Inside Steve's Brain

by Leander Kahney

  Oddly, Ive had no affinity for computers as a student. “I went through college having a real problem with computers,” Ive said. “I was convinced that I was technically inept .”20 But just before leaving Newcastle in 1989, he discovered the Mac. “I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use,” he said. “I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company: how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more I learnt about this cheeky—almost rebellious—company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.”

  Over the years, computers have grown on him. In an interview with Face magazine, he explained that he’s fascinated by their multifunction nature. “There’s no other product that changes function like the computer,” he said. “The iMac can be a jukebox, a tool for editing video, a way to organize photographs. You can design on it, write on it. Because what it does is so new, so changeable, it allows us to use new materials, to create new forms. The possibilities are endless. I love that.”

  After leaving Newcastle, Ive cofounded the Tangerine design collective in London in 1989, where he worked on a wide range of products, from toilets to hair combs. But he found contract work frustrating. As an outsider, he had little influence on the outcome of his ideas within the company.

  In 1992, he got a call from Apple asking him to submit some concepts for early laptops. Apple was so impressed, Ive was hired as a designer and moved to California. But as Apple went into decline during this period, design was relegated to a dusty basement. Apple’s managers started to look to the competition for inspiration. They wanted focus groups. Ive came close to quitting. He worked independently and alone. He’d continue to design prototype products, but they often never got any further than a shelf in his office.

  Of course, things have been very different since Jobs returned. Ive is the same designer he used to be, but the outcomes are the polar opposite.

  Ive heads up a relatively small team of about a dozen industrial designers, who have worked together at Apple for many years. “We have assembled a heavenly design team,” Ive says.21 The team works in a very private studio set apart from the rest of Apple’s campus. Housed in a nondescript building, the studio is sealed off from most of Apple employees for fear of revealing upcoming goodies. Access is granted only to a select few with authorized electronic passes; doors and windows are shaded behind black privacy glass. Even former CEO John Sculley was locked out of the design studio. “Talk about a pissed-off executive,” said Robert Brunner, the head of the design group at the time.22

  There’s very little personal space inside the studio. There are no cubicles or offices. The studio is a large open space with several communal design areas. It is full of expensive, state-of-the-art prototyping machines: 3D printers, powerful CAD (Computer Aided Design) workstations, and CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine tools. There’s also a massive sound system pumping out electronica all day, some of it sent from Ive’s friends back home in Britain. Ive is a confessed music nut, and a close friend of top techno DJ John Digweed.

  When it comes to tools, no expense is spared. But instead of hiring more and more designers, Ive puts his resources into prototyping machinery. “By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare,” Ive said. “In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.”23

  The small, intimate team is key to being creative and productive, Ive says. He denies that Apple’s innovations came from one individual designer or another, but the team working together. It’s a process of “collectively learning stuff and getting better at what we do. One of the hallmarks of the team is inquisitiveness, being excited about being wrong because that means you’ve discovered something new.”24

  Whenever he talks about his work, Ive always emphasizes the team. He has no ego. After Digweed first met Ive, it took him months to discover what Ive’s real role was at Apple. “Jonathan was saying how they’d designed different things and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, my God. His work is used by creative people across the world every day but he has no ego about it.’ ”25

  Ive’s Design Process

  Ive has often said that the simplicity of Apple’s designs is deceiving. To a lot of people, the products seem obvious. They are so plain and simple, there seems to be no “design” involved at all. There are no frills or accoutrements that trumpet the design process. But to Ive, that’s the point. The task, Ive said, is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense how difficult this thing was.”26

  The simplicity is the outcome of a design process characterized by generating a lot of ideas and then refining them—the same way the interface for OS X was designed. The process involves multiple teams at Apple, not just the designers. Engineers, programmers, and even marketers are also involved. Ive’s industrial designers are involved from the get-go of every project. “We get involved really early on,” said Ive. “There’s a very natural, consistent collaboration with Steve, with the hardware and software people. I think that’s one of the things that’s distinctive at Apple. When we’re developing ideas there’s not a final architecture established. I think it’s in those early stages when you’re still very open to exploration, that you find opportunities.”27

  To find these opportunities, Jobs assiduously avoids a serial, step-by-step design regime, where products are passed from one team to the next, and there’s little back and forth between the different departments. This is not always the case at other companies. Jobs has said it’s like seeing a cool prototype car at a car show, but when the production model appears four years later, it sucks. “And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! ... What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”28

  In interviews, Ive has talked about “deep collaboration,” “cross pollination,” and “concurrent engineering.” Products being developed at Apple aren’t passed from team to team, from the designers to the engineers to the programmers, and finally to the marketers. The design process isn’t sequential. Instead, the products are worked on by all these groups simultaneously, and there’s round after round of reviews.

  The meetings are endless. They’re an integral part of the “deep collaborative” process, and without them there wouldn’t be the same amount of “cross pollination.” “The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” Ive told Time. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”

  The design process begins with a lot of sketching. Ive’s team works together, critiquing each other’s ideas and incorporating feedback from the engineers and, of course, Jobs himself. The team then works up 3D computer models in various CAD applications, which are used to make physical models in foamcore and other prototyping materials. The team will often build several models, testing not only the outside shape of the new product, but the interior as well. Prototypes precisely modeling interior space and the thickness of the walls are sent to hardware engineers, who check that the internal components fit. They also make sure there’s sufficient airflow through the case, and that interior components like ports and battery compartments line up.

  “We make a lot of models and prototypes, and we go back and iterate,” Ive said. �
�We strongly believe in prototyping and making things so you can pick them up and touch them.” The number of models made is exhausting. “We make lots and lots of prototypes: the number of solutions we make to get one solution is quite embarrassing, but it’s a healthy part of what we do,” Ive said.29

  Robert Brunner, a partner at Pentagram Design and former head of Apple’s Design Group, said, crucially, Apple’s prototypes are always designed with the manufacturing process very much in mind. “Apple’s designers spend 10 percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming,” he said. “They spend 90 percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas.”

  The method is akin to a technique known to psychologists studying problem solving as “generate and test.” To solve a problem, all the possible solutions are generated and then tested to see if they offer a solution. It’s a form of trial and error, but not as random; it’s more guided and purposeful. Apple’s designers create dozens of possible solutions, constantly testing their work to see if it is approaching a solution. The process is essentially the same as techniques used in a lot of creative endeavors, from writing to creating music. A writer will often start by banging out a rough draft, spilling out words and ideas with little thought for structure or cohesion, and then go back and edit their work, sometimes multiple times. “Trying to simplify and refine is enormously challenging,” Ive said.30

  Attention to Detail: Invisible Design

  Ive’s team pays attention to the kind of details that other companies often overlook, like simple on/off lights and power adapters. The power cord of the first iMac was translucent— like the computer it plugged into—revealing the three twisted wires inside. Few other manufacturers pay such close attention to seemingly insignificant details. But doing so distinguishes Apple from other companies. This kind of attention to the little things is usually reserved to handcrafted goods. Apple products have those little touches that are more characteristic of bespoke suits or handmade pottery than mass-produced items churned out of Asian factories. “I think one thing that is typical about our work at Apple is caring about the smallest details,” Ive said. “I think sometimes that’s seen as more of a craft activity than a mass-production one. But I think that’s very important.”31

  Even the insides of the machines are carefully pored over. At an exhibit at the Design Museum, Ive displayed a dismantled laptop so that visitors could see the careful design of its interior layout. “You can see our preoccupation with a part of the product that you’ll never see,” Ive said.32

  Many of Apple’s products are characterized by this kind of invisible design. Recent-model iMacs are large, flat screens with the computer housed behind. The screen is attached to a pedestal made from a single piece of aluminum bent at an angle to form a foot. The aluminum pedestal allows the screen to tilt back and forth with a gentle push. But getting it to move so effortlessly, and to stay in place, was the result of months of work. The computer had to be perfectly balanced to ensure the screen stayed in place. “This was very difficult to get right,” Ive said at a design conference.

  The foot of the iMac’s aluminum base is made from a special nonslip material to prevent the machine from shifting when the screen is tilted. Why a special material? Because Ive doesn’t like rubber feet. Rubber feet would have been trivially easy to add to the base, and few people would notice whether they were there or not. But to Ive, using rubber feet doesn’t advance the state of the art.

  Ive also hates stickers. A lot of Apple products have product information laser etched right into the case, even their unique serial numbers. It’s obviously a lot simpler to slap a sticker on a product, but laser etching is another way that Apple has advanced the way products are made.

  Materials and Manufacturing Processes

  There have been several distinct stages in the design of Apple’s products over the last few years, from fruity-colored iMacs to black MacBook laptops. Every four years or so, Apple’s design “language” changes. In the late 1990s, Apple’s products were distinguished by the use of brightly colored translucent plastic (the eBook and first Bondi-blue iMac). Then, in the early 2000s, Apple started making products from white polycarbonate plastic and shiny chrome (the iPod, the iBook, the Luxo-lamp iMac). Then came laptops in metals like titanium and aluminum (the PowerBook and MacBook Pro). More recently, Apple has started to use black plastic, brushed aluminum, and glass (the iPhone, iPod nano, the Intel-powered iMacs, and MacBook laptops).

  The transitions between Apple’s different design phases are not planned ahead of time, at least not consciously. Rather, the transition between design phases is gradual—first one product sports a new design, then another. And it follows naturally from experimentation with new materials and production methods. As Apple’s designers learn how to work with a new material, they start to use it in more and more products. Take aluminum, a difficult metal to work with, which made its first appearance in the PowerBook’s casing in January 2003. Then the metal was used for the Power Mac’s case in June 2003, and the iPod mini in January 2004. Aluminum is now used in a lot of Apple’s products, from the back of the iPhone to the iMac’s keyboard.

  Ive has said many times that Apple’s design is never forced. The designers never say to each other, “Let’s make an organic, feminine-looking computer.” The iMac may look friendly and approachable, but that was never part of the machine’s design brief. Instead, Apple’s designers say, “Let’s see what we can do with plastics, maybe we can make a translucent computer.” And it proceeds from there.

  Ive and his designers pay close attention to materials and material science. For many companies, materials are an afterthought in the production process. But for Ive and his design team, the materials come first. The first iMac, for example, was always intended to be “an unashamedly plastic product,” Ive has explained. But plastic is usually associated with cheap. To make the iMac classy instead of chintzy, the team decided to make the computer’s shell transparent. But initially they encountered problems with spotting and streaking—the clear plastic cases weren’t coming off the production line uniformly clear. To ensure color consistently, the design team visited a candy factory, where they learned about mass-production tinting processes.

  Talking about the aluminum foot of the recent-model, flatpanel iMac, Ive said, “I love that we took one raw piece of material—a thick piece of aluminum—and achieved that sort of utility: you bend it, stamp a hole into it and anodize it.... We spent time in Northern Japan talking to a master of metal-forming, to get a certain kind of detail. We love taking things to pieces, understanding how things are made. The product architecture starts to be informed by really understanding the material.”33

  As well as materials, Ive and his team are keen students of new manufacturing processes. The team is constantly on the lookout for new ways of making things, and some of Apple’s most iconic designs are products of new manufacturing techniques. Several generations of the iPod, for example, had a thin transparent fascia bonded to the top of its plastic body. This thin coating of transparent plastic gave the iPod the appearance of extra heft and depth, without adding extra heft or depth. It also gave it a much more sophisticated look than a simple flat plastic surface.

  The thin sheet of transparent plastic is the product of a plastic molding technique known as “twin-shot,” where two different kinds of plastic are injected into a mold simultaneously and bond together seamlessly. As a result, the iPod’s front appears to be made from two different materials—but there are no visible seams connecting them.

  “We can now do things with plastic that we were previously told were impossible,” Ive told the Design Museum. “Twin shooting materials gives us a range of functional and formal opportunities that really didn’t exist before. The iPod is made from twin-shot plastic with no fasteners and no battery doors, enabling us to create a design which was dense and completely sealed.” 34
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br />   Before the iPod, Ive’s team had been experimenting with these new molding techniques in a series of products made from clear plastic, including the Cube, several flat-panel studio monitors, and a speaker and subwoofer set for Harman Kardon. The iPod appeared fresh and new, but its look was actually the result of several years of experimentation with new molding techniques. “Some of the white products we’ve done are just an extension of that,” says Ive.

  The ability to make seamless objects led to a design decision on the iPod that’s been bitterly criticized by consumers— the inability to change the iPod’s battery. The iPod’s battery is tightly sealed inside the device’s body, inaccessible to most owners unless they are willing to prise off the metal back. Apple and several third-party companies offer battery replacement services, but at extra charge.

  Apple has said the battery is designed to last for many years, often longer than the useful life of the iPod, but to some consumers the sealed battery smacks of planned obsolescence, or worse—it makes the iPod seem disposable.

  Lessons from Steve • Don’t compromise. Jobs’s obsession with excellence has created a unique development process that churns out truly great products.

  • Design is function, not form. For Jobs, design is the way the product works.

  • Hash it out. Jobs thoroughly figures out how the product works during the design process.