For Jobs, design amounted to more than appearances. “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” Jobs famously said. “People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”6
With the development of the Macintosh, Jobs got really serious about how-it-works industrial design, which he believed could be a key differentiator between Apple’s consumer-friendly, works-right-out-of-the-box philosophy and the bare bones, utilitarian packaging of early rivals like International Business Machines.
In 1981, with the PC revolution not yet five years old, 3 percent of U.S. households had a personal computer (including toy systems like the Commodores and Ataris). Only about 6 percent of Americans had even encountered a PC at home or work. Jobs understood that the home market presented a huge opportunity. “IBM has it all wrong,” he would say. “They sell personal computers as data-processing machines, not as tools for individuals.”7
Jobs and his chief designer, Jerry Manock, went to work on the Mac, with three design constraints. To keep it cheap and make it easy to manufacture, Jobs insisted on just one configuration, an echo of his hero Henry Ford’s Model T. Jobs’s new machine had to be a “crankless computer”: A new owner should just be able to plug the machine into the wall, press a button and it would work. The Macintosh would be the world’s first all-in-one PC, with the screen, disk drives and circuitry all housed in the same case, with a detachable keyboard and mouse that plugged in the back. In addition, it shouldn’t take up too much space on a desk, so Jobs and his design team decided it should have an unusual vertical orientation, with the disk drive below the monitor, instead of to the side like other machines at the time.
The design process continued for several months, with a sequence of prototypes and endless discussions. Material evaluations led to the use of tough ABS plastic that was used to make LEGO bricks, which would give the new machine a fine, scratch-resistant texture. Troubled by the way earlier Apple IIs had turned orange in sunlight over time, Manock decided to make the Macintosh beige, initiating a trend that would last twenty years.
As Jony would do in the next generation at Apple, Jobs paid close attention to every detail. Even the mouse was designed to reflect the shape of the computer, with the same proportions, and a single square button that corresponded to the shape and placement of the screen. The power switch was put around the back to stop it being switched off accidentally (especially by curious kids), and Manock thoughtfully put a smooth area around the switch to make it easier to find by touch. “That’s the kind of detail that turns an ordinary product into an artifact,” Manock said.8
The Macintosh looked like a face, with a slot for the disk drive resembling a mouth and a chinlike keyboard recess at the bottom. Jobs loved it. This is what made the Macintosh look “friendly”—an anthropomorphic smiley face. “Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” designer Terry Oyama said later. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”9
It took five years—the Macintosh, conceived in 1979, was released in January 1984—but the product represented the first distillation of Jobs’s design philosophy. Unfortunately, the Macintosh was the last product that Steve Jobs would see to market during his first tenure at Apple. About eighteen months after launching the Mac, in September 1985, Steve Jobs lost a boardroom power struggle. John Sculley, the ex-PepsiCo marketing executive Jobs himself had recruited, took over. His design philosophy, though, would continue to be influential throughout his absence.
Before his departure, Jobs talked about making Apple in the eighties what Italy’s Olivetti had been in the seventies, the undisputed world champion of industrial design. Design was hot in the eighties, especially in Europe, with groups like Italy’s Memphis Group10of architects and designers earning accolades for their bold, colorful designs (memorably described as “a shotgun wedding between Bauhaus and Fisher-Price”11). In March 1982, two years before the Macintosh was unveiled, Jobs decided Apple needed a world-class industrial designer to craft a uniform design language for all the company’s products.
At the time, Apple’s hardware was all over the place. The company’s different divisions—the Apple II division, the Mac division, Lisa peripherals—were all using different designers with different ideas. Apple’s products looked like they came from four different companies, not one. It drove Jobs crazy.
Jobs had Manock set up a design competition, in which potential candidates were asked to draft seven products, each named after a dwarf from Snow White. The name was inspired by the storybook Manock was reading to his young daughter; Jobs loved that it conjured up images of products that were distinctive, friendly and with personality.
Almost from the start, the front-runner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German industrial designer then in his mid-thirties. Like Jobs, Esslinger was a college dropout. He had gained notice designing TVs and other consumer electronics for Sony and Wega, a German company that Sony eventually bought. One of his TV designs for Wega was in bright green plastic, which the CEO of the company nicknamed “frog.” This no doubt influenced Esslinger to name his company Frog Design, which is also an acronym for Esslinger’s homeland: Federal Republic of Germany.
In May 1982, Esslinger flew to Cupertino to meet Jobs. They were alike—both natural entrepreneurs, brash and opinionated—and they bonded over a love of Braun and Mercedes. Jobs was particularly impressed that Esslinger had worked for Sony, a design-centric company that Jobs wanted Apple to emulate.
A master at pitching his ideas and philosophy, Esslinger also knew how to work hard. His group labored through four major design phases, and after months of work, put on an overwhelming show for Apple’s brass. While the other contenders in the competition made a handful of models, Esslinger’s group turned out forty beautifully finished models, two or three variations for each product. The other groups pitched designs in dark plastic with hard edges (like Sony’s stereo components from the eighties), but Esslinger’s designs were simple and sophisticated, made from lightly textured, cream-colored plastic. Like Jony, Esslinger wanted to differentiate Apple from the masculine design of eighties electronics and create a design language based on recurring elements that echoed the consistency of software that the Mac already provided.
Jobs was delighted with the formal presentation of Esslinger’s work in March 1983: Esslinger was declared the winner of Show White and soon emigrated to California to set up his own studio, Frog Design, Inc., having agreed to provide exclusive services to Apple for an unprecedented $100,000 a month, plus billable time and expenses. Billings would quickly add up to $2 million a year, far more than competing design firms were earning from their clients.
Jobs unceremoniously told Manock and the other in-house designers that they would be working for Esslinger, who was essentially an outside contractor, albeit one with special status. Manock was killing himself designing the first Mac, but Jobs told the hapless designers that they should consider themselves lucky to be in a position to learn from the talented Esslinger. Most worried about their tenuous jobs and, indeed, the move more or less ended Manock’s career at Apple.
Esslinger’s emerging Snow White style made Apple’s best design efforts look clumsy and outdated. Snow White designs would eventually win all the major industry awards and be so widely copied that it became the de facto design language for the entire PC industry. It was too late to redesign the Mac, at that point, which had already been tooled at great expense, so Frog’s first major product for Apple using Snow White would be the Apple IIc, the fourth in the line of Apple IIs and the first attempt at a portable computer (the “c” stood for “compact”). More important, it was Apple’s first design-driven product (designed from the outside in, rather than the inside out); even with Jobs gone, he left behind a design evolution as his legacy.
That shift in emphasis was compelling beyond the design department: Apple’s engineers bent over backward to accommodate Esslinger’s designers, rather than fighting their ideas. It was a small but subtle shift; an early attempt to make Apple design driven rather engineering driven. By the time he returned, however, the old paradigm, with the engineers wielding the power, had returned, as Jony Ive had discovered.
The “A” Team
Jobs’s plan for switching up the teams at Apple upon his return was just as straightforward as his notions for simplifying the product portfolio. He would cut back so that his “A” team—the company’s best designers, engineers, programmers and marketers—could concentrate on making innovative products.
Jobs already trusted his old NeXT executives, but he looked to spot existing Apple talent and elevate them in the ranks. The people survey he conducted led to a streamlining of Apple’s organizational chart. Jobs insisted on a clear chain of command all the way down the line. Everyone in the company knew to whom they reported and what was expected of them.
As Jobs told BusinessWeek, “Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.”12
During the process of his product and personnel reviews, Jobs called a meeting with half a dozen top analysts and journalists covering Apple. He wanted to explain to them his new game plan.
“He specifically emphasized getting back to meeting the needs of their core customers and said that Apple had lost ground in the market because they were trying to be everything to everybody instead of focusing on the real needs of their customers,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, who was in the room. “He also pointed out that Apple had broken new ground with the original Mac OS and hardware designs and that he would now make industrial design a key part of Apple’s strategy going forward.”13
Bajarin, for one, was skeptical.
“My first impression was that Apple had so many problems that I could not see how industrial design needed to be a key part of his strategy to save Apple,” Bajarin recalled. “I also was concerned that given Apple’s serious financial situation, whatever he was going to do needed to be rock solid and have an impact quickly.”
Bajarin had another recollection: “I also remember telling the people I was with that you can never underestimate Steve Jobs and that if anybody can save Apple, it would be Jobs.”14
Despite his talk about returning Apple to a design-led company, Jobs didn’t immediately visit the ID studio. Brunner’s strategy of putting the studio off campus almost backfired, because, unaware of what he already had, Jobs went to look for a world-class designer from outside the company.
He thought seriously about bringing back his old design partner, Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design, who had been working with NeXT. He called on Richard Sapper, who did the IBM ThinkPad laptop, and, incredibly, the car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose run with Apple a few years before had produced nothing. Jobs also considered the famous Italian architect and designer Ettore Sotsass, who had catapulted Olivetti to the forefront of ID in the sixties.15
Across the road, Jony Ive realized his team was in jeopardy and that he had to demonstrate to his new boss what his shop could do. He put together brochures showcasing their best design work. He included in the glossy pamphlets concepts for evolving Apple’s design language, which, with the translucent eMate, had just started moving in a bold new direction. “We generated small booklets to represent the team’s capabilities,” said a former designer on the team. “I think that played a great role in how Steve Jobs coming back perceived the team and its capabilities.”
When Jobs finally took a tour of Apple’s design studio, he was bowled over by the creativity and rigor he saw. The studio was full of eye-catching mock-ups that the previous regime had been too timid to consider. Jobs also couldn’t help but notice the computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines and a fledgling computer-aided design (CAD) group.
Mostly, though, he bonded with the soft-spoken Jony, who would later say that he and Jobs saw eye to eye immediately. “We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Jony recalled. “We were on the same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company.”
Jobs decided to keep the ID group intact, with Jony in charge. He initially made Jony report to Jon Rubinstein, head of hardware. (Eventually that would change, when design became its own autonomous division.) Even though Jony reported to Rubinstein, over the next few months Jony and Jobs began having lunch together. Jobs visited the Valley Green design studio too, often dropping by at the end of the day.16
“He would come over all the time,” said a former member of the design team. “He’d come mostly to see Jony, but also to see what was going on.” In time, Jobs become almost a fixture there.
Jobs Brings Focus
When Jobs returned, he brought focus not just to the company but to Jony’s design group.
Jony was ostensibly in charge of the design squad, but the team’s efforts weren’t unified. Young and inexperienced as a manager, Jony wasn’t exerting much discipline or leadership. It was creative chaos, just like the rest of the company. The design department was full of talented but willful designers, each working on his or her own projects with little or no coordination.
“Each designer had his own agenda, or their own design impulse, and there was no control [over their activities],” designer Doug Satzger said. “One designer had an agenda over what a laptop should be; another had an agenda over what a printer should be. There was no consistency on what the next Power Mac tower should be. The design group was not set up so that designers could work collaboratively as a team. All the designers were independent and had their own strong design sense. It was like they were all working for different companies.”
Satzger said three designers were working on three different updates of the Power Mac, a powerful computer for professionals that came in a tower configuration. “There was no consistency,” said Satzger. “Danny [De Iuliis] had designed a perfect cube with wheels on it. It was pretty big. Danny Coster was working on a model that consisted of various blocks thrown together, while the design of Thomas Meyerhoffer’s [another member of the ID team] for the tower was all slurpy with lines all over—it was a monolithic piece of art. And the team was going ahead with not one of them but all of them.”17
