With advice from Walker as well as Drexler, Jobs began assembling a team for retail stores, led by a former Target executive named Ron Johnson. The goal was to capitalize on the excitement over Ive’s wildly successful iMacs and to begin selling people on the idea that would become central to Apple’s design over the next decade: the digital hub.
KOBE: My partner, Wilhelm Oehl, and I were the first ones hired on the Apple Stores program. We started in 1999, on a whiteboard with Steve. He was asking us a lot of questions like, “How big is the Nike store?” He wanted to do a store with a large presence, but at the time Apple had two laptops, two desktops, and not a lot of software. So we had to come up with a lot of other things: the photo zone, the kids area, the Genius Bar, the theater. Those were all outcomes of trying to create an experience that was distinctly Apple and different from the kind of experience most people would have had with technology.
WALKER: Ron Johnson wanted to brainstorm what it was going to be. We had the global head of customer service for the Ritz-Carlton and two kids who sold Macs at CompUSA. We had the architects who were going to design the store. We had this incredibly brilliant graphic artist. We sat in that room for a couple of days. That’s where the Genius Bar was invented. I still remember Ron sketching it out.
MICHAEL KRAMER, CFO, Apple Retail (later COO, JCPenney): When Ron told me about the Genius Bar, I asked, “So how big is it?” He said, “Five people in every store.” “So you’re going to take away 20% of the sales floor?” “Yeah.” “What are we going to charge?” “Nothing.” Most CFOs would say, “Are you fucking crazy?” But even as a financial guy at Apple, you have to have a reverence for the creative side of the business. You have to figure out ways to say yes.
KOBE: I got the sense that Ron was quite frustrated by Steve. Ron would always give a textbook answer to any retail question, and Steve would always go a few degrees off of that. I always thought Steve was just being mean, but later I realized that he was using Ron as a barometer of conventional wisdom of what his best competitors would do. I think it drove him crazy.
GEORGE BLANKENSHIP, VP, real estate (now a VP at Tesla Motors): Retail was Ron’s show, but Steve was the guide. We had a meeting every Tuesday morning with Steve for three hours where we went over store design. We built three full stores in a warehouse in Cupertino before we opened the first one—and trashed three-and-a-half designs. One was very trade-show feeling, like at a Macworld. One was very much museumlike. We ended up with the design of those early stores with those kidney-shape tables.
KOBE: We started with the white Corian tables because the first products were brightly colored and we needed a neutral palette for them to look good on. And then as the products started getting whiter, we switched to the maple tables.
SATZGER: The alignment of those big five-by-ten-foot tables that are 36 inches high? That came from the industrial design studio. If you think about how stark the Apple Stores are, that’s the ID studio.
BLANKENSHIP: We had to go to the heart of the malls and have people stumble on us when they weren’t thinking about buying a computer.
KOBE: We were trying to get emotion as an outcome, as opposed to utility. That’s a core attribute of the design at Apple.
The first Apple Store opened in Tysons Corner, Virginia, on May 19, 2001. The following day, BusinessWeek ran a column entitled, “Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work.” The piece—remarkable for its improvidence—derided Jobs’s “perfectionist attention to aesthetics,” his decision to lease extremely expensive real estate, and his “focus on selling just a few consumer Macs.” Today, there are 412 Apple Stores, averaging roughly $6,000 in sales per square foot per year—or more than twice that of any major retailer.
KOBE: For the first two or three years, people didn’t talk about the stores; they talked about the experience in the stores. Because the people who worked there were so different, and the way you engaged with technology was so different.
MIKE FISHER, director, visual merchandising (later chief creative officer, JCPenney): There was nothing except the computer. We had to sell the sexiness of just a computer.
2001: “Then Apple’s Design Became Experiential”
TONY FADELL, senior VP, iPod division (now CEO, Nest Labs): Design at Apple was product, product, product until about 2001. Then Apple’s design became experiential. There was a product—the iPod—and then software that hinged to the product, iTunes. And then a retail experience. That’s what created the Apple design philosophy as we know it today.
WALKER: All of the wonks were saying the personal computer was dead. And then one day—you never quite knew where Steve would get his ideas because he would sometimes lay claim to others’ ideas as his own—Steve woke up and decided not only was the computer not dead, but it was more important than ever. The computer was the center of this ecosystem and there were spokes: pictures, work, music.
Jobs unveiled the “Digital Hub” strategy at Macworld in January 2001, announcing a simple MP3 application, iTunes, that would allow Mac users to burn custom playlists and listen to Internet radio stations.
RUBINSTEIN: We were looking at all the devices you could use with a Mac. We looked at cameras, and we just didn’t see where we could add enough value. With cell phones and PDAs [personal digital assistants], we concluded that the PDA was just going to get consumed by the phone. Music players really stood out as the one thing where there were no entrenched competitors. The products on the market were crap.
WALKER: I’d like to tell you the iPod was because of some deep skunk works R&D operation, but it didn’t happen that way. It started because Jon Rubinstein was at the Toshiba factory in Japan. They had these tiny hard drives, and Ruby saw the potential.
RUBENSTEIN: I would do regular visits with all of our suppliers to review all the products they were doing and see how they fit into our product road map. We went into Toshiba, and at the end of the meeting, they showed us the 1.8-inch hard drive. They didn’t know what to do with it. I said, “We’ll take all you can make.” I went to Steve: “Hey, I’m gonna need about 10 million bucks.” That’s when I went looking for someone to manage the team—and that’s when I found Tony.
FADELL: That hard drive—there was nothing else like it on the planet. It was the enabler that made the iPod work. At Fuse Systems [Fadell’s previous company], we were creating this MP3 player for home stereos. It was rack-mounted because there was no storage that was small enough.
RUBENSTEIN: Tony has tried to rewrite history where he says that he came up with the idea, that he was working on it independently. That’s total nonsense.
SATZGER: If you look up iPod creator, they called Jony “Jony iPod.” The “Godfather of the iPod” is Tony. And there’s “Mr. iPod” Rubinstein. It’s like none of those three guys can accept that it was a team of people who changed the world when they created this product.
FADELL: I started in January 2001 as a contractor. The idea was “1,000 songs in your pocket”—a long-battery-life device that syncs with the Mac. In the fourth week of March, I showed the first design to Steve. It had a navigation control, and [marketing chief] Phil Schiller said, “You should do a jog shuttle wheel.” And that was it. It all happened in a one-hour meeting. I made the device in foam models. We gave it to Jony to skin it.
SATZGER: Tony brought in a stack of foam models about the size of a cigarette package. We looked at soft shapes, metals, and the double-shot plastic that we ended up using. It couldn’t get too wild. The package size was really defined by its components.
FADELL: It was basically a two-piece shell—a plastic top with a metal back—because we could get that done really fast. Once the iPod came out, all of the other products started looking like it: It was all the same language.
The minimalist design for the iPod did not come out of nowhere. Ive’s team had been toying with similar designs for years, beginning with the G4 Cube desktop computer as well as the Titanium PowerBook G4, which was released shortly bef
ore the iPod.
RUBENSTEIN: The Cube was our only real crap-out, which was too bad, because it was actually a great product, just too expensive. We learned a lot about materials, curved plastics, touch switches—and it was a tremendous piece of industrial design. It set the foundation for almost all of our future products.
SATZGER: The market had outgrown the transparent stuff. Shortly after the iMac, we did the Titanium PowerBook, and then we redesigned the iBook in white. The white definitely came from Jony. I had to go to a couple of suppliers and say, “We want to do the whitest white.” We pushed them to the limit of adding titanium to the base resin, and then we had to make sure we adjusted the blue levels, because too much blue makes it look like a washing machine.
LINDSAY: Steve always wanted to stay one step ahead. When the industry started to become very colorful and lickable, then he realized—and Jony and I realized—that we needed to take a different path. Let’s go minimalistic, less color, focus more on patterns and textures, and different inspirations for design.
ZWERNER: We were kind of like, Who needs another Walkman? While the design [of the iPod] was great, it was just an MP3 player. The iPod languished for a while. It wasn’t until the iTunes Store that everyone was like, Holy shit, this is gonna be phenomenal.
2004: “The Holy of Holies”
The third-generation iPod, released in April 2003, was thinner and featured a new navigation wheel. At the same time, Jobs unveiled the iTunes Store. Apple would sell 2 million iPods in 2003, more than twice as many as it had from its debut in September 2001 through 2002. With 2004’s release of the iPod Mini, the figure would increase fivefold. The division was split from the rest of Apple, with Rubinstein at the helm. Ive, who had reported to Rubinstein, would now report directly to Jobs, concentrating power in the hands of his elite group of industrial designers.
SATZGER: Those of us in the industrial design studio were locked down. Steve made it really clear that if you don’t have any reason to be there, you don’t belong there, and that it was important that we didn’t talk about the designs with anybody else outside the team.
ERIK LAMMERDING, senior manager, developer relations (now cofounder, N3twork): I was never allowed in the secret room. Do you remember the show Get Smart? Duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun—chish chish chish. Multiple keycards, frosted glass. The Holy of Holies.
BOB STEVENSON, chief creative officer, Ngmoco (now cofounder, N3twork): We went in there once. Do you know the end scene of 2010 [the 1984 sequel to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey]? It was like an entire set of humans from the future.
JEREMY KUEMPEL, intern, iPad product design: I made it to the door. Have you seen the scene in Star Wars where he goes to Jabba the Hut’s palace, and the eyeball sticks out and looks at him? It was like that.
SATZGER: The studio is about 10,000 to 15,000 square feet. It’s an amazing space. When you walk in, you go through this little stainless-steel corridor that’s probably about ten feet long and that opens up into this expanse of concrete floor and glass. The ceiling is covered with metal. There are these huge concrete pillars and right in the middle is a glass section—like a giant fishbowl—and Jony has a three-wall room. I remember that Jony had a desk that was custom-designed by Marc Newson, a chair, and two standing drawer shelves. He had a whole series of colored pencils laying on his table, a Tolomeo lamp, a computer, and that’s it. There wasn’t a picture of his family, his kids, nothing—in fact, there wasn’t an image of anything on any wall in the whole studio.
RUBENSTEIN: My job was to manage all the different requirements from all the different teams, and make it work. And that means you’re the bad guy. Steve didn’t like being the bad guy, so that was my role.
SATZGER: Jony and Steve spent a lot of time together outside the office, and they’d talk about business plans and products and things like that. Jony complained that a lot of the things that Steve took credit for were his ideas. Jony has a very political agenda when it comes to his positioning within the company. He would tell me, “Anytime you meet with Steve, I gotta know.” He projects this soft-spoken English gentleman persona.
RUBENSTEIN: It’s a good image: “Shaken, not stirred.”
SATZGER: But if you challenge the VP of design—and you’re not a designer—there are going to be consequences. There are many people who are not at Apple because Jony has decided that person was in his way.
RUBENSTEIN: There was an antenna on one of the PowerBooks, and Jony and I were arguing how big the enclosure should be. And we compromised, which, frankly, compromised performance. You can’t violate the laws of physics.
According to Walter Isaacson’s book, Steve Jobs, Ive threatened to leave Apple if Rubinstein did not. In 2006, Rubinstein announced his retirement (unretiring a year later to be CEO of Palm), leaving Fadell in charge of the company’s iPod division as it was preparing to spin off a new, top-secret product.
MATT ROGERS, firmware engineer, iPod division (now Fadell’s cofounder at Nest): When we started working on this skunk works project in 2005, our team was super small. One hardware engineer, one antenna guy, one project manager. There were a lot of people at Apple who thought we’d maybe sell a million units a year. That was the high bar.
FADELL: We started with an iPod Mini and tried to make it a phone. We actually built a phone with a click wheel—it worked like a rotary dial.
ROGERS: There’s a reason nobody wants rotary phones anymore.
ANDY GRIGNON, senior manager, iPhone division (now founder, Quake Labs): Apple had just acquired a company called FingerWorks, which made multitouch keyboards. So the idea was born to do a full touch-screen-based platform for the phone.
SATZGER: The initial concept of multitouch was from a tablet-computer brainstorm. We were always trying to shove a PC into a tablet. Duncan Kerr [a designer in Ive’s group] sat people down for a couple of hours and just talked about multitouch. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just turn a page like you were turning a page? Wouldn’t it be great if you could just zoom in and out by doing some kind of gesture? We had all those ideas on paper in the ID team. And I’m sure Duncan was talking to the sensor people and the hardware people about multitouch. A couple of weeks later, we were all just blown away by the prototype Duncan and his team built. We were zooming in and out on Google Maps and rotating it.
RUBENSTEIN: It was pretty cool. But it wasn’t good enough. And so the technology wound up in the iPhone before the iPad.
GRIGNON: This was around when Scott Forstall [then in charge of Mac software] got wind of the project. He really wanted to do Mac OS on a phone.
ROGERS: The iPhone was done in these vacuums. The software and hardware teams didn’t even talk. One of my early tasks was to build a parallel software system for the iPhone so we could actually use it to make calls.
GRIGNON: We called it “skankphone.” Of Tony’s whole hardware team, which was maybe sixty people at full strength, only me and three guys were allowed to see the real user interface. Before you got UI access, you had to sign a separate legal document, Steve had to approve it, and then you’d go to Forstall, who was the ultimate owner of the secret list. He would tell you, “Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t tell your wife.”
ABIGAIL SARAH BRODY, user interface designer: I’d been working on a new design language for what we called Pro Apps—Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Aperture. One day around 2005, I got a call to move up to the fourth floor, the executive floor. I wasn’t told I’d be working on a phone. They just said, “Create a user interface for multitouch.”
SATZGER: When we developed the first iPhone, we developed around a screen size and a home button.
BRODY: I had a crude prototype and a sense of the dimensions. I rendered some finger-size images and looked at how far my thumb would reach across the screen. I had to create some sort of menu, so I just created a screen with rounded rectangular buttons.
SATZGER: We had a Screenshot that we put on every model, and that’s all we knew about the UI. Jony knew what
was going on, but most of the ID group didn’t know how the gestures worked, how you did basic functions, visual voice mail—all the amazing things that came out of that first product.
NITIN GANATRA, director of engineering, iOS applications (now executive director, Jawbone): Everyone on the team knew that Apple had attempted to ship a device with a touch input with the Newton—and was laughed at by the industry. Scott was very focused on the fine points around the look and feel. When we launched an app, it had to come up instantly. When you moved your thumb up or down, the scrolling had to track your movement with no delays.
LOREN BRICHTER, graphics engineer (later inventor of the Twitter app Tweetie, which introduced the pull-to-refresh gesture to iOS): The UI was mind-blowing: 3-D graphics, sixty frames per second. Nothing like it existed.
ROGERS: Before we launched at Macworld in January 2007, I was sitting in the bathroom using one of the devices, and I was like, This is revolution. I’m checking e-mail in the bathroom. That was the moment when I realized this is a totally different kind of device.
BRODY: Steve showed it with clown-fish wallpaper and some green sea anemones in the background. It was the same sample image I used: the black UI, the glossiness, the big numbers. Later, I saw Steve in the hall, and I said, “Is it a coincidence that it looks like my design?” And he said no. One of my fondest memories from my time at Apple was that launch day. Even if it was finished by a completely different team, and even though my contribution is maybe 0.1 percent, there is still something in there that I helped make a difference with.
HORACE DEDIU, analyst, Nokia (now an independent analyst and founder of Asymco): The day after the first iPhone launch, I went to the Nokia cafeteria and asked people about it. They were like, “Meh, there’s nothing here.” The compromises Apple took on design were legendary: You didn’t have copy-paste, you didn’t have multitasking, you didn’t have apps. Apple said, We just want to have a cool phone. Everybody else was focusing on being smart. Apple focused on being loved.
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