“It was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, ‘We don’t have a product yet.’”18
The fact that Jobs seemed calm—instead of bringing his usual fire and brimstone—spooked everyone in the room. Vogelstein said one executive described the moment as “one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill.”
Because the iPhone announcement was going to be the main event at Macworld in a few weeks, any sort of postponement would have been disastrous. “For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers,” Vogelstein wrote. “Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.”
The problem was that everything was new and nothing worked. The touch screen was new, so were the accelerometers. The proximity sensor, which turned off the screen when the user held the phone up to their face, developed a problem in a late prototype: It worked for most people, but it didn’t work if the user had long dark hair, which confused the sensor.
“We nearly shelved the phone because we thought there were fundamental problems that we can’t solve,” Jony told a business conference in London. “You have to detect all sorts of ear-shapes and chin shapes, skin color and hairdo . . . that was one of just many examples where we really thought, perhaps this isn’t going to work.”19
But just weeks before Macworld, Jony’s team had a prototype that worked well enough to show AT&T. In December 2006, Jobs traveled to Las Vegas to show it to the wireless carrier’s CEO, Stan Sigman, who was “uncharacteristically effusive,” calling the iPhone “the best device I have ever seen.”20
The arrival of the iPhone at Macworld was the culmination of more than two and half years of intense hardship, learning and dedication to bring it to market. As one Apple executive summed it up, “Everything was a struggle. Every. Single. Thing was a struggle for the entire two-and-a-half years.”
When launch day came in mid-summer 2007, Jony joined the whole design team at the flagship Apple retail store in San Francisco. “We were excited,” said Stringer. “We had something new. There was an incredible buzz. . . . And there was an enormous crowd outside. We wanted to feel that enthusiasm and see people, see their eyes when they get these new products, the first people to get them. When the doors opened, there was mayhem. It was like a carnival.”21
Stringer was overwhelmed with emotion. “We were obviously very, very proud. We’d worked really hard. It was—there was an enormous number of people that put in personal sacrifice and it was paying off in spades. It was a beautiful day.”
• • •
The iPod had been regarded by a lot of pundits as Apple getting lucky, a fluke, a one-shot. When Apple entered the cutthroat cell phone market, it was predicted the iPhone would flop. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer famously said it would never get any market share. But the iPhone was a hit from the start, and Apple used its old playbook of rapidly adding features and models.
Apple released the iPhone in mid-2007. By the end of the year, 3.7 million iPhones had been sold. By the first quarter of 2008, the sales volume of iPhones exceeded sales of Apple’s entire Mac line. And by the end of 2008, the company was selling three times as many iPhones per quarter as it was selling Macs. Revenue and profits were through the roof.
When Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, he invited his old friend Alan Kay to the launch. Jobs and Kay knew each other from Xerox PARC, and later Kay had been appointed an Apple fellow, a kind of elder statesman, and worked for a decade inside Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in the late nineties. Kay is famous for prophesizing the “Dynabook,” a tablet computer that would provide a window into all the world’s knowledge—back in 1968.
On iPhone launch day, Jobs turned to Kay and casually asked, “What do you think, Alan? Is it good enough to criticize?” The question was a reference to a comment made by Kay almost twenty-five years earlier, when he had deemed the original Macintosh “the first computer worth criticizing.” Kay considered Jobs’s question for a moment and then held up his moleskin notebook. “Make the screen at least five inches by eight inches and you will rule the world,’“ he said.22
The world would not have to wait very long for the iPad.
CHAPTER 11
The iPad
I can’t think of a product that has defined an entire category and then has been completely redesigned in such a short period of time. It is really defined by the display. There are just no distractions.
—JONY IVE
While Jony’s group was secretly working on the iPad, Steve Jobs was telling the public and press that Apple had no intention of releasing a tablet. “Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already,” he said publicly. But Jobs was dissembling. “Steve never lost his desire to do a tablet,” said Phil Schiller.1 In fact, while Jony’s design team was developing the iPhone, they were also actively working on tablets. Jobs was just waiting for the right time to bring a tablet to market.
One incentive to move forward was the appearance of netbooks, a category of small, inexpensive, low-powered laptops that launched in 2007. They quickly started to eat into laptop sales and, by 2009, netbooks accounted for 20 percent of the laptop market. But Apple never seriously considered making one. “Netbooks aren’t better than anything,” Steve Jobs said at the time. “They’re just cheap laptops.”2 Nonetheless, the subject came up several times in executive meetings.
During one such high-level executive meeting in 2008, Jony proposed that the tablets in his lab could be Apple’s answer to the netbook. Jony suggested that a tablet was basically an inexpensive laptop without the keyboard. The idea appealed to Jobs, and Jony was given the go-ahead to transform the prototypes into a real product.
Crucially, mobile technology had advanced significantly in just a few years since the iPhone had been launched. By then, the 035 tablet prototype from 2004 seemed big and unwieldy. But thanks to new screens and batteries, everyone understood that a tablet could be much lighter and slimmer. One of the major reasons the iPad hadn’t been green-lighted sooner was that the components like the screen and battery weren’t ready. “The technology was not there yet,” said a former Apple executive.
Jony began by ordering twenty models made in varying sizes and screen-aspect ratios. They were laid out on one of the studio’s project tables for Jony and Jobs to play with. “That’s how we nailed what the screen size was,” Jony has said.3 They had done the same thing earlier in finding the right size for the Mac mini and other products.
“Steve and Jony liked to do that with almost all products,” said a former engineer in the operations group. “They started off making a bunch of ‘appearance’ models and they’d make them in all sorts of sizes to find what they want.”
But, as often happens, recollections seem to vary. According to an executive at Apple at the time, the screen size was also strongly influenced by a simpler piece of equipment: a standard piece of paper. “The size of the tablet was that of a sheet of paper,” he explained. “It was conceived as a legal note tablet, and we thought that was the right size. It was targeted at education and schools and e-reading.” Hardware was still another factor, as the guts of the iPad would be based not on the iBook but the iPod touch. Early on, the iPad was understood to be, in effect, a scaled up touch-screen iPod.
Jony’s ultimate goal was to make a device that ne
eded no explanation and was fully intuitive. It was to be a “breathtakingly simple, beautiful device, something that you really want, and something that’s very easily understandable,” Stringer said. “You pick it up, you use it, something that . . . needs no explanation.”
That said, producing the “breathtakingly simple” can require an immense investment of time and creative energy.
Making the Machine
Jony’s design team explored two different design directions for the iPad, directly akin to the twin design directions they pursued with the iPhone.
Based on the Extrudo design, the first approach built upon a case that resembled the extruded aluminum iPod mini. It was just bigger and flatter. The design lead on this version was Chris Stringer, who also worked on the Extrudo iPhone. As with the phone designs, Stringer’s Extrudo iPad was made of a single piece of extruded, milled aluminum. It, too, had plastic caps for the Wi-Fi and cell phone radios. In this case, though, sharp edges weren’t much of a concern; no one was going press a tablet up to his or her face.
Jony’s IDg team experimented with some “picture frame” models, larger than some of the iPad prototypes, which had kickstands to prop them up. (Kickstands would also feature prominently in competing tablets from Microsoft and other manufacturers in the future.) Jony’s team didn’t pursue the idea, although adding a kickstand would appear later in the iPad 2’s magnetic cover, which could be folded back into a stand.
The designers found Stringer’s Extrudo iPad suffered the same limitation as the Extrudo iPhone: The bezel detracted from the screen. As Jony put it, “How do we get out of the way so there aren’t a ton of features and buttons that distract from the display?”4 Again, Jony wanted the infinity-pool illusion because he understood the screen was all-important and that nothing should detract from it.
Meanwhile, Richard Howarth brought his experience with the Sandwich iPhone models to his prototypes, making several versions of Sandwich-style iPads. The early Sandwich iPad models resembled more svelte versions of the 035 prototype. Made of shiny white plastic with a boxy shape, they are clearly in the same design family as Apple’s plastic MacBooks, released early in 2006—which makes sense given that they were designed largely by Howarth. Like the plastic MacBook, the device at that point remained fairly big and chunky. Still, Jony’s team was clearly homing in on how to present the screen, and the bezel was plain and unobtrusive.
As the design progressed, the new models got thinner, the edges sharper. Some had aluminum backs, but Jony’s team seemed to be veering in the direction of the Sandwich. Yet something bothered Jobs: Somehow the iPad wasn’t quite casual enough.
Jony spotted the problem. The iPad needed a cue, some sign that it was friendly and could be picked up easily with just one hand. As usual, Jony wanted to invite users to touch the device, pick it up and hold it and have a tactile experience.
The logical next step seemed to be adding handles, and Jony’s team experimented with them in an attempt to ease picking up the iPad. One of the later prototypes featured a pair of large plastic handles, making it look like a particularly inelegant TV dinner tray. When they realized the handle approach clearly wasn’t working, Jony’s team started exploring a tapered back that swept away underneath the screen, opening a gap for fingers to slide underneath.
As Jony’s team homed in on the iPad design, they were also completing work on the second-generation iPhone. Marketed as the iPhone 3G, to highlight its compatibility with new 3G cell phone networks, the 2008 follow-up dispensed with the original’s aluminum back plate in favor of a hard, polycarbonate plastic. Not surprisingly, then, the two simultaneous development projects shared numerous elements, as the iPad would also get a polycarbonate back, colored black or white, with a stainless steel bezel to marry the back plate to the screen.
Just as they agreed upon a design, however, production problems forced Jony to change it.
The plastic back of the iPhone 3G looks simple, but was extremely hard to manufacture. Jony and the team wanted to use a similar shell for the iPad (comprising a strong blend of polycarbonate and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), but it proved to be more difficult to manufacture at the larger iPad size, as the larger shell would shrink and warp when it came out of the mold. To stop it from shrinking at the edges, the shell was molded larger than it needed to be and machined down to size.
Even after molding, the shell still had to be polished to remove the part lines, then painted and machined again to prevent the paint shrinking around openings. The manufacturing process gained additional steps, with the openings painted over, then machined out before the installation of the buttons, the speaker grilles and the Apple logo on the back. The use of the plastic had made the entire process problematic. “You have to set those machining processes in the right order because if you machine before you paint, the chemistry of the paint relaxes the surface tension of the plastic and then the sink goes into other areas that you already machined,” Satzger said. “It’s just easier to do it with aluminum than with plastic.”
Jony’s team went back to the drawing board and designed an aluminum back. They were comfortable with the material; they already had the process and the production lines down. The new aluminum back wasn’t as tapered as Jony would have liked. To give the iPad stiffness, the designers had to add a thin sidewall that gave it strength but made it thicker and bulkier than the planned plastic version.
When they were done, however, Jony’s team was excited by the stark minimalism of the device. “We had tried so many things,” remembered Chris Stringer. “But at the end of the day, we realized it needed to be its own self. We can’t copy ourselves. We wanted a unique form . . . a very anonymous object, not playing along with the lines of consumer electronics at all.”5
The iPad they produced didn’t feel like anything else. As Stringer put it, “It felt like a new object.”
iPad Day
On January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs went public with Apple’s newest game changer. He announced the iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, positioning it as a device that exists between an iPhone and a laptop, a highly portable, handheld slate with a touch-screen interface. He distinguished it from netbooks, describing the iPad as a device more “intimate than a laptop,” conveying the sense that the iPad was at the intersection of both technology and art.
The iPad went to market in April. In less than a month, Apple sold one million iPads in half the time it took the iPhone to reach that same mark. By June 2011, just over a year after its release, twenty-five million had been sold. By most measures it became the most successful consumer product launch in history. In 2011, shipments of iPads rapidly overtook those of netbooks, sixty-three million versus fewer than thirty million, according to research firm Canalys.6
At Apple HQ, some of the faces who initiated this growth were also changing. In November 2008, Tony Fadell had stepped down as senior vice president of the iPod division, the job he took over from Rubinstein. According to an Apple press release, Fadell and his wife, Danielle Lambert, who was vice president of the company’s human resources department, were “reducing their roles” to “devote more time to their young family.”7 But two former Apple employees say Fadell was another victim of Jobs’s close relationship with Jony.
“Tony got canned,” said one source. “He was paid off with his salary for a number of years plus so many millions to leave. Tony was canned because he was battling with Jony. He went to Steve so many times bitching about Jony, but Steve had such a tremendous amount of respect for Jony and their relationship that he sided with Jony, not Tony.”8
iPad Evolution
Less than a year after the iPad’s initial launch, in March 2011, Apple surprised the world by announcing a sequel. The new version would be not only a big upgrade in terms of the hardware capability but a wholesale design turnover.
The iPad 2 was thinner and lighter than the original. It gain
ed key new features like front and back cameras, as well as thoughtful touches like a magnetic cover that turned the iPad off and on. The design marked a big advance in manufacturing (with the unibody process), which allowed Jony to fashion the deeply beveled back he originally wanted, but in metal, using Apple’s new unibody manufacturing process. “By reducing what were essentially three surfaces to two, we got rid of the structural wall around the perimeter of the product and eliminated the edge. It’s not only more comfortable to hold, but with the breakthrough we made through unibody engineering, it’s rigid, sturdy and even more precise.”9
Once again, Jony was extremely proud of his group’s efforts. “I can’t think of a product that has defined an entire category and then has been completely redesigned in such a short period of time. It is really defined by the display. There are just no distractions.”10
In March 2012, Apple followed up with the third-generation iPad, which added a high-density retina display, a faster chip and better cameras. In October of the same year, the fourth-generation iPad was launched with a much faster processor and cell connection, as well as a tiny lightning connector to replace the original thirty-pin connector, which was long in the tooth and had become a legacy technology.
In their constant iterations, Apple was beating the “fast followers” at their own game. Fast followers take a winning product, make it cheaper and get it on the market very quickly. Sometimes the products are cheap knockoffs, but often they are good-enough rivals, as myriad Android phones contest. But by upgrading the iPad quickly and aggressively, and making it significantly better with each version, Apple was staying ahead of their competitors.
The fourth-generation iPad was joined by the iPad mini in 2012, which shrank the screen to just under eight inches, and was enthusiastically snapped up by users. “The Mini gives you all the iPad goodness in a more manageable size, and it’s awesome,” wrote David Pogue, an influential tech reviewer with the New York Times. “You could argue that the iPad Mini is what the iPad always wanted to be.”11 In the first quarter of 2013, the iPad mini accounted for about 60 percent of all iPad sales.12
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products Page 24