Jony’s role, as he recalled later, was to help fulfill the design brief they’d been handed for Project Dulcimer. It was, in short, to create something “very, very new.”3
Changing the Game
“From early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn’t think of it as having been designed,” Jony explained. The shape wasn’t the issue—“it could have been shaped like a banana if we’d wanted.”4
Given the parts of the device (the screen, the chip, the battery), the elements sandwiched naturally together into a box. “Sometimes things are really clear from the materials they are made from, and this was one of those times,” said Rubinstein. “It was obvious how it was going to look when it was put together.”5
Jony named Richard Howarth the lead designer, and they used Fadell’s chunk of Foam Core as a reference. The big challenge was to design the user interface. Locating the screen was an issue, and so was whether or not to use buttons. The method of selecting songs was critical. The process inevitably reduced and reduced, resulting in a device with four buttons mounted on a dial.
Jobs worked on the interface with Tim Wasko, a veteran user interface (UI) designer who’d been at NeXT. Wasko was also working with Robbin on the UI for iTunes. He’d previously impressed Jobs with the metallic interface he created for QuickTime 4, which Jobs eventually adopted in most of Apple’s software, so he was given the job of figuring out the UI for the iPod.
He started by mapping out all the options a user would face when selecting a song: the artists, their albums and finally all the songs on a particular album. “When I diagrammed it out it was a series of lists connected to each other,” he said. “It was a question of pressing a button to go down to the next list, and pressing another button to come back up.”6
Wasko created a demo in Adobe Director, a multimedia authoring program, that was pretty simple and straightforward. Before he showed it to Jobs, he replaced the original cursor keys from a keyboard with a USB jog wheel for editing video. The jog wheel had a central dial for scrubbing through video, and several buttons above and below it. Wasko drew paper labels for the four buttons on the bottom (play/pause, backward, forward and menu) and ignored the buttons on top. It worked great. Jobs was delighted with the system but pushed Wasko to get rid of the fourth button. Wasko should have known better. “If you give Steve one thing, he’s going to hate it, even if it’s great,” remembered Wasko. “So you have to make some other crap to put on the table.”
Wasko had brought nothing to sacrifice, and so he tried to find a way to get rid of one of the buttons. He labored for weeks but he just couldn’t find a way to navigate the hierarchy with just three buttons. “We worked our butts off on that thing,” he said.
Jobs finally acquiesced to the extra button, and Wasko took his Mac and jog wheel over to show Jony at the ID studio. “It was a quick meeting,” Wasko said. “They already knew it was going to be a wheel. I just showed Jony how the interface worked.”
Jony started experimenting with different places to put the screen and scroll wheel, but the options were limited. His team initially wanted to put four buttons above the wheel, just below the screen, but then decided to put the buttons around the scroll wheel instead. This made them easy to press with a thumb while turning the wheel.
“Steve Jobs made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Jony would tell the New York Times. “It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device—which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.”7
To the consternation of a lot of users and reviewers, at least at first, an on-off button was omitted. The idea of pressing any button to turn the device on—and then to have it turn itself off after a period of inactivity—was a stroke of minimalist genius.
“As such a radically new product, the iPod was inherently so compelling that it seemed appropriate for the design effort to be to simplify, remove and reduce,” Jony said.8
Other standard features of portable consumer electronics disappeared too, among them the battery compartment. Most gadgets had removable batteries, meaning they need a battery door, plus an internal wall to seal the device’s guts from the user when the battery door is opened. Jony dispensed with both. A tighter, smaller product resulted, and Apple’s research had already shown that no one changed their batteries anyway, even if they said they did. The sealed battery would cause an outcry, of course, because users (and reviewers especially) had come to expect a replaceable battery as a standard feature. But dispensing with it allowed the iPod’s case to be just two pieces, comprising a stainless steel back, called the “canoe,” which snapped into an acrylic face via an internal latching mechanism. Fewer parts also meant fewer “tolerances” (gaps) in manufacturing the product (when adjacent components are supposed to be flush, the design must allow for a tolerance; with fewer parts, alignment issues diminish).
Jony would use the same basic schema for subsequent sealed products, including several generations of iPods, the iPhone, iPad and MacBooks. “They are basically a screen and a back cover—just two parts,” said Satzger. “It’s a better product. A much better product.”
The stainless steel back turned out to be a contentious choice: It looked great right out of the box, but was easily scratched and dented. Even if it wasn’t the most obvious choice of material, the stainless steel worked, according to design consultant Chris Lefteri. “It is actually a completely irrational use of that material in that context,” he said, noting that most other companies would have picked more durable plastic. “To put stainless steel on the back of a portable music player makes no logical sense, because it scratches easily, it dents, it is very heavy—but it absolutely worked.”9 One Apple executive said Jony’s group chose steel simply because it was the thinnest, strongest material they could quickly work with.
Apart from the back, the iPod was “beautifully made,” Lefteri said, demonstrating the design team’s mastery of plastic production techniques at that point. Each iPod case was hand polished, as were the weld lines inside. “Apple did not so much use new materials,” Lefteri explained, “but rather pushed the possibilities of existing ones. . . . That is Apple being very demanding of the materials, very obsessive about the levels of finish.”
The white color of the iPod was Jony’s idea. Jony regarded Apple’s Kubrickian white stage as a reaction to the crazy color stage, which itself was a reaction to beige. “Right from the very first time, we were thinking about the product, we’d seen [the iPod] as stainless steel and white,” he said. “It’s just so . . . so brutally simple. It’s not just a color. Supposedly neutral—but just an unmistakable, shocking neutral.”10 White also sent a message that the machine wouldn’t dominate the user, unlike black tech products that tended to come off as “technical” or “nerdy.”
“Shockingly neutral white” became the new normal for all of Apple’s consumer products at the time. The new iMac and iBooks, as yet unreleased, were also fashioned in white plastic. “There was a whole new design language going through the shop,” said the former executive. Product designer Satzger’s recollections agree: “The iPod was white because the second-generation iBook was white. Most of the things Jony Ive did historically at design school back in England were white, and he started pushing white at Apple.”
Initially, Jobs’s instincts were against white products. Satzger at one point developed a keyboard in arctic white; when Jobs hated it, he’d presented different shades, none of them strictly white. His range of whites for plastic materials included shades he called cloud white, snow white, and glacial white. Another was moon gray, which appeared white but was actually gray. When Satzger showed Jobs a moon gray chip, he could offer reassuringly, “It’s not white.” A sly move, as Jobs approved the
moon gray keyboard. Likewise, the iconic iPod headphone cables weren’t white, but moon gray. “Moon gray and seashell gray were shades developed by us at Apple that were so close to white as to appear almost white, but were in fact gray,” explained Satzger.
The white plastic face of the iPod was coated with a very thin, transparent Perspex layer that gave it its sheen. The transparent layer was raised so little above the iPod’s front that it could only be seen when held sideways on. This was the iPod’s clear, sealed lid. The clear coating also put “quite a strong, almost a halo around the product,” said Jony.11 It dazzled.
With the iPod coming together, everyone got more and more excited. Steve Jobs was working almost every day with Robbin and Wasko on iTunes and the UI, while Jony and his team were occupied with perfecting the ID. The pressure to deliver was high but, even at the time, the team sensed they were making something remarkable. “The design of the iPod turned into a really personal project,” said Jony. “I mean, I love music. The team loves music. And I think collectively, it’s a product we’re looking forward to getting our hands on.”12
New prototypes had to be delivered on Fridays, which was unusual, because prototypes were usually on hand in the middle of the week so that they could be worked on during rest of the week. Though Jobs’s daily involvement wasn’t widely known because the project was siloed, some members of the Dulcimer team suspected that Jobs was taking the prototypes home on Fridays, and playing with them over the weekend. One reason for such suspicions was the rash of new demands that arrived on many a Monday.
Prior to launch of the new player, nothing was left out of consideration, including the new product’s packaging. The packaging became almost as important as the overall product design. Previously, boxes were designed primarily for shipping, but with the iPod, the design team focused on the customer, rather than the transport company. The decision was made to design separate shipping containers and retail boxes so the customer wouldn’t be taking home his or her iPod in a plain-Jane shipping box. The result was an elaborate box that cradled the iPod like a piece of jewelry. “The iPod was the first product where we thought about the packaging as almost as important as the overall product design,” Satzger explained. “Packaging, it’s just as important as everything else.”
In August, one of the physical iPod prototypes finally played a song. A group of people working late that night took turns listening to music on the new gadget, hooked up to headphones from someone’s old Sony Walkman. That first song was Spiller’s “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love),” a house-music dance tune with vocals by the British diva Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
“Oh, my God,” Jobs said. “This is gonna be so cool.”13
The Unveiling
“We have something really exciting for you today,” said Steve Jobs on October, 23, 2001, at a special press event on Apple’s campus. Jobs had asked only a few dozen journalists to a product unveiling. The invite said simply, “Hint: It’s not a Mac.” Just a month after the September 11 attacks, and the world was still shell-shocked and, by Jobs’s showman standards, the event was low-key.
When Jobs first pulled the iPod from his jeans pocket, the reaction from the audience was muted. It didn’t seem that exciting, especially when the audience learned of its price: $499. Nearly $500 for an MP3 player—and one that worked only on the Mac, not Windows—seemed unrealistically high. Early reviewers were just as skeptical, with one saying that iPod stood for “Idiots Price Our Devices.”14 The iPod sold only modestly at first and didn’t take off until two years later, when it was made fully compatible with Windows. Still, the seeds of the iPod’s success were sown with the first device and Jony was confident in the new product.
“Our goal was to design the very, very best MP3 player we could; to design something that could become an icon,” Jony said in the iPod’s first promotional video.15
Looking back on the process, Jobs believed the creation of the iPod was quintessential Apple. “If there was ever a product that catalyzed Apple’s reason for being, it’s this,” he said, “because it combines Apple’s incredible technology base with Apple’s legendary ease of use with Apple’s awesome design. Those three things come together in this, and it’s like, that’s what we do. So if anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example.”16
Yet it was also an odd-duck project, led by engineering, not Jony’s design group as most of the products up to that time had been. Because of the rush to market, it was assembled from off-the-shelf parts and Jony was brought in to do a hated “skin job.” Yet he managed to put his mark on it by making it white, the color he’d championed for high-tech products since he was in college.
The project also earned him the nickname “Jony iPod,” and launched an armada of white tech products. The iPod would do for white what the iMac had done for translucent plastic. And Jony accomplished this tidal shift against the wishes of Steve Jobs, who had initially resisted white products.
The iPod introduced numerous design features that would be used to dramatic effect in subsequent products, including Apple’s first touch interface (albeit a simple one). The iPod set the standard for many later products with its sealed case, compact design and radical ease of use—all Jony’s team’s work. It was also Apple’s first mobile product in the Jony/Jobs era; its development allowed Jony’s team to perfect the design and manufacture of portable products, thereby setting the standard for seamless cases and sealed batteries that eventually the whole industry adopted.
The iPod stands as a remarkable accomplishment. U2’s Bono put its charm rather neatly when he said of the iPod, “It’s sexy.” Another adjective applies too: ubiquitous. The iPod’s appeal soon made the device a phenomenon.
“[The iPod] was the first cultural icon of the 21st century,” said Dr. Michael Bull, a lecturer at the University of Sussex whose studies have earned him the nickname “Professor iPod.” “Roland Barthes argued that, in medieval society, cathedrals were the iconic form. Then, by the 1950s, it had become the car. . . . I argue that 50 years later, it was the iPod, this technology that let you fit your whole world into your pocket. It was representative of a key moment in the social world of the 21st century.”17
CHAPTER 9
Manufacturing, Materials and Other Matters
One of the great things about our team, about working so closely together is the feeling that we’re really only at the beginning of something, that we have only just started. We still have lots more to do.
—JONY IVE
Over the years, the genius of Jony Ive’s IDg studio has been most apparent when the team confronted special challenges. A blending of epiphany thinking and practical implementation became a signal characteristic of the Jobs-and-Jony collaboration. More often than not, the original solutions the team came up with pushed the boundaries of traditional manufacturing; the refining of the design of the original iMac is a case in point.
About eighteen months after the first iMac hit the market, Jony’s team starting to think about replacing its bulky CRT with a light, thin LCD screen. The team began work in 2000, and the project proved challenging, requiring scores of prototypes. But the finished product would be one of Apple’s most distinctive computers.
At first, Jony’s team came up with a conventional concept for a flat-screen computer, with the guts of the computer attached to the back, much like the earlier Twentieth Anniversary Mac Jony had designed. But Steve Jobs disliked what he saw as ugly and inelegant.
“Why have this flat display if you’re going to glom all this stuff on its back?” he asked Jony. “We should let each element be true to itself.”1
According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs left Apple HQ early to think it over at his home in Palo Alto. Jony dropped by and they took a walk in Jobs’s garden, which Jobs’s wife, Laurene, had planted with sunflowers. Jony and Steve were riffing on their design problem, when Jony wondered w
hat the iMac might look like if the screen was separated from the other components like a sunflower on its stalk.
Jony became excited and started sketching ideas. “Ive liked his designs to suggest a narrative,” wrote Isaacson, “and he realized that a sunflower shape would convey that the flat screen was so fluid and responsive that it could reach for the sun.”2
A former executive tells the story differently. Jony made two prototypes. One was the ugly, inelegant flat-screen unit, the other a “goose neck” design with a separate screen and base. At the presentation, Jobs chose the gooseneck design because it was “anthropomorphic.” Like the original Mac, Jobs wanted a “friendly” computer.
Jony’s team next faced the problem of attaching the screen to the base.
First they tried a series of ball-and-socket pieces that resembled the vertebrae of a spine. The vertebrae were held together by a system of spring-loaded cables with a clamp attached to the back of the screen. When the clamp was tight, it tensioned the cables and held the vertebrae in place. When the clamp was loosened, it put slack on the cables and allowed the spine to be moved. “The display floated so that you had to grab it with two hands to release the lock, and then when you positioned it, it locked in place. It had a series of these beautiful balls and sockets, and the power and signal cables went through the neck,” said Satzger. “When you released everything it would relax, and when you tightened it, it would lock with a big cam mechanism.”
The team made scores of prototypes, which might have looked beautiful, but they turned out to be impractical. Locking and unlocking the spine clamp took two hands, making it difficult for some users, especially children, to adjust the monitor.
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products Page 19