Esslinger and Brunner, in their times, had allowed designers to explore different design directions. Brunner in particular liked to treat the early design process almost as a competition. But he’d eventually choose the best ideas, and Esslinger, too, would unify the best ideas into a single design direction. Jony had worked in this kind of environment for several years, but didn’t seem willing or able to provide a strong lead.
Jobs stepped in, shutting down unpromising projects and trimming back Apple’s product line to suit his 2×2 matrix. Satzger remembers Jobs coming to the studio and telling the designers that Apple would be putting all its energies behind just four products. First and foremost would be a desktop for consumers. “Steve said, ‘My daughter is going to college, and I’ve looked at everything out there and they’re all crap. There’s a real opportunity. Our target now is to build an Internet computer.’ He was envisioning the iMac. That was the new focus.”
Jobs wanted an inexpensive computer, something that would appeal to mainstream consumers eager to try out the Internet, which was just becoming popular thanks to Netscape’s Navigator browser, cheap modems and an explosion in Internet service providers (ISPs) like AOL, which offered inexpensive Internet access plans. And he wanted it quickly. He’d cut back the company to give it breathing room, but he needed new products quickly to restore plunging sales. He was betting the company on this one product.
At the time, Apple’s cheapest computer was $2,000, more than $800 above the average Windows PC. To be competitive against cheaper Windows offerings, Jobs initially pushed for a radically stripped-back machine called a “network computer” (also known as an NC), a hot idea in Silicon Valley at the time. The NC would be a cheap, simple terminal that connected to a central server over the Internet. It had no hard drive or optical disk drives, just a screen and keyboard. It was perfect for schools and workplaces and it seemed, at first glance, ideal for consumers eager to access the Internet.
Before Jobs’s return, in May 1996, Apple had joined Oracle Corporation and thirty other hardware and software companies in the Networking Computing Alliance, which set the standard for cheap, diskless computers based on a common networking platform. Jobs’s billionaire best friend, Larry Ellison, was especially bullish on NCs as the future of the computer industry. And as a newly installed member of Apple’s board, Ellison told the press that Apple was building an NC. He’d recently launched a start-up, Network Computing Inc., to kick-start the sector.
Influenced by Ellison’s thinking, but also eager to compete with him, Jobs also talked up the NC idea. “We’re going to beat Ellison at his own game,” he told his Apple colleagues with relish.18Just as he’d done with the first Macintosh, Jobs began by laying out certain specifications: The Mac NC should be an all-in-one product, ready to use right out of the box, in a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for $1,200 or so. “He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” recalled Apple’s marketing chief, Phil Schiller. “That meant design and engineering had to work together.”19
In September 1997, Jon Rubinstein instructed Jony to take Jobs’s Mac NC specs and prepare a dozen foam models of potential designs.
• • •
Jony gathered the entire team in the design studio to hash it out. They started by discussing the Mac NC’s potential target market. “We didn’t start with engineering dictates,” Jony said. “We actually started with people.”
“The iMac revolved not around chip speed or market share but squishy questions like ‘How do we want people to feel about it?’ and ‘What part of our minds should it occupy?’” Jony said later in a Newsweekinterview.20
Jony was looking for the Mac NC’s “design story.” As his dad, Mike, had instilled in him, developing the design story was an essential first step in conceiving something entirely new. “As industrial designers we no longer design objects,” Jony said. “We design the user’s perceptions of what those objects are, as well as the meaning that accrues from their physical existence, their function and the sense of possibility they offer.”21
They discussed topics like “objects that dispense positive emotions”; one of the designers suggested a transparent gumball dispenser as an example of this. The IDg also discussed how other businesses, like the fashion industry, might approach the problem. “We talked about companies like Swatch—companies that broke the rules—that viewed technology as a way to the consumer, not the consumer as the path to the technology,” Jony said.
Later, Jony explained his thinking this way. The computer industry “is an industry that has become incredibly conservative from a design perspective,” he said. “It is an industry where there is an obsession about product attributes that you can measure empirically. How fast is it? How big is the hard drive? How fast is the CD? That is a very comfortable space to compete in because you can say eight is better than six.”22
But Jony offered a key insight: “It’s also very inhuman and very cold. Because of the industry’s obsession with absolutes, there has been a tendency to ignore product attributes that are difficult to measure or talk about. In that sense, the industry has missed out on the more emotive, less tangible product attributes. But to me, that is why I bought an Apple computer in the first place. That is why I came to work for Apple. It’s because I’ve always sensed that Apple had a desire to do more than the bare minimum. It wasn’t just going to do what was functionally and empirically necessary. In the early stuff, I got a sense that care was taken even on details, hard and soft, that people may never discover.”23
Sitting around a table, Jony and the rest of team started sketching. Satzger remembered the table was covered with loose sheets of copy paper, colored pencils and Pilot pens. The team drew up ideas together as a collective, passing the loose sheets between them as they worked. Trying to imagine a machine that dispensed positive emotions, as they hoped the iMac would, designer Chris Stringer made a beautiful sketch of a colorful candy dispenser.
Satzger remembers coming up with the initial egg shape for the iMac, based on TVs he had previously designed for Thomson Consumer Electronics. “If you look at the shape, it’s almost exactly the same profile.”
The idea appealed to Jony and the rest of the team. Immediately, the decision was made to pursue the egg shape as the primary design direction.
The iMac had to be on the market in a matter of months or Apple would go out of business. To speed up the design process, Jony instigated a radical, integrated design process that transformed the way Apple developed its products. The workflow that the design group uses today is basically unchanged from the system Jony introduced.
The IDg needed new tools that could streamline the complex design process and allow the designers to create 3-D designs that, in turn, could be used by outside toolmakers at the factories to create the molds for the computer’s case. Marj Andresen, who worked in the product design group, was instrumental in helping Jony find sophisticated CAD software to bring the new machine to life. The new CAD modeling process Jony helped pioneer integrated disparate computing systems, using complex software that translated files to make them interoperable.
“I was given nine months to get the tools into production,” recalled Andresen, who calls herself a “CAD/CAM therapist” because of her role supporting high-strung designers. “Nine months to get from design to production was a very short time and impossible with drawings,” said Andresen. “Our only hope was to use the design files directly. While the tools existed, the process hadn’t yet been proved on either the engineering or the tooling end. It was crazy and hectic and exciting.”
Prior to the iMac, hardware engineering (electrical design) and product design (mechanical engineering) drove the design process. “They designed the size of the enclosure due to engineering constraints and ID were tasked to develop ‘skins’ to go around this enclosure,” said Paul Dunn, a former CAD manager at Apple. “When Jobs returned to Apple, he and Jony turned this process on its head.”
Although Jony’s group had a small CAD team in the studio, it was still the early days of computer-aided design. The designers worked mostly with hand-drawn sketches and some early, relatively primitive 2-D CAD software. But Jony’s team needed to design in three dimensions, not two.
They found the answer in Alias Wavefront, a 3-D graphics package used in the aerospace, automotive and the fledgling computer-animation industry. Steve Jobs’s other company, Pixar, had used it for some special effects in Toy Story, released in 1995.
“Apple was producing designs much more complicated than any of our computer rivals,” said Dunn. “The surfaces on [the iMac] were more akin to the aerospace and automotive industries than the computer industry. . . . We were pushing the envelope.”24
Alias Wavefront is, in effect, a sculpting tool; it defines the outer envelope of a product, much like a sculptor models a work in clay. As soon as the designers had a promising shape sketched out, they took it to the CAD group, who are also known as “surfacing guys.” At the time, IDg had a small group of operators; it’s now grown to about fifteen surfacing guys who are based inside the IDg studio. They run Alias (now called Autodesk Alias) on high-end Apple computers and Hewlett-Packard workstations. With Jony’s designers watching over their shoulders, the CAD operators created outlines of the proposed designs. The idea was to make sure the basic shapes and scale were sound.
The process often takes several days. When the designers and surfacing guys settle on a reasonably good shape, they send the file to one of the studio’s CNC milling machines to create a physical model. The initial models are cut from foam, and later, more detailed “hard models” are cut from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) or RenShape, a dense red foam that cuts like wood and is good for surfaces.
The design group in Jony’s early days also had an early and very expensive 3-D printer in the studio. “Apple had been at the forefront of modeling technology for many years,” said Dunn. “From the early nineties, Apple’s modeling group had a stereolithography (SLA) machine which could create complex 3-D models in several hours. The chemicals were extremely toxic, but the results were worth all the hassles.”
As Jony discovered in college, making detailed models was a key part of the design process. “When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation,” Jony said. “But when you made a 3-D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes—the entire process shifts. It galvanizes and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.”25
With this new workflow arrangement, Jony consolidated the model shop into the design studio (previously it had been under the aegis of product design). Andresen says it was a sensible move, organizationally and operationally. “The model shop gave the ID guys a first look and feel at the product design. They were creating one-off models of what products might look like. . . . [T]hey really had the coolest stuff.”26
The modeling guys were essential to the product process. “Our model shop guys were craftsmen,” Andresen remembered. “They could build anything, but they had to learn how to use the new computer tools and to accept the design files from the engineers.”
Another important piece of software in reimagining the design process was Unigraphics, a 3-D engineering program developed by McDonnell Douglas for use in aerospace. Andresen and her group created software that allowed the 3-D models created by the surfacing guys in Alias to be imported into Unigraphics. From there, the product design group used Unigraphics to create workable products from the surfaces determined by the designers. The engineers would bring in detailed 3-D models of the product’s components, allowing them to see whether the components would fit, and if the proposed shape would work. “The designers would sit with the CAD guys and say, ‘Bring in the CRT tube. Here we need some volume for board, a place for connectors,’ and so on,” said Satzger. “Processes and interfaces were developed which allowed us to take these surfaces and import them into Unigraphics, which Product Design then used as the starting point to develop real solids and parts for manufacture,” said Dunn.
The whole process was iterative. The designers worked constantly alongside the CAD operators and engineers, fiddling with the arrangements until they found a workable combination of outer skin and internal components. “It all sounds so simple, but it was very difficult, repetitive and time consuming,” said Roy Askeland, a former Apple designer who worked on the iMac. “It was defining minute details, millimeters at a time.”27
The last part of the puzzle involved sending the detailed 3-D CAD files to the mold makers. When it came to making the molds at the factory, toolmakers had previously relied on hand-drawn sketches and 2-D CAD printouts, which looked like blueprints. Although the factories had their own CAM systems to make the molds, they weren’t always compatible with the designers’ systems, so translating the design group’s sketches and models into molds at the factory was still semi-manual and could take many months. The software Andresen helped create enabled all the systems to share common files, vastly simplifying and speeding up the process.
Although the parallel design workflow was overall faster with these improvements, the system didn’t run smoothly. “It was a difficult move to pull off and it didn’t feed nicely to CAM [computer-aided manufacturing] systems, either in house or at suppliers,” said Andresen. “As we moved into surface modeling the limitations on the software and the hardware slowed us down considerably. Computers went from being boxy to having rounded corners and edges. These were very difficult to model and also very difficult for our suppliers to receive. . . . [W]e had multiple systems and even more system translation complexity.”
Nonetheless, the bugs were worked out and the revolutionary process underlies IDg’s workflow even today. “The design process basically revolves around two main systems: Wavefront and Unigraphics,” said Dunn. “Yes, many interfaces and post-processors had to be developed, and some of them were very complicated, but the overall process wasn’t that bad once it had been defined.”28
Andresen said Apple’s innovative designs of the late 1990s and early 2000s pushed the envelope of what CAD tools could handle at the time. “It’s funny to think about now when I have 3-D modeling running on my iPad . . . but back then the idea of modeling what it looked like to build a computer out of aluminum and actually shine a light on the casing was unimaginable. The CAD vendors were struggling to keep up with our demands. We had to bring them into our ID and PD labs to show them what we needed. Between computers and automotive we were forcing the CAD industry to come up with lots of new software.”
