CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THINK DIFFERENT

Jobs as iCEO

Enlisting Picasso

Here’s to the Crazy Ones

Lee Clow, the creative director at Chiat/Day who had done the great “1984” ad for the launch of

the Macintosh, was driving in Los Angeles in early July 1997 when his car phone rang. It was

Jobs. “Hi, Lee, this is Steve,” he said. “Guess what? Amelio just resigned. Can you come up

here?”

Apple was going through a review to select a new agency, and Jobs was not impressed by what

he had seen. So he wanted Clow and his firm, by then called TBWA\Chiat\Day, to compete for the

business. “We have to prove that Apple is still alive,” Jobs said, “and that it still stands for

something special.”

Clow said that he didn’t pitch for accounts. “You know our work,” he said. But Jobs begged

him. It would be hard to reject all the others that were making pitches, including BBDO and

Arnold Worldwide, and bring back “an old crony,” as Jobs put it. Clow agreed to fly up to

Cupertino with something they could show. Recounting the scene years later, Jobs started to cry.

This chokes me up, this really chokes me up. It was so clear that Lee loved Apple so much. Here was

the best guy in advertising. And he hadn’t pitched in ten years. Yet here he was, and he was pitching his

heart out, because he loved Apple as much as we did. He and his team had come up with this brilliant

idea, “Think Different.” And it was ten times better than anything the other agencies showed. It choked

me up, and it still makes me cry to think about it, both the fact that Lee cared so much and also how

brilliant his “Think Different” idea was. Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity—

purity of spirit and love—and I always cry. It always just reaches in and grabs me. That was one of

those moments. There was a purity about that I will never forget. I cried in my office as he was showing

me the idea, and I still cry when I think about it.

Jobs and Clow agreed that Apple was one of the great brands of the world, probably in the top

five based on emotional appeal, but they needed to remind folks what was distinctive about it. So

they wanted a brand image campaign, not a set of advertisements featuring products. It was

designed to celebrate not what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with the

computers. “This wasn’t about processor speed or memory,” Jobs recalled. “It was about

creativity.” It was directed not only at potential customers, but also at Apple’s own employees:

“We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who

your heroes are. That was the genesis of that campaign.”

Clow and his team tried a variety of approaches that praised the “crazy ones” who “think

different.” They did one video with the Seal song “Crazy” (“We’re never gonna survive unless we

get a little crazy”), but couldn’t get the rights to it. Then they tried versions using a recording of

Robert Frost reading “The Road Not Taken” and of Robin Williams’s speeches from Dead Poets

Society. Eventually they decided they needed to write their own text; their draft began, “Here’s to

the crazy ones.”

Jobs was as demanding as ever. When Clow’s team flew up with a version of the text, he

exploded at the young copywriter. “This is shit!” he yelled. “It’s advertising agency shit and I hate

it.” It was the first time the young copywriter had met Jobs, and he stood there mute. He never

went back. But those who could stand up to Jobs, including Clow and his teammates Ken Segall

and Craig Tanimoto, were able to work with him to create a tone poem that he liked. In its original

sixty-second version it read:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square

holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the

status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you

can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while

some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think

they can change the world are the ones who do.

Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself,

including “They push the human race forward.” By the time of the Boston Macworld in early

August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was not ready, but Jobs used the

concepts, and the “think different” phrase, in his keynote speech there. “There’s a germ of a

brilliant idea there,” he said at the time. “Apple is about people who think outside the box, who

want to use computers to help them change the world.”

They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it

should be an adverb, as in

“think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in

“think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later

explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think

about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different,

think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams

to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly.

He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how

persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising

dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone

Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard

Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan.

In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print

campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure

with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly

engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan,

Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle,

and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard

Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart.

Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks,

defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way. A photography buff, he

became involved in making sure they had the perfect iconic portraits. “This is not the right picture

of Gandhi,” he erupted to Clow at one point. Clow explained that the famous Margaret Bourke-

White photograph of Gandhi at the spinning wheel was owned by Time-Life Pictures and was not

available for commercial use. So Jobs called Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc.,

and badgered him into making an exception.

He called Eunice Shriver to convince her family to release a picture that he loved, of her

brother Bobby Kennedy touring Appalachia, and he talked to Jim Henson’s children personally to

get the right shot of the late Muppeteer.

He likewise called Yoko Ono for a picture of her late husband, John Lennon. She sent him one,

but it was not Jobs’s favorite. “Before it ran, I was in New York, and I went to this small Japanese

restaurant that I love, and let her know I would be there,” he recalled. When he arrived, she came

over to his table. “This is a better one,” she said, handing him an envelope. “I thought I would see

you, so I had this with me.” It was the classic photo of her and John in bed together, holding

flowers, and it was the one that Apple ended up using. “I can see why John fell in love with her,”

Jobs recalled.

The narration by Richard Dreyfuss worked well, but Lee Clow had another idea. What if Jobs

did the voice-over himself? “You really believe this,” Clow told him. “You should do it.” So Jobs

sat in a studio, did a few takes, and soon produced a voice track that everyone liked. The idea was

that, if they used it, they would not tell people who was speaking the words, just as they didn’t

caption the iconic pictures. Eventually people would figure out it was Jobs. “This will be really

powerful to have it in your voice,” Clow argued. “It will be a way to reclaim the brand.”

Jobs couldn’t decide whether to use the version with his voice or to stick with Dreyfuss.

Finally, the night came when they had to ship the ad; it was due to air, appropriately enough, on

the television premiere of Toy Story. As was often the case, Jobs did not like to be forced to make

a decision. He told Clow to ship both versions; this would give him until the morning to decide.

When morning came, Jobs called and told them to use the Dreyfuss version. “If we use my voice,

when people find out they will say it’s about me,” he told Clow. “It’s not. It’s about Apple.”

Ever since he left the apple commune, Jobs had defined himself, and by extension Apple, as a

child of the counterculture. In ads such as “Think Different” and “1984,” he positioned the Apple

brand so that it reaffirmed his own rebel streak, even after he became a billionaire, and it allowed

other baby boomers and their kids to do the same.

“From when I first met him as a young guy, he’s had the greatest intuition of the impact he

wants his brand to have on people,” said Clow.

Very few other companies or corporate leaders—perhaps none—could have gotten away with

the brilliant audacity of associating their brand with Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai

Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anticorporate, creative,

innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the

tech industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche, Ferrari,

Prius—because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple

product.”

Starting with the “Think Different” campaign, and continuing through the rest of his years at

Apple, Jobs held a freewheeling three-hour meeting every Wednesday afternoon with his top

agency, marketing, and communications people to kick around messaging strategy. “There’s not a

CEO on the planet who deals with marketing the way Steve does,” said Clow. “Every Wednesday

he approves each new commercial, print ad, and billboard.” At the end of the meeting, he would

often take Clow and his two agency colleagues, Duncan Milner and James Vincent, to Apple’s

closely guarded design studio to see what products were in the works. “He gets very passionate

and emotional when he shows us what’s in development,” said Vincent. By sharing with his

marketing gurus his passion for the products as they were being created, he was able to ensure that

almost every ad they produced was infused with his emotion.

iCEO

As he was finishing work on the “Think Different” ad, Jobs did some different thinking of his

own. He decided that he would officially take over running the company, at least on a temporary

basis. He had been the de facto leader since Amelio’s ouster ten weeks earlier, but only as an

advisor. Fred Anderson had the titular role of interim CEO. On September 16, 1997, Jobs

announced that he would take over that title, which inevitably got abbreviated as iCEO. His

commitment was tentative: He took no salary and signed no contract. But he was not tentative in

his actions. He was in charge, and he did not rule by consensus.

That week he gathered his top managers and staff in the Apple auditorium for a rally, followed

by a picnic featuring beer and vegan food, to celebrate his new role and the company’s new ads.

He was wearing shorts, walking around the campus barefoot, and had a stubble of beard. “I’ve

been back about ten weeks, working really hard,” he said, looking tired but deeply determined.

“What we’re trying to do is not highfalutin. We’re trying to get back to the basics of great

products, great marketing, and great distribution. Apple has drifted away from doing the basics

really well.”

For a few more weeks Jobs and the board kept looking for a permanent CEO. Various names

surfaced—George M. C. Fisher of Kodak, Sam Palmisano at IBM, Ed Zander at Sun

Microsystems—but most of the candidates were understandably reluctant to consider becoming

CEO if Jobs was going to remain an active board member. The San Francisco Chronicle reported

that Zander declined to be considered because he “didn’t want Steve looking over his shoulder,

second-guessing him on every decision.” At one point Jobs and Ellison pulled a prank on a

clueless computer consultant who was campaigning for the job; they sent him an email saying that

he had been selected, which caused both amusement and embarrassment when stories appeared in

the papers that they were just toying with him.

By December it had become clear that Jobs’s iCEO status had evolved from interim to

indefinite. As Jobs continued to run the company, the board quietly deactivated its search. “I went

back to Apple and tried to hire a CEO, with the help of a recruiting agency, for almost four

months,” he recalled. “But they didn’t produce the right people. That’s why I finally stayed. Apple

was in no shape to attract anybody good.”

The problem Jobs faced was that running two companies was brutal. Looking back on it, he

traced his health problems back to those days:

It was rough, really rough, the worst time in my life. I had a young family. I had Pixar. I would go to

work at 7 a.m. and I’d get

back at 9 at night, and the kids would be in bed. And I couldn’t speak, I literally couldn’t, I was so

exhausted. I couldn’t speak to Laurene. All I could do was watch a half hour of TV and vegetate. It got

close to killing me. I was driving up to Pixar and down to Apple in a black Porsche convertible, and I

started to get kidney stones. I would rush to the hospital and the hospital would give me a shot of

Demerol in the butt and eventually I would pass it.

Despite the grueling schedule, the more that Jobs immersed himself in Apple, the more he

realized that he would not be able to walk away. When Michael Dell was asked at a computer

trade show in October 1997 what he would do if he were Steve Jobs and taking over Apple, he

replied, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Jobs fired off an email to

Dell. “CEOs are supposed to have class,” it said. “I can see that isn’t an opinion you hold.” Jobs

liked to stoke up rivalries as a way to rally his team—he had done so with IBM and Microsoft—

and he did so with Dell. When he called together his managers to institute a build-to-order system

for manufacturing and distribution, Jobs used as a backdrop a blown-up picture of Michael Dell

with a target on his face. “We’re coming after you, buddy,” he said to cheers from his troops.

One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a

summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation

far more than any single creative individual. “I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes

the company, the way you organize a company,” he recalled. “The whole notion of how you build

a company is fascinating. When I got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be

useless without the company, and that’s why I decided to stay and rebuild it.”

Killing the Clones

One of the great debates about Apple was whether it should have licensed its operating system

more aggressively to other computer makers, the way Microsoft licensed Windows. Wozniak had

favored that approach from the beginning. “We had the most beautiful operating system,” he said,

“but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake. What we should

have done was calculate an appropriate price to license the operating system.” Alan Kay, the star

of Xerox PARC who came to Apple as a fellow in 1984, also fought hard for licensing the Mac

OS software. “Software people are always multiplatform, because you want to run on everything,”

he recalled. “And that was a huge battle, probably the largest battle I lost at Apple.”

Bill Gates, who was building a fortune by licensing Microsoft’s operating system, had urged

Apple to do the same in 1985, just as Jobs was being eased out. Gates believed that, even if Apple

took away some of Microsoft’s operating system customers, Microsoft could make money by

creating versions of its applications software, such as Word and Excel, for the users of the

Macintosh and its clones. “I was trying to do everything to get them to be a strong licensor,” he

recalled. He sent a formal memo to Sculley making the case. “The industry has reached the point

where it is now impossible for Apple to create a standard out of their innovative technology

without support from, and the resulting credibility of, other personal computer manufacturers,” he

argued. “Apple should license Macintosh technology to 3–5 significant manufacturers for the

development of ‘Mac Compatibles.’” Gates got no reply, so he wrote a second memo suggesting

some companies that would be good at cloning the Mac, and he added, “I want to help in any way

I can with the licensing. Please give me a call.”

Apple resisted licensing out the Macintosh operating system until 1994, when CEO Michael

Spindler allowed two small companies, Power Computing and Radius, to make Macintosh clones.

When Gil Amelio took over in 1996, he added Motorola to the list. It turned out to be a dubious

business strategy: Apple got an $80 licensing fee for each computer sold, but instead of expanding

the market, the cloners cannibalized the sales of Apple’s own high-end computers, on which it

made up to $500 in profit.

Jobs’s objections to the cloning program were not just economic, however. He had an inbred

aversion to it. One of his core principles was that hardware and software should be tightly

integrated. He loved

to control all aspects of his life, and the only way to do that with computers was to take

responsibility for the user experience from end to end.

So upon his return to Apple he made killing the Macintosh clones a priority. When a new

version of the Mac operating system shipped in July 1997, weeks after he had helped oust Amelio,

Jobs did not allow the clone makers to upgrade to it. The head of Power Computing, Stephen

“King” Kahng, organized pro-cloning protests when Jobs appeared at Boston Macworld that

August and publicly warned that the Macintosh OS would die if Jobs declined to keep licensing it

out. “If the platform goes closed, it is over,” Kahng said. “Total destruction. Closed is the kiss of

death.”

Jobs disagreed. He telephoned Ed Woolard to say he was getting Apple out of the licensing

business. The board acquiesced, and in September he reached a deal to pay Power Computing

$100 million to relinquish its license and give Apple access to its database of customers. He soon

terminated the licenses of the other cloners as well. “It was the dumbest thing in the world to let

companies making crappier hardware use our operating system and cut into our sales,” he later

said.

Product Line Review

One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to do is as important

as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

He went to work applying this principle as soon as he returned to Apple. One day he was

walking the halls and ran into a young Wharton School graduate who had been Amelio’s assistant

and who said he was wrapping up his work. “Well, good, because I need someone to do grunt

work,” Jobs told him. His new role was to take notes as Jobs met with the dozens of product teams

at Apple, asked them to explain what they were doing, and forced them to justify going ahead with

their products or projects.

He also enlisted a friend, Phil Schiller, who had worked at Apple but was then at the graphics

software company Macromedia. “Steve would summon the teams into the boardroom, which seats

twenty, and they would come with thirty people and try to show PowerPoints, which Steve didn’t

want to see,” Schiller recalled. One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process

was ban PowerPoints. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs

later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to

engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what

they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

The product review revealed how unfocused Apple had become. The company was churning

out multiple versions of each product because of bureaucratic momentum and to satisfy the whims

of retailers. “It was insanity,” Schiller recalled. “Tons of products, most of them crap, done by

deluded teams.” Apple had a dozen versions of the Macintosh, each with a different confusing

number, ranging from 1400 to 9600. “I had people explaining this to me for three weeks,” Jobs

said. “I couldn’t figure it out.” He finally began asking simple questions, like, “Which ones do I

tell my friends to buy?”

When he couldn’t get simple answers, he began slashing away at models and products. Soon he

had cut 70% of them. “You are bright people,” he told one group. “You shouldn’t be wasting your

time on such crappy products.” Many of the engineers were infuriated at his slash-and-burn

tactics, which resulted in massive layoffs. But Jobs later claimed that the good engineers,

including some whose projects were killed, were appreciative. He told one staff meeting in

September 1997, “I came out of the meeting with people who had just gotten their products

canceled and they were three feet off the ground with excitement because they finally understood

where in the heck we were going.”

After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted at one big product strategy

session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a

horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued.

Atop the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and

“Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. “The room

was in dumb silence,” Schiller recalled.

There was also a stunned silence when Jobs presented the plan to the September meeting of the

Apple board. “Gil had been urging us to approve more and more products every meeting,”

Woolard recalled. “He kept saying we need more products. Steve came in and said we needed

fewer. He drew a matrix with four quadrants and said that this was where we should focus.” At

first the board pushed back. It was a risk, Jobs was told. “I can make it work,” he replied. The

board never voted on the new strategy. Jobs was in charge, and he forged ahead.

The result was that the Apple engineers and managers suddenly became sharply focused on just

four areas. For the professional desktop quadrant, they would work on making the Power

Macintosh G3. For the professional portable, there would be the PowerBook G3. For the

consumer desktop, work would begin on what became the iMac. And for the consumer portable,

they would focus on what would become the iBook. The “i,” Jobs later explained, was to

emphasize that the devices would be seamlessly integrated with the Internet.

Apple’s sharper focus meant getting the company out of other businesses, such as printers and

servers. In 1997 Apple was selling StyleWriter color printers that were basically a version of the

Hewlett-Packard DeskJet. HP made most of its money by selling the ink cartridges. “I don’t

understand,” Jobs said at the product review meeting. “You’re going to ship a million and not

make money on these? This is nuts.” He left the room and called the head of HP. Let’s tear up our

arrangement, Jobs proposed, and we will get out of the printer business and just let you do it. Then

he came back to the boardroom and announced the decision. “Steve looked at the situation and

instantly knew we needed to get outside of the box,” Schiller recalled.

The most visible decision he made was to kill, once and for all, the Newton, the personal digital

assistant with the almost-good handwriting-recognition system. Jobs hated it because it was

Sculley’s pet project, because it didn’t work perfectly, and because he had an aversion to stylus

devices. He had tried to get Amelio to kill it early in 1997 and succeeded only in convincing him

to try to spin off the division. By late 1997, when Jobs did his product reviews, it was still around.

He later described his thinking:

If Apple had been in a less precarious situation, I would have drilled down myself to figure out how to

make it work. I didn’t trust the people running it. My gut was that there was some really good

technology, but it was fucked up by mismanagement. By shutting it down, I freed up some good

engineers who could work on new mobile devices. And eventually we got it right when we moved on to

iPhones and the iPad.

This ability to focus saved Apple. In his first year back, Jobs laid off more than three thousand

people, which salvaged the company’s balance sheet. For the fiscal year that ended when Jobs

became interim CEO in September 1997, Apple lost $1.04 billion. “We were less than ninety days

from being insolvent,” he recalled. At the January 1998 San Francisco Macworld, Jobs took the

stage where Amelio had bombed a year earlier. He sported a full beard and a leather jacket as he

touted the new product strategy. And for the first time he ended the presentation with a phrase that

he would make his signature coda: “Oh, and one more thing . . .” This time the “one more thing”

was “Think Profit.” When he said those words, the crowd erupted in applause. After two years of

staggering losses, Apple had enjoyed a profitable quarter, making $45 million. For the full fiscal

year of 1998, it would turn in a $309 million profit. Jobs was back, and so was Apple.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

The Studio of Jobs and Ive

With Jony Ive and the sunflower iMac, 2002

Jony Ive

When Jobs gathered his top management for a pep talk just after he became iCEO in September

1997, sitting in the audience was a sensitive and passionate thirty-year-old Brit who was head of

the company’s design team. Jonathan Ive, known to all as Jony, was planning to quit. He was sick

of the company’s focus on profit maximization rather than product design. Jobs’s talk led him to

reconsider. “I remember very clearly Steve announcing that our goal is not just to make money but

to make great products,” Ive recalled. “The decisions you make based on that philosophy are

fundamentally different from the ones we had been making at Apple.” Ive and Jobs would soon

forge a bond that would lead to the greatest industrial design collaboration of their era.

Ive grew up in Chingford, a town on the northeast edge of London. His father was a silversmith

who taught at the local college. “He’s a fantastic craftsman,” Ive recalled. “His Christmas gift to

me would be one day of his time in his college workshop, during the Christmas break when no

one else was there, helping me make whatever I dreamed up.” The only condition was that Jony

had to draw by hand what they planned to make. “I always understood the beauty of things made

by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I

really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.”

Ive enrolled in Newcastle Polytechnic and spent his spare time and summers working at a

design consultancy. One of his creations was a pen with a little ball on top that was fun to fiddle

with. It helped give the owner a playful emotional connection to the pen. For his thesis he

designed a microphone and earpiece—in purest white plastic—to communicate with hearingimpaired

kids. His flat was filled with foam models he had made to help him perfect the design.

He also designed an ATM machine and a curved phone, both of which won awards from the

Royal Society of Arts. Unlike some designers, he didn’t just make beautiful sketches; he also

focused on how the engineering and inner components would work. He had an epiphany in college

when he was able to design on a Macintosh. “I discovered the Mac and felt I had a connection

with the people who were making this product,” he recalled. “I suddenly understood what a

company was, or was supposed to be.”

After graduation Ive helped to build a design firm in London, Tangerine, which got a

consulting contract with Apple. In 1992 he moved to Cupertino to take a job in the Apple design

department. He became the head of the department in 1996, the year before Jobs returned, but

wasn’t happy. Amelio had little appreciation for design. “There wasn’t that feeling of putting care

into a product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made,” Ive said. “All they

wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the

outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit.”

When Jobs took over and gave his pep talk, Ive decided to stick around. But Jobs at first looked

around for a world-class designer from the outside. He talked to Richard Sapper, who designed the

IBM ThinkPad, and Giorgetto Giugiaro, who designed the Ferrari 250 and the Maserati Ghibli.

But then he took a tour of Apple’s design studio and bonded with the affable, eager, and very

earnest Ive. “We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Ive recalled. “We were on the

same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company.”

Ive reported, at least initially, to Jon Rubinstein, whom Jobs had brought in to head the

hardware division, but he developed a direct and unusually strong relationship with Jobs. They

began to have lunch together regularly, and Jobs would end his day by dropping by Ive’s design

studio for a chat. “Jony had a special status,” said Laurene Powell. “He would come by our house,

and our families became close. Steve is never intentionally wounding to him. Most people in

Steve’s life are replaceable. But not Jony.”

Jobs described to me his respect for Ive:

The difference that Jony has made, not only at Apple but in the world, is huge. He is a wickedly

intelligent person in all ways. He understands business concepts, marketing concepts. He picks stuff up

just like that, click. He understands what we do at our core better than anyone. If I had a spiritual partner

at Apple, it’s Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull others in and say,

“Hey, what do you think about this?” He gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details

about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He’s not just a designer.

That’s why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except

me. There’s no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out. That’s the way I set it up.

Like most designers, Ive enjoyed analyzing the philosophy and the step-by-step thinking that

went into a particular design. For

Jobs, the process was more intuitive. He would point to models and sketches he liked and dump

on the ones he didn’t. Ive would then take the cues and develop the concepts Jobs blessed.

Ive was a fan of the German industrial designer Dieter Rams, who worked for the electronics

firm Braun. Rams preached the gospel of “Less but better,” Weniger aber besser, and likewise

Jobs and Ive wrestled with each new design to see how much they could simplify it. Ever since

Apple’s first brochure proclaimed “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Jobs had aimed for

the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. “It takes a lot of hard

work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and

come up with elegant solutions.”

In Ive, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for true rather than surface simplicity. Sitting in his

design studio, Ive described his philosophy:

Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can

dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you.

Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging

through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to

have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex.

The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s

manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of

the parts that are not essential.

That was the fundamental principle Jobs and Ive shared. Design was not just about what a product

looked like on the surface. It had to reflect the product’s essence. “In most people’s vocabularies,

design means veneer,” Jobs told Fortune shortly after retaking the reins at Apple. “But to me,

nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a manmade

creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”

As a result, the process of designing a product at Apple was integrally

related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple’s Power

Macs. “We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential,” he said. “To

do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers,

and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need

that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?”

The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its manufacturing was

illustrated for Jobs and Ive when they were traveling in France and went into a kitchen supply

store. Ive picked up a knife he admired, but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same.

“We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade,” Ive recalled. They talked

about how the knife’s good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured. “We don’t

like to think of our knives as being glued together,” Ive said. “Steve and I care about things like

that, which ruin the purity and detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think

alike about how products should be made to look pure and seamless.”

At most other companies, engineering tends to drive design. The engineers set forth their

specifications and requirements, and the designers then come up with cases and shells that will

accommodate them. For Jobs, the process tended to work the other way. In the early days of

Apple, Jobs had approved the design of the case of the original Macintosh, and the engineers had

to make their boards and components fit.

After he was forced out, the process at Apple reverted to being engineer-driven. “Before Steve

came back, engineers would say ‘Here are the guts’—processor, hard drive—and then it would go

to the designers to put it in a box,” said Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller. “When you do it

that way, you come up with awful products.” But when Jobs returned and forged his bond with

Ive, the balance was again tilted toward the designers. “Steve kept impressing on us that the

design was integral to what would make us great,” said Schiller. “Design once again dictated the

engineering, not just vice versa.”

On occasion this could backfire, such as when Jobs and Ive insisted on using a solid piece of

brushed aluminum for the edge of the

iPhone 4 even when the engineers worried that it would compromise the antenna. But usually

the distinctiveness of its designs—for the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad—would set

Apple apart and lead to its triumphs in the years after Jobs returned.

Inside the Studio

The design studio where Jony Ive reigns, on the ground floor of Two Infinite Loop on the Apple

campus, is shielded by tinted windows and a heavy clad, locked door. Just inside is a glass-booth

reception desk where two assistants guard access. Even high-level Apple employees are not

allowed in without special permission. Most of my interviews with Jony Ive for this book were

held elsewhere, but one day in 2010 he arranged for me to spend an afternoon touring the studio

and talking about how he and Jobs collaborate there.

To the left of the entrance is a bullpen of desks with young designers; to the right is the

cavernous main room with six long steel tables for displaying and playing with works in progress.

Beyond the main room is a computer-aided design studio, filled with workstations, that leads to a

room with molding machines to turn what’s on the screens into foam models. Beyond that is a

robot-controlled spray-painting chamber to make the models look real. The look is sparse and

industrial, with metallic gray décor. Leaves from the trees outside cast moving patterns of light

and shadows on the tinted windows. Techno and jazz play in the background.

Almost every day when Jobs was healthy and in the office, he would have lunch with Ive and

then wander by the studio in the afternoon. As he entered, he could survey the tables and see the

products in the pipeline, sense how they fit into Apple’s strategy, and inspect with his fingertips

the evolving design of each. Usually it was just the two of them alone, while the other designers

glanced up from their work but kept a respectful distance. If Jobs had a specific issue, he might

call over the head of mechanical design or another of Ive’s deputies. If something excited him or

sparked some thoughts about corporate strategy, he might ask the chief operating officer Tim

Cook or the marketing head Phil Schiller to come over and join them. Ive described the usual

process:

This great room is the one place in the company where you can look around and see everything we have

in the works. When Steve comes in, he will sit at one of these tables. If we’re working on a new iPhone,

for example, he might grab a stool and start playing with different models and feeling them in his hands,

remarking on which ones he likes best. Then he will graze by the other tables, just him and me, to see

where all the other products are heading. He can get a sense of the sweep of the whole company, the

iPhone and iPad, the iMac and laptop and everything we’re considering. That helps him see where the

company is spending its energy and how things connect. And he can ask, “Does doing this make sense,

because over here is where we are growing a lot?” or questions like that. He gets to see things in

relationship to each other, which is pretty hard to do in a big company. Looking at the models on these

tables, he can see the future for the next three years.

Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play

with the models. He doesn’t like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He’s

right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it’s rubbish, even though based on the

CAD [computer-aided design] renderings it looked great.

He loves coming in here because it’s calm and gentle. It’s a paradise if you’re a visual person. There

are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions

fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don’t run into major

disagreements.

On this day Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for

the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted

for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret over something like this,

but Jobs got involved as well. Ever since he had a special power supply made for the Apple II,

Jobs has cared about not only the engineering but also the design of such parts. His name

is listed on the patent for the white power brick used by the MacBook as well as its magnetic

connector with its satisfying click. In fact he is listed as one of the inventors for 212 different

Apple patents in the United States as of the beginning of 2011.

Ive and Jobs have even obsessed over, and patented, the packaging for various Apple products.

U.S. patent D558572, for example, granted on January 1, 2008, is for the iPod Nano box, with

four drawings showing how the device is nestled in a cradle when the box is opened. Patent

D596485, issued on July 21, 2009, is for the iPhone packaging, with its sturdy lid and little glossy

plastic tray inside.

Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to “impute”—to understand that people do judge a

book by its cover—and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signaled

that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it’s an iPod Mini or a MacBook Pro, Apple

customers know the feeling of opening up the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in

an inviting fashion. “Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging,” said Ive. “I love the

process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel

special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”

Ive, who has the sensitive temperament of an artist, at times got upset with Jobs for taking too

much credit, a habit that has bothered other colleagues over the years. His personal feelings for

Jobs were so intense that at times he got easily bruised. “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,’” Ive said. “And later I

will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal

attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts

when he takes credit for one of my designs.” Ive also has bristled when outsiders portrayed Jobs as

the only ideas guy at Apple. “That makes us vulnerable as a company,” Ive said earnestly, his

voice soft. But then he paused to recognize the role Jobs in fact played. “In so many other

companies, ideas and great design get lost in the process,” he said. “The ideas that come from me

and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn’t been here to push

us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 649