured, cream-colored plastic. Like Jony, Esslinger wanted to differentiate Apple from the masculine design of eighties electronics and create a design language based on recurring elements that echoed the consistency of software that the Mac already provided.

  Jobs was delighted with the formal presentation of Esslinger’s work in March 1983: Esslinger was declared the winner of Show White and soon emigrated to California to set up his own studio, Frog Design, Inc., having agreed to provide exclusive services to Apple for an unprecedented $100,000 a month, plus billable time and expenses. Billings would quickly add up to $2 million a year, far more than competing design firms were earning from their clients.

  Jobs unceremoniously told Manock and the other in-house designers that they would be working for Esslinger, who was essentially an outside contractor, albeit one with special status. Manock was killing himself designing the first Mac, but Jobs told the hapless designers that they should consider themselves lucky to be in a position to learn from the talented Esslinger. Most worried about their tenuous jobs and, indeed, the move more or less ended Manock’s career at Apple.

  Esslinger’s emerging Snow White style made Apple’s best design efforts look clumsy and outdated. Snow White designs would eventually win all the major industry awards and be so widely copied that it became the de facto design language for the entire PC industry. It was too late to redesign the Mac, at that point, which had already been tooled at great expense, so Frog’s first major product for Apple using Snow White would be the Apple IIc, the fourth in the line of Apple IIs and the first attempt at a portable computer (the “c” stood for “compact”). More important, it was Apple’s first design-driven product (designed from the outside in, rather than the inside out); even with Jobs gone, he left behind a design evolution as his legacy.

  That shift in emphasis was compelling beyond the design department: Apple’s engineers bent over backward to accommodate Esslinger’s designers, rather than fighting their ideas. It was a small but subtle shift; an early attempt to make Apple design driven rather engineering driven. By the time he returned, however, the old paradigm, with the engineers wielding the power, had returned, as Jony Ive had discovered.

  The “A” Team

  Jobs’s plan for switching up the teams at Apple upon his return was just as straightforward as his notions for simplifying the product portfolio. He would cut back so that his “A” team—the company’s best designers, engineers, programmers and marketers—could concentrate on making innovative products.

  Jobs already trusted his old NeXT executives, but he looked to spot existing Apple talent and elevate them in the ranks. The people survey he conducted led to a streamlining of Apple’s organizational chart. Jobs insisted on a clear chain of command all the way down the line. Everyone in the company knew to whom they reported and what was expected of them.

  As Jobs told BusinessWeek, “Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.”12

  During the process of his product and personnel reviews, Jobs called a meeting with half a dozen top analysts and journalists covering Apple. He wanted to explain to them his new game plan.

  “He specifically emphasized getting back to meeting the needs of their core customers and said that Apple had lost ground in the market because they were trying to be everything to everybody instead of focusing on the real needs of their customers,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, who was in the room. “He also pointed out that Apple had broken new ground with the original Mac OS and hardware designs and that he would now make industrial design a key part of Apple’s strategy going forward.”13

  Bajarin, for one, was skeptical.

  “My first impression was that Apple had so many problems that I could not see how industrial design needed to be a key part of his strategy to save Apple,” Bajarin recalled. “I also was concerned that given Apple’s serious financial situation, whatever he was going to do needed to be rock solid and have an impact quickly.”

  Bajarin had another recollection: “I also remember telling the people I was with that you can never underestimate Steve Jobs and that if anybody can save Apple, it would be Jobs.”14

  Despite his talk about returning Apple to a design-led company, Jobs didn’t immediately visit the ID studio. Brunner’s strategy of putting the studio off campus almost backfired, because, unaware of what he already had, Jobs went to look for a world-class designer from outside the company.

  He thought seriously about bringing back his old design partner, Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design, who had been working with NeXT. He called on Richard Sapper, who did the IBM ThinkPad laptop, and, incredibly, the car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose run with Apple a few years before had produced nothing. Jobs also considered the famous Italian architect and designer Ettore Sotsass, who had catapulted Olivetti to the forefront of ID in the sixties.15

  Across the road, Jony Ive realized his team was in jeopardy and that he had to demonstrate to his new boss what his shop could do. He put together brochures showcasing their best design work. He included in the glossy pamphlets concepts for evolving Apple’s design language, which, with the translucent eMate, had just started moving in a bold new direction. “We generated small booklets to represent the team’s capabilities,” said a former designer on the team. “I think that played a great role in how Steve Jobs coming back perceived the team and its capabilities.”

  When Jobs finally took a tour of Apple’s design studio, he was bowled over by the creativity and rigor he saw. The studio was full of eye-catching mock-ups that the previous regime had been too timid to consider. Jobs also couldn’t help but notice the computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines and a fledgling computer-aided design (CAD) group.

  Mostly, though, he bonded with the soft-spoken Jony, who would later say that he and Jobs saw eye to eye immediately. “We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Jony recalled. “We were on the same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I
loved the company.”

  Jobs decided to keep the ID group intact, with Jony in charge. He initially made Jony report to Jon Rubinstein, head of hardware. (Eventually that would change, when design became its own autonomous division.) Even though Jony reported to Rubinstein, over the next few months Jony and Jobs began having lunch together. Jobs visited the Valley Green design studio too, often dropping by at the end of the day.16

  “He would come over all the time,” said a former member of the design team. “He’d come mostly to see Jony, but also to see what was going on.” In time, Jobs become almost a fixture there.

  Jobs Brings Focus

  When Jobs returned, he brought focus not just to the company but to Jony’s design group.

  Jony was ostensibly in charge of the design squad, but the team’s efforts weren’t unified. Young and inexperienced as a manager, Jony wasn’t exerting much discipline or leadership. It was creative chaos, just like the rest of the company. The design department was full of talented but willful designers, each working on his or her own projects with little or no coordination.

  “Each designer had his own agenda, or their own design impulse, and there was no control [over their activities],” designer Doug Satzger said. “One designer had an agenda over what a laptop should be; another had an agenda over what a printer should be. There was no consistency on what the next Power Mac tower should be. The design group was not set up so that designers could work collaboratively as a team. All the designers were independent and had their own strong design sense. It was like they were all working for different companies.”

  Satzger said three designers were working on three different updates of the Power Mac, a powerful computer for professionals that came in a tower configuration. “There was no consistency,” said Satzger. “Danny [De Iuliis] had designed a perfect cube with wheels on it. It was pretty big. Danny Coster was working on a model that consisted of various blocks thrown together, while the design of Thomas Meyerhoffer’s [another member of the ID team] for the tower was all slurpy with lines all over—it was a monolithic piece of art. And the team was going ahead with not one of them but all of them.”17

  Esslinger and Brunner, in their times, had allowed designers to explore different design directions. Brunner in particular liked to treat the early design process almost as a competition. But he’d eventually choose the best ideas, and Esslinger, too, would unify the best ideas into a single design direction. Jony had worked in this kind of environment for several years, but didn’t seem willing or able to provide a strong lead.

  Jobs stepped in, shutting down unpromising projects and trimming back Apple’s product line to suit his 2×2 matrix. Satzger remembers Jobs coming to the studio and telling the designers that Apple would be putting all its energies behind just four products. First and foremost would be a desktop for consumers. “Steve said, ‘My daughter is going to college, and I’ve looked at everything out there and they’re all crap. There’s a real opportunity. Our target now is to build an Internet computer.’ He was envisioning the iMac. That was the new focus.”

  Jobs wanted an inexpensive computer, something that would appeal to mainstream consumers eager to try out the Internet, which was just becoming popular thanks to Netscape’s Navigator browser, cheap modems and an explosion in Internet service providers (ISPs) like AOL, which offered inexpensive Internet access plans. And he wanted it quickly. He’d cut back the company to give it breathing room, but he needed new products quickly to restore plunging sales. He was betting the company on this one product.

  At the time, Apple’s cheapest computer was $2,000, more than $800 above the average Windows PC. To be competitive against cheaper Windows offerings, Jobs initially pushed for a radically stripped-back machine called a “network computer” (also known as an NC), a hot idea in Silicon Valley at the time. The NC would be a cheap, simple terminal that connected to a central server over the Internet. It had no hard drive or optical disk drives, just a screen and keyboard. It was perfect for schools and workplaces and it seemed, at first glance, ideal for consumers eager to access the Internet.

  Before Jobs’s return, in May 1996, Apple had joined Oracle Corporation and thirty other hardware and software companies in the Networking Computing Alliance, which set the standard for cheap, diskless computers based on a common networking platform. Jobs’s billionaire best friend, Larry Ellison, was especially bullish on NCs as the future of the computer industry. And as a newly installed member of Apple’s board, Ellison told the press that Apple was building an NC. He’d recently launched a start-up, Network Computing Inc., to kick-start the sector.

  Influenced by Ellison’s thinking, but also eager to compete with him, Jobs also talked up the NC idea. “We’re going to beat Ellison at his own game,” he told his Apple colleagues with relish.18 Just as he’d done with the first Macintosh, Jobs began by laying out certain specifications: The Mac NC should be an all-in-one product, ready to use right out of the box, in a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for $1,200 or so. “He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” recalled Apple’s marketing chief, Phil Schiller. “That meant design and engineering had to work together.”19

  In September 1997, Jon Rubinstein instructed Jony to take Jobs’s Mac NC specs and prepare a dozen foam models of potential designs.

  • • •

  Jony gathered the entire team in the design studio to hash it out. They started by discussing the Mac NC’s potential target market. “We didn’t start with engineering dictates,” Jony said. “We actually started with people.”

  “The iMac revolved not around chip speed or market share but squishy questions like ‘How do we want people to feel about it?’ and ‘What part of our minds should it occupy?’” Jony said later in a Newsweek interview.20

  Jony was looking for the Mac NC’s “design story.” As his dad, Mike, had instilled in him, developing the design story was an essential first step in conceiving something entirely new. “As industrial designers we no longer design objects,” Jony said. “We design the user’s perceptions of what those objects are, as well as the meaning that accrues from their physical existence, their function and the sense of possibility they offer.”21

  They discussed topics like “objects that dispense positive emotions”; one of the designers suggested a transparent gumball dispenser as an example of this. The IDg also discussed how other businesses, like the fashion industry, might approach the problem. “We talked about companies like Swatch—companies that broke the rules—that viewed technology as a way to the consumer, not the consumer as the path to the technology,” Jony said.

  Later, Jony explained his thinking this way. The computer industry “is an industry that has become incredibly conservative from a design perspective,” he said. “It is an industry where there is an obsession about product attributes that you can measure empirically. How fast is it? How big is the hard drive? How fast is the CD? That is a very comfortable space to compete in because you can say eight is better than six.”22

  But Jony offered a key insight: “It’s also very inhuman and very cold. Because of the industry’s obsession with absolutes, there has been a tendency to ignore product attributes that are difficult to measure or talk about. In that sense, the industry has missed out on the more emotive, less tangible product attributes. But to me, that is why I bought an Apple computer in the first place. That is why I came to work for Apple. It’s because I’ve always sensed that Apple had a desire to do more than the bare minimum. It wasn’t just going to do what was functionally and empirically necessary. In the early stuff, I got a sense that care was taken even on details, hard and soft, that people may never discover.”23

  Sitting around a table, Jony and the rest of team started sketching. Satzger remembered the table was covered with loose sheets of copy paper, colored pencils and Pilot pens. The team drew up
ideas together as a collective, passing the loose sheets between them as they worked. Trying to imagine a machine that dispensed positive emotions, as they hoped the iMac would, designer Chris Stringer made a beautiful sketch of a colorful candy dispenser.

  Satzger remembers coming up with the initial egg shape for the iMac, based on TVs he had previously designed for Thomson Consumer Electronics. “If you look at the shape, it’s almost exactly the same profile.”

  The idea appealed to Jony and the rest of the team. Immediately, the decision was made to pursue the egg shape as the primary design direction.

  The iMac had to be on the market in a matter of months or Apple would go out of business. To speed up the design process, Jony instigated a radical, integrated design process that transformed the way Apple developed its products. The workflow that the design group uses today is basically unchanged from the system Jony introduced.

  The IDg needed new tools that could streamline the complex design process and allow the designers to create 3-D designs that, in turn, could be used by outside toolmakers at the factories to create the molds for the computer’s case. Marj Andresen, who worked in the product design group, was instrumental in helping Jony find sophisticated CAD software to bring the new machine to life. The new CAD modeling process Jony helped pioneer integrated disparate computing systems, using complex software that translated files to make them interoperable.

  “I was given nine months to get the tools into production,” recalled Andresen, who calls herself a “CAD/CAM therapist” because of her role supporting high-strung designers. “Nine months to get from design to production was a very short time and impossible with drawings,” said Andresen. “Our only hope was to use the design files directly. While the tools existed, the process hadn’t yet been proved on either the engineering or the tooling end. It was crazy and hectic and exciting.”