Design Crazy

Good Looks, Hot Tempers, and True Genius at Apple

By Max Chafkin

Additional reporting by

Austin Carr, Skylar Bergl, and Mark Wilson

A FAST COMPANY / BYLINER ORIGINAL

Copyright © 2013 by Max Chafkin and Fast Company

All rights reserved

Cover image © Bernard Bisson/Sygma/Corbis

ISBN: 978-1-61452-086-3

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Table of Contents

Introduction

“A Bicycle for the Mind”

“Fuck It, Run the Spot”

“Here Lies the Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive”

“All the Work Sucks”

“Good Enough to Lick”

“The Top-Secret Stuff”

“He Wanted to Control Everything That Touched the Product”

“Hey, I’m Gonna Need About Ten Million Bucks”

“The First Boxes Were Like Origami”

“The Holy of Holies”

“We Called It the SkankPhone”

“The Most Personal Computer”

“It Started as This Green Felt Thing”

“Apple Branches, Grafted onto New Trees”

About the Author

About Fast Company

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Introduction

“This is our signature,” Apple’s gauzy television ads proclaim, referring to the familiar words that the company stamps on the undersides of its products: DESIGNED BY APPLE IN CALIFORNIA. The ads fall in the grand Apple tradition—beginning with the “1984” Super Bowl spot—of seeming to say a great deal while revealing little. Apple is one of the most intensely competitive, pathologically secretive organizations in history. If there is one thing that CEO Tim Cook doesn’t want people to know, it’s what is behind his company’s “signature.” As a result, most efforts to explain design at Apple end up reducing a complex thirty-seven-year history to bromides about simplicity, quality, and perfection—as if those were ambitions unique to Apple alone.

So the editors of Fast Company asked me and my co-writers—Austin Carr, Skylar Bergl, and Mark Wilson—to try to remedy that. It wasn’t easy: Precious few designers have left Sir Jonathan Ive’s industrial design group since he took over in 1996: Two quit, three died. (We talked to the two who quit, among dozens of other longtime Apple veterans.) What we found is that the greatest business story of the past two decades—how Apple used design to rise from near bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world, while bringing sophisticated computers to hundreds of millions of people—is deeply misunderstood.

Outsiders have tended to assume that because cofounder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs was a champion of products in which hardware and software work together seamlessly, Apple itself was a paragon of cross-collaboration. In fact, the opposite was often true. And though Jobs was without a doubt the single most important figure in the company’s history, the story of the Apple founder’s exile and restoration has obscured the fact that much of the critical design work that led to Apple’s resurgence started while Jobs was running Pixar and NeXT. Ive—of whom Jobs once said, “He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me”—joined the company in 1992, and he’d already taken over the company’s vaunted industrial design group when Jobs returned in 1997. That many people believe that Jobs plucked Ive out of obscurity probably says more about Jobs’s own capacity for mythmaking than it does about the company he built.

Ive’s power has continued to grow since Jobs’s death in October 2011. Last year, following the ouster of Jobs’s longtime software guru Scott Forstall, Ive expanded his domain to include software as well as industrial design. This past June, at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Cook unveiled Ive’s first software creation: a new, minimalistic version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 7. The applause was deafening, as usual. Technology and design blogs cooed, and mainstream media outlets felt compelled to linger on arcane discussions of user interface design, explaining how Apple is moving away from skeuomorphism (the use of realistic, three-dimensional icons) toward flat design (a more impressionistic, two-dimensional style).

Ive didn’t appear onstage, choosing instead to watch the proceedings with the company’s board of directors in the front row, directing a courtly gaze at his colleagues Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi as the marketer and software engineer, respectively, showed off his work. This might be surprising, but then, Ive prefers to appear publicly in prerecorded promotional videos, playing his part as Apple’s English gentleman-designer. That character is more than willing to expound beautifully on Apple’s heritage as a company concerned with making technology accessible to regular people, but in the few instances Ive has spoken publicly about his life’s work, he’s refused to divulge such basic information as the size of his industrial design team, or how Apple’s product development process actually works.

Historically, Ive’s shyness might have been a political move: he was an up-and-comer at a company ruled by a brilliant, dictatorial CEO with a penchant for picking fights with rivals and claiming their best ideas for himself. But whatever the intent, the effect of Ive’s celebrity has given his work an undeniable mystique. The iPhone was a revolutionary consumer product, but then, so was the Toyota Prius. No one calls it the Jesus Car.

Neither Ive, nor anyone else at Apple, was willing to speak on the record for this story, preferring to let the work speak for itself—and to preserve the company’s fastidiously cultivated mythology. As a result, this is a story different from any other you’ve ever read about Apple. It is an oral history of Apple’s design, a decoding of the signature as told by the people who helped create it.

1.

“A Bicycle for the Mind”

1980

TRIP HAWKINS marketing and product manager, Apple Lisa group (later founder of Electronic Arts)

One day, Steve [Jobs] comes in with a copy of Scientific American. Steve loved Scientific American. He shows us this article about the energy efficiency of animals. It says that, if you look at which animal is the most efficient, in terms of miles per kilocalorie, it’s the condor. And humans are way, way down the list—you know, with the rank-and-file animals. “But,” Steve says, “a human being on a bicycle is twice as efficient as the condor.” That was the kind of storytelling Steve could do to inspire people. That turned into a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal on the day the company went public.

DAVE MORIN, marketing manager, 2004–2006 (now CEO of Path, a mobile social-networking app)

Apple is rooted in the depth of its history. The metaphor—the computer as a “bicycle for the mind”—have you heard this? That was very much a part of the way we talked about computers even when I was at Apple.

Jobs’s inspiration—that computers could enhance human potential the same way that bicycles transformed our energy efficiency—seems obvious in retrospect, but the idea was radical at the time, even within Apple itself. In the early 1980s, the company was suffering through acute growing pains, beset by warring factions and destabilized by Jobs’s battle with the board of directors, who’d stripped him of his operating role. Worse, the products were underwhelming. The Apple III, initially conceived as a successor to the wildly successful Apple II, was hamstrung by technical problems, and the Lisa, which featured a groundbreaking graphical user interface based on work done at the research lab Xerox PARC, was prohibitively expensive, at roughly $10,000. Within all that chaos, Jobs took over a small skunkworks project to develop a low-cost computer for the masses. He code-named the project “Bicycle.”

ANDY HERTZFELD, lead software developer, Macintosh group (later at Google, where he helped design Google+)

When I told Steve I needed a day or two to finish up what I was doing before moving over to the Mac building, he unplugged the Apple II I was working on and carried it away with him. I had no choice but to follow. The Macintosh had been an under-resourced research project, a prototype with no clear path to shipping. Steve saw it had a chance to be the future of the personal computer industry.

SUSAN KARE, interface designer, Macintosh group (now runs her own design studio)

Andy and I had gone to high school together, and he showed me a little bit of what he was working on. He said he needed some images. I didn’t have any computer background. I’d been working in a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and doing sculpture in my home studio. But Andy said that if I got some graph paper, it would correlate to pixels. That sounded fun, so I went to a stationery store on University Avenue in Palo Alto and bought the tiniest ruled graph paper I could find.

TRIP HAWKINS

We had already identified the fact you could do bitmap graphics, meaning that you could draw individual pixels on the screen. Xerox had the Alto, which had a mouse and some software pop-up menus and paradigms like copy/paste and delete. But they’d never commercialized it.

JAMES FERRIS, director of creative services (now creative director, Esse Group)

I went with Steve to Xerox PARC. He’d been there previously, but he wanted me to see something he thought was totally cool: the mouse and the GUI [graphical user interface, a screen with icons and graphics rather than simply lines of code]. He said, “This is the way Apple has to be.” For a while it was all we talked about, but it was still a bit of a shocker when I got to see what they were working on in the pirates’ lair.

The “pirates’ lair” was Apple’s Bandley 3 building, where the Macintosh division was housed. The name came from a 1983 retreat where Jobs told his team, “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” Kare painted a skull and crossbones on a black flag with a rainbow-hued Apple logo as the eye patch, and a group of Mac developers hung it outside. The pirate flag came to symbolize the Macintosh’s radical ambitions to democratize computing—and the fact that the creators of the new computer had become a guerrilla force within an increasingly large and conservative company.

JERRY MANOCK, lead hardware designer, Macintosh group (joined Apple, initially as a consultant, in 1977, when the company had just five employees; now the owner of his own design studio)

The original concept for the Mac was portability. The keyboard would fold up over the screen to protect it while it was being carried around. But Steve decided that the concept would stress minimum space on a desk. That’s why we switched to a vertical orientation.

TRIP HAWKINS

There was a debate [on the Lisa] team about the mouse. Was it going to have a mouse, and how many buttons should it have? Steve and I wanted one button, because if there’s one button, you never have to think about it. One of the former Xerox guys argued for six buttons. He said, “Look, bartenders have six buttons on those drink dispensers, and they can handle it.” But that was a failure to understand what Steve was trying to do with user experience.

STEVE HAYDEN, copywriter on the Apple account for Chiat\Day (later vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather)

One of the first ads I did for Apple was “100 things you could do with a personal computer.” It was stories about how people had used personal computers to rock their baby to sleep or to control fire alarms—all this imaginative stuff. That was Steve [Jobs’s] idea to stimulate people’s thinking. The competitors, like Commodore and Kaypro, were all doing speeds and feeds, whereas Steve always wanted things like “What is the significance in the world? How might this change things?”

JERRY MANOCK

I can picture Steve running into the Macintosh design group and saying really excitedly, “We’ve got this fantastic concept.” His idea was that a nontechnical secretary should be able to go into a room alone with a Mac in a box and a letter opener and be doing useful work in one hour.

SUSAN KARE

There was an overarching idea of a computer your mom could use. So the typefaces couldn’t look like those weird monospaced computer fonts. I looked at Helvetica and Times New Roman and the kinds of type you’d see in magazines, anything that might look familiar to people. The goal, always, was real-world references. I was from suburban Philadelphia, so I named the fonts after stops on the Paoli Local—so Rosemont, Paoli, Ardmore, Overbrook. Steve thought city names were fine, but he asked why would we pick these little cities that nobody had heard of? So we renamed them Venice, Chicago, and New York.

TOM SUITER, director of creative services

Even back then we were doing things with packaging that look like the Apple packaging today. The philosophy was never stated, but it was this: Get rid of all the junk you didn’t need. What should remain is the Apple brand identity, some beautiful typography, and a great shot of a product. For the Mac we did a Picasso-like logo done by an artist in San Francisco named John Casado. We printed it on uncoated paper stock. It was just beautiful.

JERRY MANOCK

When you cut the tape and opened the main box, there was a little two-and-a-half-inch-thick box that said “Open me first.” It had a power cord, some very simple graphics, and a two-page handout that basically said Turn it on. And when you put it on, MacWrite and MacDraw were already loaded into the software.

SUSAN KARE

I designed the boot image—a happy Mac—because we wanted the computer to be friendly. That was a word we tossed around a lot. The icon was inspired by those yellow smiley-face buttons, of course, and by the kind of things I used to draw when I was fourteen years old. We did the happy Mac, and then we did the unhappy Mac, which was never supposed to be seen. You know, like the bomb.

JERRY MANOCK

We’d been talking about what the texture on the outside of the product was going to be, and [Mac industrial designer] Terry Oyama and I showed Steve a bunch of options—some heavy, some light, some wood-grain. There was lettering on the sample plaques, and we suggested putting signatures on the inside of the case. He thought it was a great idea and came up with the phrase “true artists ship,” which meant that he considered the team artists, but that we had to get our creation out the door.

SUSAN KARE

It sounds a little insufferable now, but my business card said “Macintosh Artist.”

JERRY MANOCK

About a year before the Mac came out, in February of 1983, I did a drawing of the inside of the back case on cardboard, and everybody signed their name with a Sharpie. People who were out sick that day were really upset that they didn’t get to sign it.

SUSAN KARE

The Mac team, at its largest, was probably a hundred people. Steve would walk around the building at the end of the day, maybe around dinner, and see what was new. Steve would say we’re really gonna remember those days as the best days of our lives.

2.

“Fuck It, Run the Spot”

1984

As the Macintosh launch date approached, Jobs turned his attention to getting the word out. The effort was led by Steve Hayden and Lee Clow of Chiat\Day.

STEVE HAYDEN

Steve said, “We want to stop the world in its tracks. I want everybody to know the Macintosh is coming.” We were thinking, “Jesus Christ, how do you stop the world in its tracks?” One of our copywriters in San Francisco had done a wonderful headline for either the Apple II or Apple III that was “Why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984,’” and we said, “Let’s do something with that.” We were seeing things as simple as the copy machine having an impact in the Soviet Union, and we realized the computer could be a powerful tool for democratizing everything.

TOM SUITER

It was classic Steve Jobs: Go big.

STEVE HAYDEN

The original concept was to be funny, not scary—a satire of what people thought the future would be. And [director] Ridley Scott said, “No it’ll be taken much more seriously if it were this Metropolis view of the future.” Lee Clow’s idea was for a woman to run out with a baseball bat and smash the screen. But Ridley said, “If this is gonna bring down the Soviet Union, it should be a hammer.”

ANDY HERTZFELD

I saw a rough cut as it was being worked on. Most of the Mac team loved it, but the board of directors didn’t even want to show it.

STEVE HAYDEN

We’d had two minutes during the Super Bowl, and we were given the order to sell off the time. We sold off the two thirties, but not the sixty. And at that point Steve manned up and said, “Fuck it, run the spot.”

Despite objections from the board of directors, the Super Bowl ad, co-written by Hayden and Clow and directed by the Blade Runner auteur, aired shortly after halftime of the otherwise dreary Raiders–Redskins matchup.

The following day, Jobs, wearing a double-breasted blazer and a bow tie, took the stage at the Apple shareholders’ meeting. “I’d like to show you Macintosh in person,” he said. “All of the images you’re about to see … will be generated from what’s in that bag.” He pulled the squat beige computer Manock had designed out of a duffel bag. As the Chariots of Fire score played, the new computer displayed the word MACINTOSH, followed by INSANELY GREAT.

JERRY MANOCK

I was in the second or third row [of the shareholders’ meeting] cheering, with tears streaming down my face.

GUY KAWASAKI, Macintosh evangelist (now an author and adviser to Google’s Motorola Mobility division)

Seeing the Mac for the first time was an earth-shattering experience. You have to remember that the state of the art back then was an Apple II. No mouse, no graphics. If you were lucky, you had a 24-by-80 screen.

The entire package was great. It had a beautiful white box. It was self-contained: it wasn’t like you had to buy one big thing and put another big thing on top of it. It was typical Steve-ism.

TRIP HAWKINS

I went to a restaurant a few months after the Mac came out, and the menu had obviously been made on a Mac. I was looking at the fonts and the graphics, and it was all the work we’d done. Yes, it was really shitty impact printing on a dot-matrix printer, but there it was.

JASON WILSON, user interface designer at Apple during the 2000s (now lead product designer, Pinterest)

My uncle had the first Macintosh. We spent a month at his house one summer. Most kids see friends in the summer; I was playing on MacPaint. I would draw airline tails, especially Pan Am tails. The software was so easy. I mean, a kid—I was seven years old—could sit down and use it and figure it out by himself.

STEVE HAYDEN

The original goal was a computer for the rest of us, but the pricing didn’t work out: it had to come out at $2,500, so it had to be positioned for business. But there was no business-quality printer, there was no storage. MacWrite was the original word processor, but if you wrote ten pages, you lost everything you’d written.

GUY KAWASAKI

There was some irrational exuberance. We just thought it was so obvious that Mac was so much better. We thought, How could you not want one? But if you worked for a Fortune 500 company and they said “Use MS-DOS,” are you going to quit? And initially there was no software—no Lotus 1-2-3 [spreadsheet]—so even if you wanted to use the Mac, there was nothing you could do with it.

The Macintosh team tried to remedy some of these problems. They added more memory in subsequent versions and began to develop a software suite aimed at business users, who, despite the Mac team’s desire to build a computer for the rest of us, made up the vast majority of the personal computer market.

STEVE HAYDEN

Jobs had been saying, “If Mac Office doesn’t come out in a hundred days, Apple computer is finished as a company.” The board in those days was very conservative and full of heavy-duty business guys. And Steve was saying things like “I don’t care if I go down as long as I go down in flames.”

TRIP HAWKINS

Steve was pretty uncivilized back then.

TOM SUITER

When Steve was building the Mac factory in Fremont [California], we had to pick colors for the robotic equipment. There was a guy on my team who chose the Pantone colors for the robots, which were supposed to be gray. When it was time to look at the equipment, Steve went absolutely crazy. He flipped out and got in his car and drove like a hundred miles an hour back to Cupertino. I was in the backseat thinking, I’m going to die because we picked the wrong shade of gray. After we got back, he called me and said, “I want you to fire that guy.” He was an amazing guy with a family and kids. I held Steve off and the guy stayed on, but it was crazy. All of that over a freaking Pantone color.

For the 1985 Super Bowl, Hayden wrote another ad, this one promoting Macintosh Office, a forthcoming product suite that included a new laser printer and networking capabilities designed to appeal to the corporate users who were buying IBM PCs. Titled “Lemmings,” the ad depicts a line of men in suits—understood to be IBM buyers—marching off a cliff, victims of “business as usual.”

STEVE HAYDEN

I was in a meeting with [Apple CEO John] Sculley and Jobs and I said, “Macintosh Office isn’t ready for prime time. There’s no server. There’s no LaserWriter. AppleTalk is excruciatingly slow. I don’t think we should run this ad.” Lee Clow got so angry with me, and I got thrown off the Macintosh account.

The reaction to that ad was universally negative, and then, because of the controversy, customers showed up at Apple dealers asking for Macintosh Office. The dealers said, “We don’t have it.” That tends to piss people off. That was one of the biggest disasters in Apple history. It took them twenty years to recover.

Slow Mac sales, combined with Jobs’s increasingly eccentric behavior, would ultimately lead to Jobs’s ouster later that year.

HUGH DUBBERLY, Apple design manager during the late 1980s and early 1990s

The legacy of the Mac is a true dilemma. On one hand it was visionary. The Xerox Alto was a $25,000 or $30,000 device, hugely expensive. The Lisa was $10,000—so a third of the cost—but a commercial disaster. Macintosh took out another huge chunk of cost, but the Mac was still $2,500. In many ways it not only looked like a toy, it was a toy.

GUY KAWASAKI

In a perfect world, [Mac] would have had a faster chip, more RAM, a bigger hard disk. The first generation is never perfect. But it was eye-opening. We did demos of it for developers. We showed MacPaint, the finder, the desktop, how icons represented apps—everything that is taken for granted today was completely new. Nobody except computer scientists had seen a mouse before.

DAVE MORIN

When I was a kid—I’m not sure how old I was, maybe four or five years old—my grandfather bought the Macintosh Plus. As far back as my memory goes, I was in love with the Mac: the mouse, the interface, the fonts—the fonts were beautiful—the fact that if you put something in the trash, the can got bigger, and the sound when you emptied it. And the sad Mac face when the computer crashed. It seemed human, like it had a soul. I still have that computer.

3.

“Here Lies the Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive”

1992

Although the years of Steve Jobs’s exile are commonly viewed as an unrelentingly bleak period for Apple, the company enjoyed some success. Revenue grew, and with Hartmut Esslinger’s Frog Design (now Frog) in charge of the company’s design, Apple created a number of memorable computers before Esslinger decamped for NeXT, Jobs’s new company, in the late 1980s.

Eventually, a revolving door of CEOs—John Sculley, followed by the colorless Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio—and an uninspired product line that included the sixteen-pound Mac “portable,” caused the company to fall behind the likes of IBM and Dell. By 1996, Apple would be losing nearly $1 billion a year.

Obituaries were written. “Pray,” counseled Wired, recommending that Apple get out of the hardware business altogether. BusinessWeek declared “the fall of an American Icon.”

The industrial design team, against all odds, remained a bright spot. During those dark years, Apple launched a promising line of laptops—the PowerBook—and a pioneering computer for kids with a curious bulbous shape and an unusual use of translucent plastics. Perhaps most important, the era marked the arrival of a young English industrial designer named Jonathan Ive.

ROBERT BRUNNER, founder of Apple’s industrial design group (now founder of the design company Ammunition)

I sometimes joke that when I die, my tombstone will say “Here lies the guy who hired Jonathan Ive.” Jonathan had shown up at my old firm, Lunar, on a bursary scholarship. He was this quiet, polite English kid with these models. It wasn’t that they were just well-designed objects; he’d actually engineered them. I thought, Wow, this is someone I’d like to have on my team.

When I first got to Apple in 1989, I remember sitting there one day in my little gray Herman Miller cubicle and calling Jony and seeing if he was interested in coming to work at Apple. He said no. He’d just started his own firm, Tangerine, and he wanted to see it through. And then a couple of years later, in 1992, I hired Tangerine for this mobility project called Juggernaut. I have to admit part of the reason was because I wanted to see if I could get him interested in Apple. Tangerine did an amazing job and built some wonderful models.

When Jony came over to show them, it was a beautiful, sunny weekend in California. And when I asked again if he was interested, he said yes.

THOMAS MEYERHOFFER, senior industrial designer, Ive’s first hire (now runs his own design firm)

We wanted to put design forward as a competitive tool for Apple, but nobody really understood what design could do. There was a great urge from us in the design group to say, “Apple is different, Apple has always been different,” because at the time everything was beige. A beige plastic box.

ROBERT BRUNNER

We’d been using third-party manufacturers [for peripherals]—Canon for printers, Sony for displays—but there was this crown-jewels attitude about computers. And so the Mac Portable had been designed and built just like the desktops in Fremont. Everything had to be vertically assembled and snapped together—with no screws, because of the high labor cost. As a result, the Mac Portable was a laughingstock. So that’s why we brought Sony in to help build the PowerBook, and that relationship became a model for the future. That’s when we figured out how to work with Asia.

The PowerBook 100, designed by Brunner’s group and manufactured by Sony, featured a nine-inch black-and-white display and a trackball located just in front of the space bar. It would become the industry standard for laptop design and represented the beginning of Apple’s move to manufacture its computers overseas and at a lower cost.

Other attempts at innovation were less successful. An ambitious effort to build the first handheld computer, the Newton, seemed to sputter even before the first version was released.

BRIAN MAGGI, senior marketing manager (now a user-experience consultant)

I started with Apple in 1992 on the Newton, which was a quasi top-secret project. Then Sculley did a demo at CES [the Consumer Electronics Show] with the Newton tethered to a IIfx, which was this monster Mac the size of a suitcase. That was the way Apple would do things. Be kind of secret, but the minute they got something working, barely working, they showed it to everybody. Then for two years you’d listen to people ask about where it is.

ROBERT BRUNNER

We were a little company trying to take on the world, and so the result was we tried to participate everywhere we could. We had three lines of desktops, two lines of notebooks, three lines of printers. Displays. Keyboards. We couldn’t develop all of those to a level where they were great products. There was so much pressure to cut costs, and to cut time to market. It just became this huge battle.

JEFF ZWERNER, creative director, packaging (now a vice president at Evernote, a note-taking app)

It was a bad time, and what was remarkable is people were still audibly saying “What would Steve do?” We were still trying to use the old Apple tenets, but without the resources.

ROBERT BRUNNER

There was a guy on our team, Thomas Meyerhoffer, who was working on the eMate. We took the guts and the operating system of the Newton and put it in a clamshell. The idea was a very simplified computer for kids. That’s where the whole translucent, bulbous form of the iMac got started.

THOMAS MEYERHOFFER

At the time, every laptop you’d seen before was square and a big chunk of beige plastic. I wanted to make this product look light and fun, to give it some sort of sophistication. And because nobody knows what’s inside those beige boxes, I wanted to give the feeling of knowing that there’s something intelligent in there. So I used a translucent plastic, because that’s the only way you can do that. It gave the product more life. All this happened outside of the main company structure.

The Newton group was more like a startup at the time, and so for once I was able to execute some of the ideas we’d had in the design group. It wasn’t until Jobs came back that what we were trying to do got any traction outside of the Newton group.

DOUG SATZGER, industrial design creative lead (now vice president of industrial design at Intel)

We worked on a lot of cool concepts. But still, under [then CEO] Gil Amelio, design didn’t mean anything. You’d design a product, and marketing would say, “Well, we only gave you $15 to do this and it’s gonna cost us $20, so we’re gonna badge a Dell computer or Canon printer.” We were a marketing-driven company that wasn’t focused on design or even delivering a product. We became just another PC manufacturer.

I saw that if this was the way it was going to continue, then I should probably leave. Jony knew that, and we had discussions about how the whole team would move if that would happen.

Things were even worse in the software division. Microsoft Windows, once seen as an inferior copycat, had taken over the PC market. Rather than focus on building a next-generation operating system—and addressing the root of the company’s woes—Apple executives tried to improve market share (and keep software developers from defecting) by licensing the Mac OS to several hardware companies. One of the licensees, Power Computing CEO Stephen Kahng, promised to “squeeze a nickel out of every dime.” These lower-cost clone computers, marketed under brands like SuperMac, Genesis, and Power Computing, may have slightly helped Apple’s operating-system market share, but they further eroded the company’s brand. Mac sales declined.

CORDELL RATZLAFF, manager, Mac OS human interface group (now a user-experience director at Google)

There was a project code-named Copland, which was supposed to be Apple’s next-generation operating system. It was probably one of the worst-managed projects ever at Apple. The schedule just kept getting pushed out. After a couple of years of this, it was clear that it was never going to ship.

DON LINDSAY, design director, Mac OS user-experience group (now vice president of user experience at BlackBerry)

There was an effort to look outside to acquire an operating system that would serve as the foundation of a modern Apple OS. We looked at BeOS [founded by Jean-Louis Gassée, Jobs’s successor as head of the Macintosh division]. Steve’s company, NeXT, was another. And there were two more that I can’t even recall. It was shortly after that that Apple acquired NeXT—and, of course, along with that package comes Steve Jobs.

4.

“All the Work Sucks”

1997

Apple’s deal to acquire NeXT for $429 million closed in December 1996. Just eight months later, Jobs told a raucous crowd at Macworld in Boston that he had arranged for the departure of all but two members of the company’s board of directors. He would be named interim CEO the following month. During an early strategy meeting with senior executives, Jobs drew a square with four quadrants. On the top he wrote CONSUMER and PRO, and on the side he wrote DESKTOP and PORTABLE. The implication: all but four product lines would be killed immediately.

Jobs approached Ive’s industrial group differently. He felt a kinship with the then-thirty-year-old designer, who succeeded Brunner after he resigned in late 1995.

DOUG SATZGER

For Steve’s first interview with us, we cleaned up in the studio. We knew Steve was a loud talker but that he wanted his voice to be focused on whom he was talking to. So when he walked in the door, we turned up the music, so his conversations stayed between the person he was with. He spent a lot of time with us, and basically at the end of it he said, “You guys do a lot of really good work, but on the wrong products, so we’re canceling everything.”

There were three different desktop towers in the works, each one with a different language, and each one hitting a different market; he canceled all but one. We were working on three or four different laptops; he canceled all but one. We were working on a series of laser writers and ink-jets that covered a whole price range; he canceled every single one of them. We were working on digital cameras; he canceled them.

But I think his first impression was good.

JEFF ZWERNER

You didn’t present to Steve. You’d just hope you could get two statements in. You had to create visual stimuli for him to discover and interact with whatever you were working on. He would then either chuck it across the room, which was a no, or he’d say “Maybe” or “This is nice,” and put it in a little stack. That interaction became your brief. I always felt that Steve had a number in his head from 1 to 100, and you, in three or four meetings, had to pick that number … without talking.

TOM SUITER, creative director of CKS Group, an ad agency he cofounded after leaving Apple that had done work for Pixar and NeXT (now founder of The Bureau, a brand consultancy)

When Steve came back, he copied me on an e-mail. He didn’t send me the e-mail. He sent it to the guy who was running marketing at the time, and it said, “As you know, I think all the work you guys are doing in your department sucks.”

I told my partners, “Oh my God, I think we just got the Apple business.”

KEN SEGALL, creative director, Chiat\Day (now a writer and consultant)

Steve said, “We’re working on some great new stuff that you’ll see some months from now. But for the time being, we want to create a brand campaign and let the world know that Apple is back.” It was half for the employees and half for the world. Steve said—and he mentioned Jony Ive—that there were a lot of good people who stayed at Apple over the years hoping that someone would rekindle the magic. He wanted everyone to know that the company had a vision, a direction. One day, our art director, Craig Tanimoto, put the words THINK DIFFERENT on the wall and did this cool thing of attaching them to portraits of people.

Jobs asked Suiter to help him run a bake-off for a relaunch ad campaign between Chiat\Day—which ran Apple’s advertising in the 1980s—and Arnold Worldwide, the agency behind Volkswagen’s celebrated “Drivers Wanted” campaign.

TOM SUITER

Arnold had given a really, really good performance, and then Steve and I walked down the hall and on the door was this skull and crossbones taped on there. It was Chiat\Day. Lee Clow [the agency’s chief creative officer] gave this amazing performance about just how screwed up Apple was and how people felt ashamed that they were Mac people, and that they shouldn’t be. Then he just started showing pictures of people who did things different. Steve had tears in his eyes. There was no discussion about should it be “Think differently,” because Steve loved it. It was like the old band members were coming back together.

THOMAS MEYERHOFFER

It was like night and day. Suddenly we could push our ideas all the way through the chain of command. Steve reconfigured the powers in the company. He was a leader who in many ways thought and behaved like a designer.

KEN SEGALL

We used to sit at a table every other week with Steve going through pictures of people for Think Different. Steve would be like Yes. Yes. No. Yes. There’s video on YouTube of Steve presenting the ad for the first time. He’s wearing shorts and he looks really tired. Well, we were up till three o’clock in the morning getting his approval on a voice-over. We sent a bunch of voice-overs to Steve, with the one with his voice being the recommendation.

He called me and said, “I was listening with my wife, and there’s only one voice worth listening to: Richard Dreyfuss. All the others are horrible.”

“The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect … and we need to bring it back,” Jobs began in the presentation. “What we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done.” He then rolled the now iconic ad: “Here’s to the crazy ones,” began the copy that Segall co-wrote, voiced by Dreyfuss. The version voiced by Jobs would be released after his death.

5.

“Good Enough to Lick”

1998

As Jobs spearheaded the Think Different campaign to buy the company time to develop new products, Ive’s industrial design team was working on a simpler, more beautiful desktop computer based on Meyerhoffer’s old eMate.

DOUG SATZGER

Steve told us he wanted an Internet computer. His daughter was going to college, and he wanted to develop a computer that he felt was good enough for her to take to school. He had this idea for a product that didn’t need a hard drive.

JON RUBINSTEIN, vice president of hardware engineering, Ive’s boss until 2004 (later CEO of Palm)

The network computer just didn’t work. There wasn’t enough bandwidth—you needed a local hard drive. The original design looked like a shrunk-down version of what became the iMac. It had a tunnel underneath where you could put the keyboard, because there was almost nothing inside it. Our bestselling platform at the time was the G3 Desktop, so we leveraged that design to build the iMac.

DOUG SATZGER

When Steve saw the first iMac that was built from the engineering drawings, he looked at the keyboard. If you remember, the iMac had little pinstripes on the back surface of the keyboard. Steve noticed that the pinstripes were off by probably a quarter of a millimeter in spacing. And he didn’t say, “I notice that these are off.” He said, “Why did you change that?” And we were all just like, Are you kidding? We realized very quickly that his attention to detail was ridiculous. But, you know, it was great.

KEN SEGALL

When we first saw the iMac prototype, it was shocking. Somebody lifted a cloth, and you could see the guts of the computer. It looked like a cartoon version of the future. Steve had been talking about betting the company on this, and we were thinking, Oh, God, I hope he knows what he’s doing.

TIM KOBE, cofounder of Eight Inc., an architecture firm that worked on display designs at Macworld keynotes (now works on the design of the Apple Stores)

I remember when we were briefed on the iMacs, Steve said, “All it takes is for the word color to get out and we’re screwed.” He was really sensitive to the fact that that core idea—that it had color and a personality—was a shift in thinking. It was the first time the computer moved away from being an appliance to being a consumer product. It was a historical shift in the way people perceived computing.

KEN SEGALL

When we started doing photography, we realized how cool it was. With the iMac, it wasn’t so much about functionality—because it was really just the same Mac—but it looked so unbelievably different. Steve wanted people to know it was a new Apple.

Jobs unveiled the so-called Bondi Blue iMac—named for a beach in Sydney, Australia—at a special event in May 1998. “It looks like it’s from another planet,” Jobs said. “A planet with better designers.”

JON RUBINSTEIN

The iMac was kind of perfect. Occasionally you get a product that just kind of works right.

TRIP HAWKINS

I was like “Man, he managed to make a monitor look sexy.” No one had done that ever.

DOUG SATZGER

We delivered the Bondi Blue iMac, and as soon as Steve got offstage after the announcement, he said, “I love the iMac, but we just delivered it in the wrong color.”

So a contractor and I had the responsibility of presenting new color options to Steve. He walked into the Valley Green conference room, and we had all these images with different colors, transparencies, textures, glosses, but none of them were actual iMacs. He turned to us and he said, “You guys suck, get the fuck out of the room.” We left, and then he asked for me to be brought back in and he looked at me and he said, “When can I see colors?” So we worked for the next three days and we defined fifteen colors and put them into three different families and built them in the actual iMacs. Steve just fell in love with the bright colors.

In an interview with Fast Company in 1999, Ive explained the use of colors as a way to make the iMac “more egalitarian, more accessible, and more open.” Instead of going into a computer store and making a decision based on the speed of a computer’s processor and the size of its hard drive, customers were simply asked which color they wanted. To make the point, Segall and his Chiat\Day colleagues created print ads where the five new iMac varieties were arrayed on the page like lollipops. “Collect all five,” one ad said. Another promised, “No artificial colors.”

JEFF ZWERNER

There was an ad that said YUM, in big Apple Garamond [type] under a picture of these gumdrop iMacs. It worked. It conjured this playful feeling. It was beautiful.

CHRIS CUNNINGHAM, design director of Acco Brands, maker of Swingline staplers

That’s when we developed our candy-colored staplers. They had that same kind of Apple feel, like the iMac.

MICHAEL BOEHM, designer of the George Foreman Grill, which released an iMac-like candy-colored version

The iMac was certainly a departure. You looked at computers and consumer electronics, they were all pretty serious. And the iMac managed to add an element of fun to it. That was something I’d been trying to do for a long time.

6.

“The Top-Secret Stuff”

1999

Apple had always been prone to secrecy, but with the company’s market share in the low single digits, Jobs began to emphasize that if the company were going to survive threats from Microsoft, it would need to make sure that news of forthcoming products—such as the new Mac operating system and a minimalist white iBook laptop—not leak to the press or competitors ahead of schedule.

CORDELL RATZLAFF

As we were designing Mac OS X, Steve really put clamps down on secrecy. Before he came back, you’d hear something in the hall, and the next day it would be in the San Jose Mercury News.

BRIAN MAGGI

It was as if they picked product managers because they didn’t have charisma—because those guys wouldn’t talk.

CORDELL RATZLAFF

At some point, Steve said, “You can’t show what you’re doing to Mac OS X to anybody, even inside Apple, unless I tell you you can.”

BRIAN MAGGI

The top-secret stuff was something we had to get used to with Jobs. We used to joke that it was FOS—friends of Steve. They were the group of guys from NeXT that just came out of nowhere and were running the show. They didn’t tell anybody anything they were doing. My job in developer relations was getting third parties to make things for our products. One of the key ones was that we needed a floppy drive for the iMac. We had to get them to build it without telling them anything about it. We’d have the raw [iMac] CPU pieces put in a squared-off metal box, and we’d tell people that was what the new product was going to be.

ANDY GRIGNON, software engineer (now founder of Quake Labs)

Apple is secretive, but it’s also notorious for its rumor mill. In the 1990s, [employees] had a group-chat app called Rumor Monger, which was an anonymous instant message system that IT couldn’t track. It was a way for Apple employees to talk about new hardware and specs and whatever else. But then it very quickly devolved into “Who is banging whom?” And IT couldn’t stop it. They made these really awkward, archaic rules, like if you get caught using Rumor Monger, you get fired. Eventually it just petered out.

DON LINDSAY

Shortly before the unveiling of the iMac, Steve turned his attention to software, specifically what should be the user experience on the Mac OS? He hauled the entire software design team into a room, and in typical Steve style, he just declared everybody in the room to be an idiot.

CORDELL RATZLAFF

The first thing out of his mouth was “So you guys designed Mac OS, huh?” We said, “Yeah, we did that.” The next thing he said was “You’re a bunch of amateurs.” It went downhill from there. We spent the next few weeks working night and day building a prototype of what we wanted Mac OS X to be. We started by thinking about every other operating system out there at that time. You had Windows 95, NeXTSTEP, Mac OS 8. They were all these big, dark, gloomy, chunky interfaces that looked like they were carved out of granite. They had big buttons that were really rectangular, the color palette was all gray, you had lots of shades of gray. Our approach was “Let’s do the exact opposite: Where it’s dark and gloomy, let’s make it light and colorful. Where things are really rectangular, let’s make them more organic and rounded and softer.”

In that prototype, there were the initial ideas for the dock, the Mac as your digital hub, a completely new color scheme, and the animations.

The new user interface system was known as Aqua. Using a fixed dock on the bottom of the screen and relying heavily on visual metaphors and animation, it would evolve into the modern versions of both OS X and iOS while exerting an obvious influence on operating systems offered by Microsoft and Google, and pretty much every major software release since.

CORDELL RATZLAFF

One of our inspirations was the industrial design. We had just come out with the colored iMacs, so we tried to translate that into the software. In one of our meetings, Steve said, “I want this to look good enough to lick.” After that, one of the designers stuck a half-sucked Life Saver to his monitor. Another designer had a mood board with lots of photos of liquor advertisements so we could look at all the spectacular reflections off the liquor and ice in the glass. We were going for something that was really bright, really colorful, and much more realistic—like something you could see in the physical world. We wanted the window-close and maximize buttons to look like little jewels.

DON LINDSAY

This is an example of what Steve brought to the table. Steve was taking his knowledge from the hardware, which at the time was about translucency and glossiness and color, and he was bringing that to bear on the interface by saying, “Hey, are there properties of the hardware we can apply on the software?” He was thinking about the problem very holistically, saying, “Can we unify this experience?”

CORDELL RATZLAFF

When we showed Steve the prototype, we spent three hours together and came up with a hundred other ideas that we could do. He was always big on minimizing stuff: If you go pre–Mac OS X, there were like eight ways to manage your windows.

That night, we all went out. We were all so happy that we all still had jobs and that Steve liked it. We got a case of beer, and we were literally sitting on the floor outside our office drinking beer when Steve comes running back and he has [marketing chief] Phil Schiller with him. And he says, “Phil! You gotta see this stuff!” And so we had a couple of beers and went through the whole demo again with Phil. After that, there was no question we were going to change the user interface for Mac OS X.

DON LINDSAY

The challenge in delivering simplicity is, marketing wants to bring more functionality to bear, engineering wants to bring more options to bear—and all of that just adds to confusion and clutter. That’s when a task like printing a document becomes confounded with all these buttons and fields and tabs. If anything, this was one of Steve’s greatest strengths, because he was able to reinforce that principle again and again. He was in a position where he could turn to marketing and say “No.” Or turn to engineering and say “No.” He was a champion for design, a stick we could use against everyone else who was trying to see that their needs were met.

CORDELL RATZLAFF

We’d meet with Steve on Tuesday afternoons. He would come up with a lot of new ideas, and we would work on those for the next week. He would come up with the craziest ideas. At one point, Steve wanted to do all of our error messages as haikus. He would leave and we would all think, What is he smoking?

ANDY GRIGNON

A lot of companies start the design process by blocking things out with wireframes, like, the contact list goes here, and there’s a big wireframe with an X through it. Apple would start with these gorgeous mock-ups in Photoshop and Flash—or Shockwave at the time. There’s no code behind it, and you can only do one thing, but you get the feel.

DAVE MORIN

There was this period of time when I was in college when the Mac was gone from my life. That was when Steve was gone, and Apple started falling apart. But toward the end of college, I remember reading this article where Steve said the interface buttons were so beautiful you wanted to lick them. I had to see it. My uncle had just bought a white iBook, and I played with Mac OS X and I was like, This is amazing. I had become an entrepreneur by then, and at the time I had never considered working for anyone, ever. But I was falling deeply in love with Apple again—and the idea of going to work for Apple.

7.

“He Wanted to Control Everything That Touched the Product”

2000

Jobs’s revamp of Apple’s advertising had started when he recruited writers and creative directors who’d worked on Macintosh ad campaigns in the 1980s. But as Jobs sought to expand Apple’s retail presence beyond the CompUSA and specialty stores where most computers were sold at the time, he looked to then Gap CEO Mickey Drexler, who’d joined Apple’s board in 1999. One of the people Drexler had worked with at Gap was Dan Walker.

DAN WALKER, chief talent officer (now an HR consultant)

I was in my kitchen in Orange County, and my wife answers the phone, says, “Sure, he’s right here.” She hands the phone to me and says, “It’s Steve Jobs.”

He said, “Mickey Drexler is on our board of directors, and he told me that I should give you a call because I’m thinking about opening retail stores for the Apple brand. Would you come up and talk to me?”

And I said, “How soon do you want to do it?”

He said, “How fast can you get up here?”

TIM KOBE

One day I get a call from Andrea, Steve’s assistant, saying, “Hey, Steve wants a retail capabilities pitch. He’s gonna be at your office in thirty minutes.”

GEORGE BLANKENSHIP, then VP of real estate strategy for Gap

I was working at Gap, and had planned on retiring in a few months. My admin buzzed in and said, “Um, I’ve got Mickey Drexler and Steve Jobs on the line for you.”

I knew exactly what was going on: The guys in Gap’s Philadelphia real estate offices were yanking my chain. I thought it was a joke. About five minutes in, Mickey dropped off, and then here I am on the phone with Steve Jobs. It was incredible.

KEN SEGALL

I remember everything about my first call from Steve. I was in my living room, sitting by my fireplace, thinking, Steve Jobs is calling me—I have arrived. It was like talking to the President or something: you want to be careful about what you say, but you want to sound smart.

GEORGE BLANKENSHIP

We talked for twenty minutes and Steve said, “Can we get together?” I said, “Sure, why not?”

DAN WALKER

I got [to Apple headquarters, at 1 Infinite Loop, in Cupertino], went to the fourth floor of the Loop. The side opposite the elevators, that’s where Steve dwelled. That was Valhalla. Steve was in full-blown summer mode. He had on his camp shorts—not a nice pair at that—and a short-sleeved black T-shirt. His hair was a little too long, and he was barefoot. Steve never really used his office. There was crap piled all over the place. But he had a conference room next door, and it was simply called “Steve’s Room.” He and I met there, and that was the beginning of a long relationship.

He told me what he wanted to do with the retail business. He was creating a premium product that really needed to have a story told. He wanted to control everything that touched his product: the creation of the product, the manufacturing, how that product went to market, and how the customer interacted with the product.

Blankenship and Walker would join Apple; Tim Kobe, whose firm had been designing displays at Macworld, would be tapped to handle store design. Jobs recruited Target executive Ron Johnson, the man who championed the big-box retailer’s groundbreaking relationship with architect and designer Michael Graves, to run the division. The goal: to capitalize on 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.”

TIM 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 that was different from the kind of experience most people would have had with technology.

MIKE FISHER, director of visual merchandising (later chief creative officer at JCPenney)

There was nothing except the computer. So I think the first [display] window that I did was an OS X window. The other one was a digital platform window that had, like, CDs in it, because there was no other equipment. We had to somehow sell the sexiness of just a computer.

GEORGE BLANKENSHIP, vice president of real estate (now vice president of store design and development at Tesla Motors)

The idea was to get in front of as many people as possible to tell them what we did. If you go back to the year 2000, what most people knew about Apple was one thing: I don’t want one. 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.

DAN WALKER

I remember we had a visioning meeting, because 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. He felt very strongly that you should have no hassle if you have a question about anything or something doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to work, of dealing with real experts who can help you out and not make you feel stupid.

MICHAEL KRAMER, CFO of Apple Retail (later COO at JCPenney)

I remember 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 percent of the sales floor?”

“Yeah.”

“What are we going to charge?”

“Nothing.”

What? I’m the finance guy, and I’m thinking, You’re going to take away 15 to 20 percent of the store, staff it with more expensive people, and there’s going to be long training. Most CFOs would say, “Are you fucking crazy?” But I thought this could be the differentiator. This is what’s going to completely highlight our ability to interact with the customer better than anybody else out there. Even as a financial guy at Apple, you have to have a reverence for the creative side of the business. You can’t always just say no. You have to figure out ways to say yes.

MIKE FISHER

I remember Steve said to me, “We should have a red phone at the Genius Bar.”

I said, “What’s the red phone for?”

“If they stump the Genius.”

He was obsessed with this red phone. He would get stuck on these little details that were just crazy. The red phone did make it for a minute, but then it went away, because no one could ever stump the Genius.

TIM 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 five 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.

At one point Steve said, “I don’t want a cash register in the store. I don’t even want to use cash!” Ron was like “Come on.”

MIKE FISHER

We argued about that for a long time. The cash drawers are hidden in the tables. [Apple employees check out many customers today via an iPhone app, bypassing the registers entirely.] There were so many things Steve was persnickety about. He didn’t like Christmas. So the first year he was like, “I don’t want to do anything about Christmas.” He didn’t understand retail.

GEORGE BLANKENSHIP

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 museum-like. We ended up with the design of those early stores with those kidney-shape tables.

TIM 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.

DOUG SATZGER

The alignment of those big five-by-ten-foot tables that are thirty-six inches high—those came from the industrial design studio. If you think about how stark the Apple Stores are, that’s the ID studio.

TIM KOBE

The initial stores had wood floors, like a traditional apparel store, but we were getting so much traffic that the wood floors were wearing so fast. So in the next generation we evolved to the Pietra Serena stone floors. It was this cool gray color, a very even-textured stone.

MIKE FISHER

That stone was a nightmare, because it varies in coloration really subtly. The first stores looked like checkerboards because of how the stone was honed and cut. That was a whole drama. We had to rip floors out and get them more uniform.

GEORGE BLANKENSHIP

We had a team in Italy choosing the Pietra Serena slabs; we rejected something like 89 percent of what came out of the quarry. There was an attention to detail that most people will never notice. When you went to a supplier with a spec like ours, they’d say “This is gonna cost you an arm and a leg.” And we’d look at them and go, “Okay.”

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—most famously an all-glass cube on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Apple averages roughly $6,000 in sales per square foot—or more than twice that of any other major retailer.

TIM KOBE

I don’t know what the price of the Cube was exactly—maybe it was $25 million—but I remember Steve saying, “Cost isn’t the key thing.” When we started, the stock was $13 per share, and then it went up to $700. He was exactly right that the $25 million for that store didn’t matter. We were spending money on the things that made the brand come to life. 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.

8.

“Hey, I’m Gonna Need About Ten Million Bucks”

2001

TONY FADELL, senior VP, iPod division (now CEO of Nest Labs)

Design at Apple was product, product, product, until about 2001. That’s when 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. All of those things were created from 2001. That’s what created the Apple design philosophy as we know it today.

DAN WALKER

This was a time when 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. He said the center of this ecosystem was the computer, and there were spokes: pictures, work, music.

Jobs unveiled the Digital Hub strategy at Macworld in January 2001. “We don’t think the PC is dying at all,” Jobs began, announcing a simple MP3 application, iTunes, that would allow Mac users to burn custom playlists and listen to Internet radio stations.

JON 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.

DAN WALKER

I’d like to tell you the iPod was because of some deep skunkworks 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.

JON RUBINSTEIN

I would do regular visits a couple of times a year with all of our suppliers. We’d go through an in-depth review of 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 and I said, “Hey, I’m gonna need about ten million bucks.” That’s when I went looking for someone to manage the team—and that’s when I found Tony.

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. Flash didn’t have the capacity, and hard drives were just too big.

JON RUBINSTEIN

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.

DOUG SATZGER

It’s funny: 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.

TONY FADELL

I started in January 2001 as a contractor. I hired my guys and then a bunch more people. The idea was “1,000 songs in your pocket”—a long-battery-life device that syncs with the Mac.

JON RUBINSTEIN

It was a tiny team that did the first iPod—twenty people maybe. We had a hundred people in the power supply group, a hundred people in the display group. There were these huge groups to support the iPod teams.

TONY FADELL

In the fourth week of March, I showed the first design to Steve. It had a navigation control, and Phil Schiller said, “You should do a jog shuttle wheel.” And that was it. It all happened in a one-hour meeting with Steve. I made the device in foam models. We took it to Jony to skin it.

DOUG SATZGER

Tony brought in a stack of the foam models that showed a screen on the top and had a four-button cursor. And it was about the size of a cigarette package. So we looked at soft shapes; we looked at the metals; we looked at the double-shot plastic, which we ended up using. It couldn’t get too wild. The package size was really defined by its components. There wasn’t a lot of design work other than the materials and the processes that we used to actually make it.

TONY 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 minimalistic design for the iPod, defined by a navigation wheel, a metal panel, and translucent plastic with a white backing, would indeed come to define the Apple design language—but it did not come out of nowhere. In fact, Ive’s team had been toying with a similar aesthetic for years, beginning with the flawed but gorgeous G4 Cube, as well as the Titanium PowerBook G4, which was released shortly before the iPod.

JON RUBINSTEIN

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.

DON 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.

KEN SEGALL

Remember, after the colored iMacs, they did these patterns? There was one with speckles. It was hideous beyond belief.

DAN WALKER

It looked like a grungy cow with big spots.

KEN SEGALL

At the time it was cool.

DOUG 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. The products he had done in college, I think, were almost all white. He just felt white was the purest, and I think it really contributed to a new direction in the design world.

DON LINDSAY

We were like “Let’s go down the path of minimalism, let’s go for less color and focus more on patterns and textures, and different inspirations for design.”

KEN SEGALL

I think that the shift to white was about Jony’s being sensitive to whatever today’s version of good design is.

DOUG SATZGER

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—right to the point of the resin no longer having properties—and then we had to make sure we adjusted the blue levels, because too much blue makes it look like a washing machine. We probably did fifteen colors on the twelve-inch Aluminum PowerBook, but once we started understanding how to farm the aluminum and how to machine the aluminum—that was an amazing new world.

KEN SEGALL

We all grew up a bit and wanted simpler, subtler things. Apple matured and the world matured.

DAN WALKER

The code name for the iPod was “iPod.” Steve was talking to the group and said, “None of us are crazy about this. We need a name for this. Do you have any ideas?” People started throwing out ideas, like “iBot.” Nobody could come up with anything that was interesting or that got anybody’s juices flowing. As we got close to the point where they had to start making packaging and developing ad campaigns, there wasn’t another name.

JEFF ZWERNER

We were kind of like “Who needs another Walkman?” While the design was great, it wasn’t a hot category. 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.”

TONY FADELL

People think of the iPod as just the iPod. But what people call the iPod was really three things: iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes Store.

9.

“The First Boxes Were Like Origami”

2001

As Apple prepared to release the iPod, Jobs’s relentless attention to detail extended to the packaging. Apple’s commitment to creating an experience extended well beyond the integration of hardware, software, and retail—though most customers would never fully appreciate, or even notice, the effort.

JEFF ZWERNER

Most people don’t know this, but there are packaging engineers out there in the world. Most of them work for the cardboard box companies, but Apple had a whole packaging engineering group. At the time I was there, there were eight of them. All they did was think about box structure, how to make it smaller, how to hide the cables so you could have a moment with the product before you get to all the crap.

MICHAEL KRAMER

The first boxes were like origami. It was an experience to open the friggin’ box.

JEFF ZWERNER

We shot the iPod pure front, seven-eighths, three-quarters, so as you went around the box, it turned. We used a photographer who’d worked with these intricate armatures from Switzerland that held mirrors so you could throw directed lighting on the ports. We shot on large-format film, and then we’d repaint the products. There’s an entire room at Apple called the Lava Lounge, full of Photoshop people; all they do is retouch photography. We’d spend $100,000 on a single image.

MICHAEL KRAMER

I never understood why we put so much money in the box and the graphics on the box, because when you walk into an Apple Store or even a Best Buy, you don’t see the boxes.

JEFF ZWERNER

We would meet with Steve twice a week for maybe fifteen minutes. You’d come in Monday and have an all-nighter. There would be tons of interns building boxes. I mean, that’s all they did all night—chug, chug, chug. We were locked in a room that was separate from everyone else, with our own printers and key-card access. And on Tuesday morning, you’d put your little iPod cubes in ten-gallon black garbage bags and you’d present to Steve. And you might have another all-nighter on Wednesday night to prepare for the Thursday meeting.

I’d get back from the meeting and the designers would be like “How’d it go?”

And I’d be like “Great. We got a decision.”

And they’d be like “Really? Did he look at this one?”

“Yeah, he looked at it. And then he threw it.”

TONY FADELL

Most companies would never spend all this money on something you’re going to get rid of, but it’s all about the ceremony of purchasing, all about emotional momentum. And it builds at each step: first learning about the product, the purchasing the product, the unboxing, the installation, the usage. And you try to avoid emotional friction.

JEFF ZWERNER

Every six months or so, you’d be putting your stuff back into your garbage bags and Steve would poke his head in the door. He’d say, “Guys, this is fucking awesome. This is the best work we’ve ever done.”

The iPod was released in October 2001, to a mostly tepid response. Sales picked up in 2003, when Fadell’s group released a third-generation iPod, in April, that was thinner and featured an improved navigation wheel—and at the same time unveiled the iTunes Store.

TONY FADELL

The first argument I had with Steve was: Should the iPod connect with a PC? I said, “Steve, you’re selling a $399 iPod and you need a $2,000 Mac to use it. This is absolutely brain dead.” He said, “Well, I want to sell more Macs.”

DAVE MORIN, marketing manager

My job was to market the Mac to college students. At the time, we were really trying to get people to consider Apple over Dell. I think our market share on college campuses might have been 2 percent. We tried giving iPods to every kid at Duke. People don’t remember this, but the iPod was a crazy idea, and people weren’t buying it initially. We had to try to convince them that it was a good idea to have 1,000 songs in your pocket.

JON RUBINSTEIN

We argued with Steve a bunch [about putting iTunes on Windows], and he said no. Finally, Phil Schiller and I said, “We’re going to do it.” And Steve said, “Fuck you guys, do whatever you want. You’re responsible.” And he stormed out of the room.

In October 2003, iTunes was introduced for Windows. Apple would sell two million iPods that year. The following year, with the release of the iPod Mini, the figure would increase fivefold.

TONY FADELL

Once it was on the PC, that’s when it took off.

DAN WALKER

I still remember the colors of the iPod Mini: gold, some ugly-ass shade of green, blue, pink, and silver. I remember telling Jony Ive, “Nobody is going to buy the gold. Nobody’s going to buy that baby-shit green.” Sure enough, that was the case, but we just could not make enough silver, pink, and blue iPods. But Steve liked leaving the market a little bit hungry sometimes. Having people wait a bit was okay with him, and having them sell out really quickly was okay with him, too. The scarcity created a sense of preciousness.

10.

“The Holy of Holies”

2004

DOUG 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 of N3twork, an Internet startup)

Oh, no, I was never allowed in the secret room. Do you remember the show Get Smart? Remember the doors? Duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun—chish, chish, chish. It’s like: multiple key cards, everything frosted glass. The Holy of Holies.

BOB STEVENSON, chief creative officer, Ngmoco (now Lammerding’s cofounder at N3twork)

We went in there once, right after we’d founded Ngmoco. We were invited by the industrial design group. We did the double security thing. Do you know the end scene of 2010 [the 1984 sequel to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey], with the checkered floors and the guy going, “Something woooonderful”? It was like an entire set of humans from the future. It was like this super-quiet conference room, all white. We sat down and someone said in a really soft voice, “Tell us about games.” It was one of the weirdest experiences of my life.

JEREMY KUEMPEL intern, iPad product design

I made it to the door once. I had to deliver a file. Have you seen the scene in Star Wars where he goes to Jabba the Hutt’s palace and the eyeball sticks out and looks at him? It was like that.

DOUG SATZGER

The studio is about ten thousand to fifteen thousand 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 all covered with metal. There are these huge concrete pillars, and right in the middle is a glass section—like a giant fishbowl—and Jony had a three-wall room with a glass face. Jony had a desk that was custom-designed by Marc Newson, a chair, and two standing drawer shelves. He has a whole series of colored pencils lying 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.

JEFF ZWERNER

It’s all very deliberate. Jony manufactured every facet of that space to make Steve feel comfortable—from what they wore to the music that was playing. It was deliberately dressed down, and there was ambient techno music. There was an unwritten rule that if Steve came in, everyone had to slowly and deliberately move to the other side of the room so Steve didn’t feel uncomfortable.

BRIAN MAGGI

I was working with this big Chinese manufacturer on speakers for the iMac, and we had a meeting with Jony in VG6, the industrial design office. We get there, go through the airlock, and then I see Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison coming in. I know I’m probably not supposed to be there, and all I can picture is that Steve will walk in and say, “This is shit. Who are you? You’re fired.” We got up and went out the back door, walked through the grass, and took the long way around back to the Loop. The supplier had no idea what was going on.

DOUG SATZGER

There was an incredible creative energy in the team when we sat down together. The design team is very connected, always out together, traveling together as a team. One of my favorite memories was when the design team went out to dinner because Marc Newson was in town. Mark is one of Jony’s closest friends. We ordered several bottles of champagne and crème caramel for everybody, and Marc says, “We don’t need any utensils,” and he sucks the thing off the plate. And we went around the table sucking crème caramel off the bar at Le Colonial, which is this really nice French-Vietnamese restaurant. Jony got so wasted that night that he vomited all over the men’s bathroom. So we put him in [Apple industrial designer] Chris Stringer’s brand-new Audi TT and, as soon as he sat down, he just filled the dash.

JON RUBINSTEIN

Jony worked with Steve directly a lot, and Steve spent a lot of time in the studio, because it was his happy place. I mean, running the business wasn’t as much fun as hanging around with the design team.

DOUG SATZGER

Nobody writes about this, but Jony has a very political agenda when it comes to his positioning within the company. He would tell me, “Any time you meet with Steve, I gotta know.” He projects this soft-spoken English gentleman persona.

JON RUBINSTEIN

I think it’s a good image: “Shaken, not stirred.”

DOUG SATZGER

But if you challenge the VP of design—and you’re not a designer—there are going to be consequences.

JON RUBINSTEIN

Jony’s funny. He’s an artist, which made him very different from the engineers. We would have arguments about stuff, but the best products come when there’s creative tension.

NITIN GANATRA, director of engineering, iOS applications (now executive director at Jawbone)

Someone has to root the design in real engineering, and that fell on the engineering team.

JON RUBINSTEIN

My job was to manage all the different requirements from all the different teams and make it work.

NITIN GANATRA

Someone has to be the bad guy.

JON RUBINSTEIN

Steve didn’t like being the bad guy, so that was my role.

DOUG SATZGER

There are many people who are not at Apple because Jony has decided that person was in his way.

JON RUBINSTEIN

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. I think that “Antennagate” [a 2010 incident in which Ive’s team reportedly pushed through a gorgeous iPhone design that diminished the built-in antenna’s strength] was the same thing. You can’t violate the laws of physics. If you violate them, you end up with a product that’s not as good.

DOUG SATZGER

Steve was always the hub. 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 a lot that things that Steve took credit for were his ideas.

Around 2003, Rubinstein and Ive begin drawing up plans to develop a book-size tablet computer. Though this proto-iPad never went into production, it was the forerunner of all modern smartphones and tablets.

DOUG SATZGER

We were always trying to shove a PC into a tablet. Duncan Kerr [an industrial designer] sat people down for a couple of hours and just talked about multi-touch. 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? And 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 multi-touch.

JON RUBINSTEIN

It was the iPad, but it wasn’t the iPad at the time. ID mocked it up, and the human interface team set it up so that they could work on it.

DOUG SATZGER

A couple of weeks later, we were all just blown away by the prototype Duncan and his team built. It was a multi-touch layer on top of a screen laying on a table and attached to a tower. We were zooming in and out on Google Maps and rotating it.

JON RUBINSTEIN

It was pretty cool. But it wasn’t good enough. And so the technology wound up in the iPhone.

11.

“We Called It the SkankPhone”

2005

In 2004, with iPod sales skyrocketing, the division was split from the rest of Apple, with Rubinstein at the head. Ive, who had reported to Rubinstein, would now report directly to Jobs, concentrating power in the hands of his elite group of industrial designers. According to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, Ive threatened to leave Apple if Rubinstein did not. In 2006, Rubinstein announced his retirement (he unretired the following year to become CEO of Palm), leaving Tony Fadell in charge of the company’s iPod division as it was preparing to spin off a new, top-secret product.

ANDY GRIGNON

I worked with Scott Forstall [senior VP of the Mac OS team], and I was getting the urge to do something new. We’d started on what would become the Apple TV, but I was getting bored, and Tony said, “Dude, come over. We got stuff to do here [in the iPod division].” He had this idea for speakers he wanted to make, but that was just a ruse for the phone project.

NITIN GANATRA

Even in 2005, a phone was pretty clearly a dream project. The iPod was out and doing well—and it was clear that the phone market just needed something from Apple in the worst way. BlackBerry owned the market, and they were pretty shitty devices. And there was the Windows phone. I mean, “Windows phone” really says it all.

TONY 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.

MATT ROGERS, firmware engineer, iPod division (now Fadell’s cofounder at Nest Labs)

It did work. But there’s a reason nobody wants rotary phones anymore.

TONY FADELL

So then we were like, Okay, we’ll put the wheel on the screen.

MATT ROGERS

When we started working on this skunkworks 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, Maybe we’ll sell like a million units a year. That was the high bar.

ANDY GRIGNON

This was around when Forstall got wind of the project. He really wanted to do Mac OS on a phone. And Apple had just acquired a company called FingerWorks, which made multi-touch software. So the idea was born to do a full touchscreen-based platform for the phone.

MATT ROGERS

The iPhone was done in these vacuums. The software and hardware teams didn’t even talk. One of my tasks early on was to build a parallel software system for the iPhone so we could actually use it to make calls.

ANDY GRIGNON

We called it the SkankPhone.

NITIN GANATRA

Gosh, I haven’t heard the word SkankPhone in about two years. But SkankPhone, yes.

ANDY GRIGNON

Of Tony’s whole hardware team, which was maybe sixty people at full strength, only me and three other 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.” It was like “Really? Are you fucking kidding?”

I did show my wife some stuff once we got going, but in the early days, no. Phones didn’t leave Apple. When we had to go to AT&T Labs in Texas for testing, an Apple security guard had to be there for the duration.

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 was assigned to work on a multi-touch prototype with one engineer. I was walked in and given a secret badge. I wasn’t told I’d be working on a phone; they just said, “Create a user interface for multi-touch.”

I had a crude prototype and a sense of the dimensions. I rendered some finger-sized 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 round rectangular buttons. The device was just called a “lifestyle manager” at that time. At some point, a few months later, they said, “Thank you very much,” and my work was given to another team.

DOUG SATZGER

When we developed the first iPhone, we developed around a screen size and a home button. 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 in the UI, but most of the ID group didn’t know what the interaction was, how the gestures worked, how you did basic functions, and what’s this whole thing about visual voice mail—all the really amazing things that came out of that first product.

12.

“The Most Personal Computer”

2007

As Fadell’s team developed the iPhone hardware, Apple’s software team—led by Forstall and working largely walled off from the rest of the company—raced to get the first version of iOS, which would draw on Abigail Brody’s early work, ready in time for the launch, planned for Macworld in January of 2007.

ANDY GRIGNON

One of our biggest milestones was Steve wanted absolutely fluid animations, at least sixty frames per second on everything. It had to be liquidy smooth. And in the early days, the hardware couldn’t handle it.

NITIN GANATRA

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.

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. There’s a Simpsons episode where one of the characters picked up a Newton and wrote the words “Beat Up Martin,” and it was transcribed [by the handwriting recognition program] as “Eat Up Martha.” So in the hallways and while we were talking about the keyboard, you would always hear the words “Eat Up Martha,” which was basically a reference to the fact that we needed to nail the keyboard.

MATT ROGERS

Before we launched at Macworld, I was sitting in the bathroom using one of the devices, and I was like, You know, this is a revolution: I’m sitting in the bathroom and I’m checking e-mail. That was the moment when I realized this is a totally different kind of device.

LOREN BRICHTER, graphics engineer (now an independent app developer and a consultant to Facebook)

The UI was mind-blowing: 3-D graphics, sixty frames per second. Nothing like it existed. There wasn’t anything like it in the same universe.

ANDY GRIGNON

Every Apple event starts months in advance. They have a special room over in Building 3. It’s a mini version of the stage. All the computers and everything else is set up there. Stage guys tag and photograph everything, and then they re-create it on the big stage. Every cable is plugged in the way it was. For the early rehearsals, everyone is joking around. But then when it goes to the stage, it becomes really not fun and not games anymore. You’re there several hours a day.

NITIN GANATRA

Steve decided we were going to do a grand finale at the end of the demo—to play music and have it pause during a phone call and then go to Maps. It was just murder on us. We spent all of Christmas and New Year’s vacation working on this thing feverishly. We were definitely not ready to ship. The iPhone was not as complete as it appeared.

ANDY GRIGNON

Steve wore the same clothes presenting that he wore every day. Whatever he did, it was to make himself more comfortable, to remove all the variables. He had his own green room, his own bathroom. There were guards. And only one person would go and get him from the green room.

JON RUBINSTEIN

Steve would wig before keynotes. But it’s like the diva right before the opera. And Steve was brilliant at doing those presentations. And he’d spend months preparing. I mean, he was very passionate about this. He did a phenomenal job.

NITIN GANATRA

On the day of the [iPhone] announcement, it was me and a handful of the engineers in the VIP area. We’d stayed in hotels the night before, and I’d slept like shit. A good buddy of mine actually brought a flask. It felt like it was running in slow motion, like we were in a car crash. It was very tense. We could never completely relax, because the grand finale was coming up.

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Jobs said, opening his keynote at Macworld, comparing the launch of the mystery product to the introductions of the Macintosh and the iPod. “Today we’re introducing three revolutionary products … an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.” Jobs’s grand finale—music, maps, and all—worked more or less according to plan, but it would take Apple another six months before the iPhone was ready.

LOREN BRICHTER

We got tickets to go to Macworld. We were in the front reserve—not the very front, because we were just lowly engineers. None of us had any idea how it was gonna be presented. For most of the project, the iPhone was a massive green circuit board and thick cable running off it to a crappy touchscreen. The first time we got DVT devices—that’s like a first draft of the final hardware—we were like “How the hell did they fit it in this?”

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. It’s not exciting at all.” The compromises Apple took on design were legendary: you didn’t have copy/paste, you didn’t have multi-tasking, you didn’t have apps. Apple said, “We just want to have a cool phone.” They focused on making people love the product. And that’s the distinction at the end of the day. Everybody else was focusing on being smart. Apple focused on being loved.

MATT MACINNIS, marketing manager

The notion of a cell phone being an object of desire to the average consumer didn’t really exist before the iPhone.

GEORGE BLANKENSHIP

People lined up at stores all around the world to get something they had never seen [in person].

The iPhone would go on to become the most successful Apple product of all time. In 2012, sales of the iPhone alone accounted for a staggering $80 billion—more revenue than Microsoft’s entire product line.

ABIGAIL SARAH BRODY

I don’t know if you remember, but Steve showed the iPhone with the 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. A few days 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. That’s when I realized, yes, that’s my DNA. 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.

TRIP HAWKINS

The iPhone is not a touch device. It’s a swipe device: Steve used a capacitive touch display so you didn’t have to mash it. It’s almost like he was trying to fix what was wrong with the Newton.

Over the next few years, Ive’s team would crank out a succession of improved touchscreen devices. Meanwhile, a burgeoning app market would become the prime showcase for advancements in user interface design.

ANDY GRIGNON

We were getting the software stack together, and we realized, “Whoa, I could actually use this for a lot of shit. I could get directions on the road.” Remember, back in the days of Google Maps, you had to print them out.

Steve had been absolutely against opening the App Store early on, because he didn’t want the phone to crash. You have to be able to call 911 on the phone anytime, so we couldn’t trust our operating system to a bunch of crazy stupid developers without putting them in a huge sandbox first.

PHIL LIBIN, CEO of Evernote

We’d already released a mobile Web version so you could use Evernote on the iPhone, but it was clunky. And then sometime in 2008, I got a call saying, “This is confidential, but we may be launching an app store. Do you want to be a part of it?” I think they gave us two or three weeks’ notice.

LOREN BRICHTER

I started working on Tweetie [a Twitter client] in 2008, a few months after the App Store launched. The App Store was already huge, and I remember thinking to myself that I’d totally missed the boat.

Brichter, who had opened a one-man app development shop in his home in Philadelphia after leaving Apple, not only invented the “pull to refresh” gesture that would be copied by scores of apps, but also would go on to sell Tweetie to Twitter for several million dollars. His next app—a word game called Letterpress—was released last year to wide acclaim.

As Apple added features to the iPhone that had initially seemed to be missing—multi-tasking, copy and paste, 3G—Jobs instructed the company’s hardware and software teams to start working on a new low-cost gadget for the home. At the time, the computer industry had embraced the craze of ultra-cheap, scaled-down PCs called netbooks, but Jobs decided that scaling up the iPhone and iPod Touch, which was an iPhone without a cell phone antenna, was a more promising route.

NITIN GANATRA

I first heard about this tablet in late 2008. Steve was saying, “Just think of it as a big iPod Touch.” It was one of the few times that Steve was arguing that we didn’t have to do that much work.

RYAN STAAKE, iPhone and iPad interface designer

We had a meeting where they sat everybody in the human interface group down, and said, “Steve wants to do a tablet.” The gist was a larger-form-factor iPhone. This was shortly before it came out, because the amount of work necessary was nowhere close to the iPhone; we weren’t starting from scratch. We were given prototype devices, embedded in black plastic—a shroud to hide the look of the hardware from us. There was a black sheet we had to put over it if there was a meeting with people from other groups.

MATT MACINNIS, marketing manager

There’s no magic to the product planning cycle at Apple beyond a ruthless focus on a limited set of use cases. What each product does in the first iteration is going to be narrow, but those things are going to be airtight. For the iPad, there were ideas about having docks on two sides. Depending on where you put it in your house, it would behave differently. If you put it on its side by your bed, it would be an alarm clock. But if you put it upright in the kitchen, it’d be a recipe book. Those got cut back.

The iPad was widely ridiculed when Jobs showed it off in January 2010, still looking somewhat frail after a 2009 liver transplant. He used the new device while reclining onstage in a Le Corbusier chair, declaring, “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop, and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone.” Many commentators pointed out derisively that it was essentially a giant iPhone, though it turned out that was enough. Apple sold almost fifteen million iPads in 2010.

KEN SEGALL

Back in the Apple II days, they had a tagline, “the most personal computer.” But this, the iPad, it is really the most personal computer ever made. I mean, you touch it. It responds to your voice.

13.

“It Started as This Green Felt Thing”

2010

To outsiders—and to Wall Street—Apple had never been stronger, but in hindsight, some would point to the years following the release of the iPad as the time when design at Apple began to drift. There were no major new product releases, and even minor updates seemed to give the company trouble. The launch of the iPhone 4 was marred by reports of reception problems. “Antennagate” led to an emergency press conference in which Jobs offered customers a non-apology apology, insisting that the crisis had been overblown but still offering refunds and free rubber bumpers.

Consumers forgave Apple and bought the iPhone 4 anyway, but efforts to develop Web services—for instance, Ping, a failed social network for music, and MobileMe, a suite of cloud storage services—seemed uncharacteristically half-baked. The sense that the company had lost its edge in design was perhaps best epitomized by Game Center, a social networking app for iPhone games released in September 2010. Game Center took Jobs’s preference for visual metaphors that reference the physical world—known to designers as skeuomorphism—to garish new extremes.

NITIN GANATRA

Game Center was a rough one. All the faults with skeuomorphism were front and center. It started as this green felt thing, and they struggled to come up with something that was a true metaphor.

JASON WILSON

Forstall took Steve’s design taste without understanding the sensibilities behind it. I left Apple because I couldn’t stand the design under Forstall.

NITIN GANATRA

A lot of the press latched on to the fact that Forstall was the guy who was really pushing skeuomorphism. The truth is, it was Steve. He would look at wood and leathers, and there would be these extensive reviews of materials just to see what would look best on the calendar app or the bookshelf app. It was definitely understood that as much as you could tie things to the physical world and give people clues in the digital presentation of how these things operate, they’ll be able to manipulate them more successfully. I don’t remember a feeling of “Oh boy, here we go again, mimicking physical objects.” It was seen as a positive thing.

TOM SUITER

I got to spend some time with Steve on a personal project right before he passed away; we had like three lunches together. I remember him saying, “I feel like we need to go back to a kind of Paul Rand, simple-looking thing.” [Rand was the legendary modernist graphic designer who created iconic logos for ABC, IBM, and, yes, Jobs’s NeXT.] He obviously wasn’t doing very well, and it would have been easy for him to say, “Yeah, everything’s fine.” But he was troubled by what was happening at Apple. He was saying, “We need to change something.”

Discontent among the company’s younger designers grew following Jobs’s departure from the company in August of 2011 and his death weeks later. Many felt a sense that Apple would never be the same, and some left.

JEFF ZWERNER

The hardest thing at Apple is recruiting. You are going to the best designers in the world and saying, “Can you imagine, coming to Apple and putting pictures of things on white, with one line of typography—for years?”

JEREMY KUEMPEL

I worked on the iPad SIM-card ejector. It’s got a really nice click. You’re welcome, world. There were opportunities to stay at Apple, but I didn’t want to, because I realized that I wouldn’t be designing a product—I’d be designing a SIM ejector.

JEFF ZWERNER

I really admire the people who stayed there and their ability to see the big picture. Steve saw this as kind of a life’s work. And the question is, in the absence of that careful management, that thread that ties everything together, how will it stay intact?

MATT ROGERS

Why’d I leave? The seed of doubt started nine months earlier, when we were getting ready to ship the iPhone 4 and we were going over the frame rate for some popular video game at the time—not Angry Birds, but something like that. It just didn’t feel right to have the best engineering team in the world working on what was a video-game platform. I wanted to do something that was better for humanity. And also I was running one of the iPod teams: we were working on the fourth-generation shuffle and the ninth-generation Nano. At some point you’re ready for something new.

HORACE DEDIU

People spend their entire career at Apple in one job. Phil Schiller started his career as a marketing guy, and he’s gonna die as a marketing guy. There’s no mobility inside the company. If you’re an engineer, the only option Apple gives you is just to be a better engineer. And if you’re a marketing guy, you’re just going to be a better marketing guy. The madness of Apple is how do you keep people doing that?

MATT MACINNIS

I’m Canadian, and I got my green card in July 2010. I quit in August. On the outside, Apple is so cool and hip—but it’s not a soft, gooey company on the inside. You go in there and it’s a fucking engine. There’s a certain camaraderie about being a part of the greatest company in history, but the whole house of cards is going to fall apart if it stops being cool.

ANDY GRIGNON

When we were developing the iPhone, Forstall erected doors [to the OS group] that had special badge access. The doors were initially clear glass, but they changed those and made them opaque, because people could see in. They set up dividing curtains between colleagues for people who had UI access. All of a sudden, you had all these fiefdoms, of everyone wanting to have their special thing. It became very divisive. The culture at Apple was changing.

HORACE DEDIU

The Apple system only works as long as you have strong leadership, and it falls apart once you get too big. It depends on an authoritarian leader. What Steve was trying to do was work out how to make sure that Apple outlives him. I’m sure he told [now CEO] Tim Cook, “Make sure no one under you tries to hijack the system.” The way you’d hijack the system is build a power base. You build loyalties that are to you and not to the company. The main job of the CEO of Apple is to prevent that from happening, to prevent the natural instinct of people to say, “I’m elite, I’m better than others, I should be given special status.” And as soon as you get that special status, the rule is simple: You’re fired. This is I think what happened to Scott Forstall.

In June 2012, Forstall, then the company’s software chief and a longtime confidant of Jobs, demoed a new version of Apple Maps at Macworld. The app, designed and powered by Apple for the first time after it severed ties with Google, was visually pleasing. But once it became publicly available, there were a number of highly publicized complaints that it directed users to the wrong location. Though the snafus were considered by many to be hyped up by Apple detractors, they prompted a public apology from CEO Tim Cook and reportedly led to Forstall’s resignation the following month. Ive, who had rarely had any input in Apple’s software decisions, took over for Forstall and began working on an ambitious redesign of iOS.

MATT MACINNIS

One of the key ingredients in Amazon, Facebook, and Google is data. Those businesses were built on deep technical understanding of how to manage swaths of data. Apple doesn’t know how to do that.

JASON WILSON

The software has been falling off. The Web services have all been failures. And Google is kicking ass.

DOUG SATZGER

When I was at Apple, we set the trends. It’s still that way, but there’s a lot of companies that are getting smarter.

In June 2013, at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple execs unveiled Ive’s new modernist reworking of iOS 7, which includes a new gesture-based interaction model; a futuristic Mac Pro desktop; and, perhaps most important, a reinvigorated sense of swagger. “We just completely ran out of green felt,” quipped Craig Federighi, senior VP of software engineering. “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” groused Phil Schiller.

LOREN BRICHTER

I have nitpicks with iOS 7, but I’m really happy they did something big. It’s more than just the veneer. The way they’re reimplementing the UI framework with physics—it just feels natural. They’re mimicking the real world. So in a way, the skeuomorphism, which was previously going into visual design, is now going into interaction design.

KEN SEGALL

Surprise was always an important factor to Steve. That’s the feeling I get from the new Mac Pro. I look at that and think of the G4 Cube. The way it opens up, the turbine fan, and the thermal core—it’s very Apple. Who on earth but Apple would redesign a desktop computer? That makes me feel good about Apple as an innovator.

TOM SUITER

You still have people at Apple who have been there for so long. People like Hiroki Asai [whom Suiter hired at CKS Group and who is now Apple’s executive creative director], Jony, and Phil Schiller, who is really different from Steve but who is a smart guy. I guess the question is, who is that ringleader? Maybe that’s Jony. As long as those key pillars are there, as long as the people who understand the secret recipe are there, Apple is okay. It would really trouble me if those folks started to move along.

DOUG SATZGER

There was always a tension between this team of peers, but Steve controlled that. Now you have these peers working together, and I think you’re going to start seeing people doing their own thing. Jony running user experience and industrial design might be the right thing. But for me there has been a complete failure in advertising—both in print and on television. The ads have become very vanilla, very mainstream, because Phil is in charge of that. I think you’re going to see the product line grow because Steve isn’t controlling it.

14.

“Apple Branches, Grafted onto New Trees”

2013

ABIGAIL SARAH BRODY, now founder of a stealth startup

I watched WWDC online, and they were all trying so hard. But for me, Apple is a different place without Steve. It’s a good place, but it’s different. What really makes me happy is to see people like Tony Fadell doing new things. They’re like Apple branches, grafted onto new trees.

TONY FADELL, now CEO of Nest Labs

At Apple, we were always asking, What else can we revolutionize? We looked at video cameras and remote controls. The craziest thing we talked about was something like Google Glass. We said, “What if we make visors, so it’s like you’re sitting in a theater?” I built a bunch of those prototypes. But we had such success with the things we were already doing that we didn’t have time.

MATT MACINNIS, now founder of Inkling, an e-book publisher

Visual design and interaction design are things I learned at Apple. Marketing, branding—I learned a lot of that at Apple. What I have learned since I’ve left is that confidentiality doesn’t work. If you try to replicate it, you just look like an asshole.

ROBERT BRUNNER, now founder of the design studio Ammunition and the designer of the Beats by Dr. Dre line of headphones

Most of the work we’ve done at Ammunition comes out of Shenzhen, China. Look at the level that these manufacturers are capable of. That whole ecosystem has been funded and educated by Apple.

JEREMY KUEMPEL, now founder of Blossom Coffee, an $11,000 coffeemaker designed to brew each cup at the perfect temperature

I want to create whole products and define an industry in the way that the iPad created the tablet market.

ABIGAIL SARAH BRODY

What Apple initiated will be carried on by others. And that’s my mission, too. I’m working on something with another ex–Apple executive. It will be a billion-dollar, world-changing business.

GEORGE BLANKENSHIP, now a VP at Tesla Motors

In 2001, you didn’t expect to be walking through a mall and see a computer store that looked like an Apple Store. People today do not expect to see a car in a mall. When I design Tesla stores, there are a lot of similarities, intentional similarities. The goal is to get people to want our car, and it’s working.

JEFF ZWERNER, now a VP at Evernote

The lesson I take is to take the long view: Nothing happens overnight. I was too immature at the time to buy into that at Apple, but I’m mature enough now.

DAVE MORIN, now CEO of Path

Steve used to say, “In order to create something that deserves to sit alongside the best products in the world, you have to have spent enough time interacting with the best products.” This table we’re sitting at is an Eames table. These are Eames chairs. These boots I’m wearing are made by Lucchese, which I think makes the best cowboy boots in the world. Understanding craftsmanship is what it takes to create quality. The pursuit of quality above all else is something we aspire to learn from Apple and that drives us at Path.

PHIL LIBIN

There had always been products that had been beautifully designed. But they were high-end, and very few people actually owned them. Apple was the first company that took high design and made it mainstream. It taught the world taste.

TRIP HAWKINS

In five hundred years, Steve Jobs will be the only guy from our generation that anybody knows about. We went from a world where no one has computers to a world where people have dozens of them. Mary Meeker [of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers] said people look at their smartphones 150 times a day. But it’s not 150 times a day, it’s a thousand times a day. That’s a pretty significant world change, beyond the impact of something more mundane, like radio or television.

HUGH DUBBERLY

The highway between Cupertino and Mountain View [home to Google]—this is Florence during the Renaissance. People are going to look back and think, My God, what happened here?

GADI AMIT, founder of NewDealDesign, designer of the Fitbit activity tracker and the Lytro camera

Around 1990, I was in Israel, working at a company called Scitex, but I was spending a lot of time at the Frog Design office in San Francisco. The guy next to me was working on NeXT for Steve Jobs. I saw three identical mice on his desk, and I couldn’t tell the difference between them, so I asked. He said, “Can’t you see?” And he pointed to the bottom plate of the mouse. One was 1 millimeter thick, one was 1.5 millimeters, the other 2 millimeters. And then I saw the difference—and it transformed my worldview about details in design. That’s the reason I moved to California.

That is Apple’s contribution: this dogmatic, beautiful striving for perfection, that chasing for the last millimeter. It drove the world of design to a completely new level.

About the Author

Max Chafkin is a contributing writer with Fast Company. His work has also been published in Inc., Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best Business Writing 2012. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Christine Lagorio.

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Photograph by Travis Ruse

About Fast Company

Fast Company is the world’s leading progressive business media brand, with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, ethonomics (ethical economics), leadership, and design. Written for, by, and about the most progressive business leaders, Fast Company inspires readers and users to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead new conversations, and create the future of business. Fast Company magazine publishes ten issues a year. To learn more, please visit fastcompany.com.

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Table of Contents

Copyright

Introduction

1. “A Bicycle for the Mind” 1980

2. “Fuck It, Run the Spot” 1984

3. “Here Lies the Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive” 1992

4. “All the Work Sucks” 1997

5. “Good Enough to Lick” 1998

6. “The Top-Secret Stuff” 1999

7. “He Wanted to Control Everything That Touched the Product” 2000

8. “Hey, I’m Gonna Need About Ten Million Bucks” 2001

9. “The First Boxes Were Like Origami” 2001

10. “The Holy of Holies” 2004

11. “We Called It the SkankPhone” 2005

12. “The Most Personal Computer” 2007

13. “It Started as This Green Felt Thing” 2010

14. “Apple Branches, Grafted onto New Trees” 2013

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