On the executive team, Schiller’s contributions went far beyond just masterminding product launches and marketing strategies. He was a passionate participant in discussions about product development, helping to define products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. The navigation wheel on the iPod had been Schiller’s idea, inspired by a Bang & Olufsen design. A technology junkie, he knew the ins and outs of every product’s technical specifications and was respected for his extensive knowledge of market trends. Among those who dealt with him, however, he was a more controversial figure. Many loathed and feared him. Apple employees said Schiller was controlling and had a fiery temperament like Jobs, but compared to his longtime boss, he lacked charisma and gravitas.
Schiller had two nicknames. One was Dr. No, in reference to his Jobs-like habit of brusquely rejecting proposals. The other was Mini-Me, from the Austin Powers movies.
The name had been bestowed upon him because of the sidekick role he often played during Jobs’s keynote presentations. One particularly memorable stunt during a 1999 Macworld event had Schiller leaping off a fifteen-foot platform to demonstrate how Apple’s latest laptop computer could continue to transmit data wirelessly. As Jobs got the audience to join him in yelling, “Three. Two. One. Jump!,” Schiller took off. He landed on a mattress as the accelerometer that was attached to the computer tracked his fall. “This is definitely one small step for man and one giant leap for wireless networking,” he had joked beforehand. But the name stuck mostly because of his Jobs-like behavior. Even though people used the nickname snidely, Schiller was flattered. In his office, he kept a cardboard cutout of the character that Jon Rubinstein had given him one year before the hardware executive had left the company.
Colleagues said Schiller seemed to enjoy his power a little too much. He liked to boast of the fact that he was one of the few who had an all-access pass on Apple’s campus and was the most cliquish member of the executive team. Those who worked with him thought he was suspicious of new executives joining Apple and that he often showed hostility until he felt they had proved themselves worthy of his respect.
Even in his personal life, he projected bold tendencies. He was a fan of the San Jose Sharks hockey team and owned a Lamborghini. A former percussionist, he favored music with aggressive, driving drum tracks like Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times, Bad Times.”
Without Jobs, Schiller could assert his marketing prowess as he took a bigger role in keynote presentations and advertising. But the big question was whether he could measure up to the standards that Jobs had set. Did he have the same level of creativity and imagination?
Scott Forstall’s nickname was Boy Wonder. At forty-two, he was the youngest executive team member and was in charge of iOS, the operating system that ran the iPhone and iPad. Upon graduating from Stanford University with an interdisciplinary degree in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction, he had worked at NeXT until it was acquired by Apple. For many years Forstall had been just one of the many bright engineers on the Macintosh user interface team, but he found his opportunity while Apple was developing the iPhone. He vaulted into Jobs’s inner circle by managing the effort to shrink the Macintosh operating system so the smaller device could have a more fully functioning operating system.
Forstall shared many of the same qualities as Jobs. He was dynamic, driven, and detail oriented, so much so that he kept a jeweler’s loupe in his office so he could readily examine the pixels in each icon. He also had charisma and was capable of motivating his team when he wanted to. But because of his swift rise, he also lacked the maturity in management that usually came with experience. He could be extraordinarily tough with people when things were going wrong, and he handled dissension poorly, especially when it came from other teams. His go-to solution was to take out the Steve card, dropping in Jobs’s name to try to win an argument. He used it so often that he was admonished by a senior executive for it.
Though he was once known for his irreverent sense of humor, Forstall had become increasingly political as his ambitions grew. Some compared him to Wesley Crusher, the irritating prodigy in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It didn’t take long for him to become the most polarizing figure on Jobs’s team.
As a colleague, he was impossible to work with. He took credit whenever he could, but he blamed others when something went wrong. When Apple was getting criticized for the antenna problems associated with the iPhone 4, Forstall managed to shift most of the blame primarily to Apple’s hardware and design teams even though his software was also at fault. In addition, he stole valuable engineers from other teams and made life difficult for anyone who posed a threat to his turf. The battles between him and Tony Fadell, the iPod hardware executive who left Apple in 2008, were famous. It was a mystery to some why Jobs tolerated Forstall’s behavior. One theory was that the pair had shared an unbreakable bond when Forstall fell ill with a serious stomach condition around the same time that Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. Another was that Forstall was unusually skilled at looking good in front of his boss.
What made Forstall particularly intolerable to some was his craving for the spotlight. Apple’s executive team thrived in part because they all accepted that Jobs was the superstar. Forstall, however, yearned for attention, too. As he became more powerful, he shed his used Corolla and purchased a silver Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG, identical to the one that Jobs had. As Jobs grew sicker and started sharing the stage with his team, Forstall was one of the beneficiaries who got to handle major product introductions. Like Jobs, he had a signature look—black shoes, a black zip-up sweater, and jeans. Tall and lean with dark brown hair, he made a striking image.
But Forstall was also one of the few executives who made an effort to communicate outside of Apple. In the summer before Jobs died, he participated in an annual meeting of iPhone and iPad app developers at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that had been one of the first to invest in Apple apps.
Among the executive team members, Forstall probably came closest to projecting an energetic and creative vibe similar to Jobs’s. He was also an extraordinarily talented software engineer. Cook needed Forstall on both counts, provided he could control him.
A few days after Jobs’s private memorial service, BloombergBusinessweek published a profile on Forstall that called him the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It discussed how critical he was to Apple. “In many ways, Forstall is a mini-Steve,” it said. “He may also be the best remaining proxy for the voice of Steve Jobs, the person most likely to channel the departed co-founder’s exacting vision for how technology should work.”
Though the magazine said that Forstall declined to comment on the story, the nature of it made more than a few people suspect he had orchestrated the whole thing. At a time when the entire company was rallying around Cook, it gave an impression, rightly or wrongly, that Forstall was trying to elevate his own profile.
A few months later, when Fortune reporter Adam Lashinsky came out with his book Inside Apple, he wrote, “Eight years younger than Tim Cook, Forstall easily could be a CEO-in-waiting, especially if Apple’s board decides it needs a CEO more in the image of Steve Jobs.” In an event at venture capital firm Highland Capital Partners, Lashinsky told the audience that he thought Forstall was more crucial to the company than Jonathan Ive.
The world disagreed. As far as it was concerned, Ive reigned as the most invaluable executive at Apple, the keeper of Jobs’s faith. It automatically made him the star on Cook’s leadership team. Winning his allegiance was crucial.
The son of a silversmith in Britain, Ive learned design from an early age. As a young boy, he was exposed to the beauty of simplicity when his parents came home with a Braun MPZ 2 Citromatic juicer conceived by the famous German industrial designer Dieter Rams. “It was clearly made from the best materials, not the cheapest,” he later recalled. “No part appeared to be hidden or celebrated, just perfectly considered and completely appropriate. At a glance, you kn
ew exactly what it was and how to use it. It was the essence of juicing made material: a static object that perfectly described the process by which it worked. It felt complete and it felt right.”
As a Christmas gift, his father would take Ive into the college workshop where he taught to help him make whatever he wanted as long as he sketched it out first. By the time he was in high school, he was a superb draftsman.
Ive was an easygoing and handsome teenager. He was involved in the Wildwood Fellowship Church, a small evangelical church where his father was an elder, and he played the drums for a band called Whiteraven, which performed mellow rock in church halls. Large and strong, he was also a rugby player. A group photo showed him looking confidently at the camera with a shock of dark hair styled in a mullet. His English teacher, Netta Cartwright, remembered him sitting in the back of the class surrounded by friends. He contributed actively in class discussions as they read books like George Orwell’s 1984.
Though he was a good all-around student, Ive’s forte was design and technology, a field that required students to take liberal arts courses such as history and English in addition to science and design classes. His work in the subject demonstrated a sophistication far beyond his years. A drawing of a toothbrush was so exquisite that it left an unforgettable impression on anyone who had seen it. Upon graduation, he ended up at Newcastle Polytechnic, whose industrial design graduates included IDEO CEO Tim Brown and Philips design lead Gavin Proctor. Even at such a top institution, Ive shone with his originality and talent. His sketches were featheresque in their fluidity, gracefulness, and restraint, while his models were so understated and perfect that they looked real. Among the projects he worked on were a beautiful minimalist stand-alone ATM machine and a white phone with pale purple buttons for the hearing impaired. Both won awards from the Royal Society of Arts. Ive used the prize money to take his first trip to California.
After leaving Newcastle, Ive worked for a well-known design firm, Roberts Weaver, for a short time before co-founding an independent firm called Tangerine with a couple of other designers. A defining project during this time was designing a sink and toilet for the plumbing fixture company Ideal Standard, which had hired him after seeing his university work. Ive had come up with a radical sink, involving a huge piece of ceramic and a pedestal that leaned against the wall. But when he presented the design, the CEO summarily dismissed it because it was too unusual and difficult to make. Faced with the limitations of a consultancy and disillusioned with the lack of imagination in British manufacturing, he jumped to Apple.
Ive joined the company in 1992 and immediately became a key contributor. When his boss, Robert Brunner, left to start his own design firm a few years later, Ive took over as the head of the department. But he was deeply unhappy about the company’s lack of interest in design and his powerlessness in affecting change. Ive had been on the verge of leaving when Jobs came back. The two didn’t bond immediately, but they soon discovered their mutual passion. Their first product together was the all-in-one iMac, a curvy, playful desktop computer that was all about design. The casing of the iMac had cost more than sixty dollars a unit, three times more than the average, and the screws inside it were custom-made with a particular finish. They had cost twenty-five cents each instead of three cents for a more typical screw. In choosing its translucent blue plastic panels, designers had supposedly visited a jelly bean factory to study how colors can help a product look enticing. One of Ive’s proudest features was the iMac’s handle, which instantly conveyed accessibility. When the computer finally launched, Ive sent one to his father.
“Anything that I did before the iMac,” he told people, “seems irrelevant.”
From that moment, Ive became an essential partner to Jobs, helping to define the elegantly understated look and feel of Apple’s computers, iPods, iPhones, and iPads. The timeless sophistication of their design, combined with their uncompromising quality and close attention to the smallest detail, solidified Apple’s luxury brand image. While rivals were suffering from the commoditization of their products, Apple was in a category of its own, charging premium prices.
By many accounts, Ive projected warmth and humility. He was the kind of man who enveloped you in a friendly bear hug when he saw you and didn’t seem to exhibit a shred of ego despite his huge accomplishments.
But he was a shrewd strategist. Ive’s closeness with Jobs was no accident. Industrial design had originally been part of the hardware unit, but Ive chafed under the management of Rubinstein, who he thought interfered with his relationship to Jobs. Because of the inevitable trade-off between form and function there is an inherent tension between designers, who focus on aesthetics, and engineers, who make the product work. In many ways, this tension was crucial, but Ive wanted a direct and equal voice in product development. When Rubinstein left the unit to run the newly created iPod division, Ive negotiated so he could work directly for Jobs.
Ive and Jobs were inseparable. Almost daily, Jobs dropped by the design studio, where the two of them would walk around the project tables looking at works in progress. When Jobs arrived, Ive’s team moved discreetly to a different area, so the pair could talk freely without being heard. The two also ate lunch together regularly. People would sometimes see them sitting silently, just thinking together. Outside of work, the Jobs and Ive families socialized.
“Jony had a special status,” Jobs’s wife, Laurene, said. “Most people in Steve’s life are replaceable. But not Jony.” Given Jobs’s strong personality, the relationship was often stressful, but it was worth it.
“If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony,” Jobs once said.
He gave Ive more operational power than anyone else. “There’s no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out,” he said. “That’s the way I set it up.”
Some who saw the relationship between Jobs and Ive suspected that Ive didn’t consider Jobs to be as close of a friend as Jobs considered him. Though he didn’t show it, Ive had a strong ego, and he was frustrated by Jobs’s tendency to steal the spotlight. “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one,’ ” he complained to Isaacson during an interview. “Later, I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea.”
Ive said he paid “maniacal attention” to where an idea came from, showing Isaacson the drawers in his office where he kept notebooks with his ideas.
Still, Jobs let Ive become a star. For a man who disliked sharing the spotlight this was no small thing. Many a deputy had left Apple because Jobs was unwilling to share credit. Ive spoke occasionally at design conferences, and he always had a major role in product launches through video clips, where he spoke about the products’ design. He also won numerous accolades. BBC described him as the Armani of Apple.
When Jobs died, Ive was distraught. He was also anxious about the implications of losing his mentor. In the end, an industrial designer’s success depended on his CEO’s willingness to create a design-centric environment. Jobs was the one who had created a company culture around design and allowed Ive’s team to operate independently of other divisions. “What am I going to do?,” he moaned to a confidant. “I don’t have my intellectual partner.”
But this was his chance to lead Apple’s innovation without interference or fear of someone else taking credit for his work. If he succeeded, he could go down in history as the best industrial designer ever, bar none. Until now he had been walking in Jobs’s shadow.
The risk to Apple, however, was that he would grow too powerful and upset the careful balance that Jobs had established between form and functionality. Whereas Jobs sought to come up with products that stood at the intersection of liberal arts and science, Ive was about the liberal arts. As an industrial designer, he cared about how things looked more than about what went inside.
Hanging on to this team was not going to be easy. Now that Cook had been appointed CEO, recruiters w
ere calling his executives daily in the hopes of enticing them away. Rumors were swirling that Ive was planning to quit and return to Great Britain. A few years before, he had purchased a ten-bedroom historical mansion on a fifty-three-acre estate in Somerset near his parents’ home.
Their new boss wasted no time proving to Ive and the others how badly he wanted them to stay at Apple. In November 2012, just a month after Jobs’s death, his senior vice presidents received massive stock bonuses as an incentive for their continued loyalty. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, most of them were given 150,000 shares each, or about $60 million. Cue, who had only recently been promoted, received 100,000 shares. There was no mention of Ive because his role didn’t fall under the SEC’s disclosure requirements for directors, officers, and principal stockholders. But it was safe to assume that the design chief also made out well. The day after he received his knighthood, he told the BBC that he wanted to remain at Apple.
“I would just like to work with the same team that I’ve been fortunate enough to work with for the past fifteen years, and just learn together and work on trying to solve the same sorts of problems that we’ve been trying to solve over the last fifteen years,” he said.
In July, Ive signaled his commitment to Apple by buying a house on a street known alternately as the “Gold Coast” or “Billionaire’s Row” in the tony San Francisco neighborhood of Pacific Heights. The $17 million, 7,274-square-foot Tudor-style home was a stark contrast to Tim Cook’s relatively modest $1.9 million home. The four-bedroom, 7.5-bath brick-and-stone mansion was designed by the architect Willis Polk and came with two kitchens, an elevator, a two-bedroom, one-bath staff apartment, and a view looking out onto the Golden Gate Bridge. It was one of the most expensive sales in San Francisco in 2012. Ive’s new neighbors included Oracle’s Larry Ellison. PayPal founder Peter Thiel and actor Nicolas Cage also lived nearby.
Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs Page 16
