Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Kahney, Leander

  Prior to the iMac, hardware engineering (electrical design) and product design (mechanical engineering) drove the design process. “They designed the size of the enclosure due to engineering constraints and ID were tasked to develop ‘skins’ to go around this enclosure,” said Paul Dunn, a former CAD manager at Apple. “When Jobs returned to Apple, he and Jony turned this process on its head.”

  Although Jony’s group had a small CAD team in the studio, it was still the early days of computer-aided design. The designers worked mostly with hand-drawn sketches and some early, relatively primitive 2-D CAD software. But Jony’s team needed to design in three dimensions, not two.

  They found the answer in Alias Wavefront, a 3-D graphics package used in the aerospace, automotive and the fledgling computer-animation industry. Steve Jobs’s other company, Pixar, had used it for some special effects in Toy Story, released in 1995.

  “Apple was producing designs much more complicated than any of our computer rivals,” said Dunn. “The surfaces on [the iMac] were more akin to the aerospace and automotive industries than the computer industry. . . . We were pushing the envelope.”24

  Alias Wavefront is, in effect, a sculpting tool; it defines the outer envelope of a product, much like a sculptor models a work in clay. As soon as the designers had a promising shape sketched out, they took it to the CAD group, who are also known as “surfacing guys.” At the time, IDg had a small group of operators; it’s now grown to about fifteen surfacing guys who are based inside the IDg studio. They run Alias (now called Autodesk Alias) on high-end Apple computers and Hewlett-Packard workstations. With Jony’s designers watching over their shoulders, the CAD operators created outlines of the proposed designs. The idea was to make sure the basic shapes and scale were sound.

  The process often takes several days. When the designers and surfacing guys settle on a reasonably good shape, they send the file to one of the studio’s CNC milling machines to create a physical model. The initial models are cut from foam, and later, more detailed “hard models” are cut from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) or RenShape, a dense red foam that cuts like wood and is good for surfaces.

  The design group in Jony’s early days also had an early and very expensive 3-D printer in the studio. “Apple had been at the forefront of modeling technology for many years,” said Dunn. “From the early nineties, Apple’s modeling group had a stereolithography (SLA) machine which could create complex 3-D models in several hours. The chemicals were extremely toxic, but the results were worth all the hassles.”

  As Jony discovered in college, making detailed models was a key part of the design process. “When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation,” Jony said. “But when you made a 3-D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes—the entire process shifts. It galvanizes and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.”25

  With this new workflow arrangement, Jony consolidated the model shop into the design studio (previously it had been under the aegis of product design). Andresen says it was a sensible move, organizationally and operationally. “The model shop gave the ID guys a first look and feel at the product design. They were creating one-off models of what products might look like. . . . [T]hey really had the coolest stuff.”26

  The modeling guys were essential to the product process. “Our model shop guys were craftsmen,” Andresen remembered. “They could build anything, but they had to learn how to use the new computer tools and to accept the design files from the engineers.”

  Another important piece of software in reimagining the design process was Unigraphics, a 3-D engineering program developed by McDonnell Douglas for use in aerospace. Andresen and her group created software that allowed the 3-D models created by the surfacing guys in Alias to be imported into Unigraphics. From there, the product design group used Unigraphics to create workable products from the surfaces determined by the designers. The engineers would bring in detailed 3-D models of the product’s components, allowing them to see whether the components would fit, and if the proposed shape would work. “The designers would sit with the CAD guys and say, ‘Bring in the CRT tube. Here we need some volume for board, a place for connectors,’ and so on,” said Satzger. “Processes and interfaces were developed which allowed us to take these surfaces and import them into Unigraphics, which Product Design then used as the starting point to develop real solids and parts for manufacture,” said Dunn.

  The whole process was iterative. The designers worked constantly alongside the CAD operators and engineers, fiddling with the arrangements until they found a workable combination of outer skin and internal components. “It all sounds so simple, but it was very difficult, repetitive and time consuming,” said Roy Askeland, a former Apple designer who worked on the iMac. “It was defining minute details, millimeters at a time.”27

  The last part of the puzzle involved sending the detailed 3-D CAD files to the mold makers. When it came to making the molds at the factory, toolmakers had previously relied on hand-drawn sketches and 2-D CAD printouts, which looked like blueprints. Although the factories had their own CAM systems to make the molds, they weren’t always compatible with the designers’ systems, so translating the design group’s sketches and models into molds at the factory was still semi-manual and could take many months. The software Andresen helped create enabled all the systems to share common files, vastly simplifying and speeding up the process.

  Although the parallel design workflow was overall faster with these improvements, the system didn’t run smoothly. “It was a difficult move to pull off and it didn’t feed nicely to CAM [computer-aided manufacturing] systems, either in house or at suppliers,” said Andresen. “As we moved into surface modeling the limitations on the software and the hardware slowed us down considerably. Computers went from being boxy to having rounded corners and edges. These were very difficult to model and also very difficult for our suppliers to receive. . . . [W]e had multiple systems and even more system translation complexity.”

  Nonetheless, the bugs were worked out and the revolutionary process underlies IDg’s workflow even today. “The design process basically revolves around two main systems: Wavefront and Unigraphics,” said Dunn. “Yes, many interfaces and post-processors had to be developed, and some of them were very complicated, but the overall process wasn’t that bad once it had been defined.”28

  Andresen said Apple’s innovative designs of the late 1990s and early 2000s pushed the envelope of what CAD tools could handle at the time. “It’s funny to think about now when I have 3-D modeling running on my iPad . . . but back then the idea of modeling what it looked like to build a computer out of aluminum and actually shine a light on the casing was unimaginable. The CAD vendors were struggling to keep up with our demands. We had to bring them into our ID and PD labs to show them what we needed. Between computers and automotive we were forcing the CAD industry to come up with lots of new software.”

  • • •

  During that first month, Jony’s team built at least ten models for the Mac NC—but they didn’t show them all to Jobs. Jony’s team knew right away they wanted the egg shape, so they shared only variations of that shape. “When it came to showing models to Steve Jobs, we would select models that we ourselves thought were good,” said Satzger. “Steve would then approve—or not. Many times he said simply no to a model design. But we never presented anything to Steve that we didn’t want him to pick.”

  When Jony first showed Jobs the egg-shaped machine in the studio, he rejected it. But Jony persisted. He agreed with Jobs that it wasn’t quite right, but suggested it had a sense of fun. It was playful. “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.29

  The next time Jony showed the egg shape to Jobs, the boss went nuts for it. Jobs star
ted carrying the Foam Core model around campus, showing it to people to gauge their reaction. At the same time, he was cooling to the idea of a stripped-down network computer. Competing NCs already on the market, such as Microsoft’s WebTV and Apple’s own Pippin, sold by Bandai as @Mark in Japan, were getting zero traction in the marketplace.

  Jobs ordered the NC be upgraded to a real computer with, among other things, a bigger hard drive and an optical drive. To prevent any delays, Rubinstein suggested the hardware should be based on the G3 desktop, a machine for professionals that had been in the pipeline before Jobs took over and had just been released. The addition of a hard drive and an optical drive meant enlarging the egg-shaped enclosure, but it was a relatively simple operation of scaling it up. Jony charged Danny Coster to take lead of the design.

  The iMac was going to be made in plastic—it would be an “unashamedly plastic” product, in Jony’s words—but plastic came with difficulties. “We didn’t want it to look trashy,” Jony explained later. “There’s a fine line you walk between affordable and cheap. We certainly wanted it to appear affordable, and we wanted to make it clear that this isn’t a terrifying technology—a technology that still alienates a huge number of people.”30

  Jony’s group made models in a reddish blue, almost purple, and in orange, but the solid plastic looked cheap, so someone suggested the case be transparent. Jony immediately approved of the idea. “It came across as cheeky,” he said. “That’s why we liked translucency.”31 Transparent plastic had already started to creep into some of Apple’s products, like printer trays and covers; the clamshell-shaped eMate, designed by Thomas Meyerhoffer, was made entirely of transparent plastic. At the time, Meyerhoffer told Macweek that translucency gave the eMate a sense of accessibility by allowing users to see inside.32 Once Jony decided to make the iMac transparent, he realized the internals would have to be designed with care, too, since they would now be visible. Jony was particularly worried about the electromagnetic shielding that went around some of the internal components, which in opaque products was usually hidden in a big, ugly sheet metal box.

  Jony had the designers bring all the different transparent-colored items they could find into the studio for inspiration. “We had a taillight from a BMW,” said Satzger. “A lot of kitchen accessories. An old transparent thermos. Cheap flatware for picnics. We had a whole product shelf, full of these transparent products. We studied the qualities, the depth of a transparent product. The textures on the inside. The thermos was a big inspiration. It was a deep shiny blue, with a shiny thermos flask reflecting inside.”33

  Indeed, the final iMac, with its silver internal shielding visible through the transparent shell, resembles the transparent thermos married to a car taillight.

  One of the designers brought in a small piece of beach glass, greenish blue in color, with a softly frosted surface. It might have come from Half Moon Bay, California, or Sydney’s Bondi Beach in Australia, where Coster liked to surf. When Jony presented Steve with three models to choose among, he included this green/blue tint (that Jony’s team called Bondi Blue) along with orange and purple models. Jobs selected the Bondi Blue.

  The transparency added a sense of accessibility, but in order to give the iMac an even more approachable feel, the designers added a handle on top. For Jony, the handle on the iMac was not really for carrying it around, but to build a bond with the consumer by encouraging them to touch it. It was an important but almost intangible innovation that would change the way people interacted with computers.

  “Back then, people weren’t comfortable with technology,” Jony explained. “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.”34

  The idea came with a downside, according to Jony. “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.”

  The iMac was code-named Columbus because it represented a new world. As Jony later expressed it, “With the first iMac the goal wasn’t to look different, but to build the best integrated consumer computer we could. If as a consequence the shape is different, then that’s how it is. The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”

  • • •

  Over the years, Apple had acquired a lot of legacy technologies, those elements that are becoming obsolete but aren’t quite there yet. The fast-moving technology industry is full of them. At the time, Apple’s legacy technologies included various parallel and serial ports for connecting mice, keyboards, printers and other peripherals. Like most computer makers, Apple tended to accommodate as many legacy technologies as possible. The company was loathe to lose a sale for the lack of a connector to hook up some old printer.

  Jobs decided to make the iMac the first “legacy-free” computer. He ditched the old ADB, SCSI and serial ports, and included only Ethernet, infrared and USB. He also abandoned the floppy drive, a decision that drew more controversy than any other. These changes reflected Jobs’s simplification philosophy, which would soon come into play in many products. Jony, too, would become a master of the approach, agreeing with Jobs’s mantra: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”35

  USB, now a standard technology for connecting peripherals, was a particularly gutsy choice to include in the nineties. Invented by Intel, the USB 1.1 standard hadn’t even been finalized yet (and wouldn’t be until September 1998, a month after the iMac’s release). It had no traction in the industry yet but Jobs was betting it would solve the increasingly vexing problem of special accessories for the Mac platform. As the Mac’s market share shrank, fewer and fewer peripheral makers were willing to make hardware with special connectors just for the tiny Mac market. But USB peripherals could be made Mac-compatible with the addition of just the software to drive them, and, if necessary, Apple could write these so-called drivers itself.

  To make the ports accessible, Jony located them on the side of the machine. “One of the things that makes the backs of most computers look so agricultural is the ton of cables pouring out,” said Jony. “We moved the connectors to the side, which, functionally, makes them much easier to get to and keeps the back quite simple. The back of my computer may as well be its front in terms of what you see.”

  Characteristically, Jony sweated the details, including the power cable, which he also wanted to be transparent. “You know how, when you take a shower, condensation forms on the glass? We wanted that same kind of exquisite matte surface finish on the cable.”36

  The transparent mouse made Jony particularly proud. “If you know how mice work, it’s quite intriguing,” he said. “You see through the Apple logo, like a little window on the top of the mouse, into this little mouse factory. You see the ball moving on twin axles—well, it’s actually pretty complicated and intriguing what goes on inside the mouse besides the ball rolling. We’ve tried fairly hard to layer what you can see inside. For the most part you just get a sense of what’s inside—a sense of materials reflecting light and a sense of forms and shapes. It’s only occasionally that you get a more literal view of what’s going on inside.”37

  On the downside, Jony’s perfectly round mouse proved to be an ergonomic nightmare. It was skittish on tabletops and difficult to orient properly; it was always pointing in the wrong direction and was too small for many adults. Users had to pinch their hands into a claw to use it, giving them cramps. Jobs was told that the mouse would be a problem, but in his race to market, he ignored the advice.

  As a regular presence in the design studio, Jobs was getting excit
ed about Columbus and the radical redesigns coming out of Jony’s studio. Marjorie Andresen, the CAD expert, said the optimism and vision of Jony’s design group was infectious. “The engineers tended to be more grounded in what was possible today,” she said. “The industrial designers were clearly imagining what would be possible tomorrow and in the future.”

  Apple set up a special factory in South Korea, where the iMac would be assembled in partnership with LG. But the manufacturing engineers raised concerns about the cost of the iMac’s design. Satzger said the tooling for the case was very complex. “It was the first time we really started challenging tooling and injection molding standards.”

  As head of the engineering group, Rubinstein had to balance the concerns of all parties. Though Rubinstein tended to side with the engineers, Jobs usually sided with Jony and his team.

  “When we took it to the engineers they came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn’t do it,” Jobs recalled. “And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of grudgingly did it.”38

  Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller put the push-pull in context. “Before Steve came back, engineers would say ‘Here are the guts’—processor, hard drive—and then it would go to the designers to put it in a box. When you do it that way, you come up with awful products.”39 But Jobs and Jony tilted the balance again toward the designers.

  “Steve kept impressing on us that the design was integral to what would make us great,” said Schiller. “Design once again dictated the engineering, not just vice versa.”