There’s also some subtle subterfuge in the media with the ID studio. Jony occasionally gives interviews on Apple’s campus in an engineering workshop full of CNC milling machines. It’s been identified as the design studio, but it’s actually an engineering workshop nearby.
The secrecy extends well beyond physically protecting the products within Apple’s own studios. When working on new products, the software engineers have no idea what the hardware looks like and, conversely, the engineers have no idea how the software works. When Jony’s team was making prototypes for the iPhone, the designers worked with a picture of the home screen with dummy icons.
Although all departments have their proprietary information, the secrecy is evidently tilted more in one direction. Apple’s most secretive department is Jony’s group. “It’s locked down,” said Satzger. “People know not to talk about their work and what was going on inside Apple to the wrong people.” Who are the “wrong people”? Essentially anyone but direct colleagues. Even Jony is forbidden from telling his wife what he’s working on.
A former Apple engineer who worked closely with Jony’s group in the product design team said the secrecy could get exhausting. “Out of everything I’ve ever done in my life, I’ve never seen a more secret environment than working there,” he said. “We were constantly under threat of losing our jobs for revealing any shred of anything. And even within Apple, your neighbors often didn’t know what you were working on. . . . The secrecy was like a gun to your head. Make one false move and we’ll pull this trigger.”4
Apple’s obsessive secrecy has also meant that the designers have gotten almost no press and very little public recognition. They’ve won almost every award and are certainly admired in design circles, but to the general public, they remain largely anonymous. There’s surprisingly little resentment about the lack of credit. The team is used to it and Jony is gracious in sharing the recognition their products do receive. Though he typically gets the awards, he always talks about the team. As one observer wryly noted, the only time Jony says “I” is when he’s talking about the iPhone or iPad. The move is as much to shield the individuals on the team, however, as it is to give due praise. According to Rubinstein, “Although in the press Jony gets all the credit, in reality his whole team does a lot of work. . . . They all contribute tremendously with great ideas.”5
The design team doesn’t take offense at the lack of individual public praise. “We took it as, we’re all getting credit,” said Satzger. “[Apple] always says, ‘the Apple design team,’ but Steve never wanted us to be in front of the camera. They blocked headhunters and search people. Because we were blocked from facing media and hidden from headhunters and so on, we called ourselves the ‘ID Team that’s Behind the Iron Curtain.’”6
As the principal inventors at Apple, Jony and his group conceive and create new products, refine existing ones and do some fundamental R&D, though they are not the only R&D group in the company (there is no distinct R&D department). The sixteen-odd designers focus on refining and improving Apple’s products and manufacturing processes. By comparison, Samsung has a thousand designers working in thirty-four research centers around the world. Of course, Samsung makes many more products than Apple (including some components for the iPhone and iPad).
Stringer describes the role of an industrial designer at Apple as “to imagine objects that don’t exist and to guide the process that brings them to life. And so that includes defining the experience that a customer has when they touch and feel our products. It’s managing the overall form and the materials, the textures, the colors. And it’s also working with engineering groups to, as I say, bring it to life, to bring it to the market and to building the craftsmanship that it absolutely needs to have to have that Apple quality.”7
Jony’s ID group has become a tightly knit team, as many of them have worked together for decades. They no longer design Apple’s products alone, but each product has a designated design lead, the designer who does most of the actual work, plus one or two deputies.
Weekly meetings ensure the design process is collaborative. Two or three times a week, Jony’s entire team gathers around the kitchen table for brainstorming sessions. All of the designers must be present. No exceptions. The sessions typically last for three hours, starting at nine or ten a.m.
The brainstorms begin with coffee. A couple of the designers play barista, making coffee for the group from a high-end espresso maker in the kitchen. Daniele De Iuliis, the Italian from the United Kingdom, is regarded as the coffee guru. “Danny D was the person who educated us all on coffee and grind and the color of the crema, how to properly do the milk, how temperature is important and all that stuff,” said Satzger, who was one of his keenest disciples.
When it’s time to get down to it, the brainstorms are freewheeling, creative roundtables where everyone is expected to contribute. Jony runs the brainstorms, but he doesn’t dominate them.
“Jony’s always been involved in every design session,” said one designer.
The brainstorms are very focused. Sometimes it’s a model presentation, sometimes the detail of a button or speaker grille is discussed, or the group hashes out whatever design problem Jony’s group is working on.
“[We] discuss our objectives, and so we can just be talking about what we would want a product to be,” said Stringer. “That ordinarily becomes sketching, so we’ll sit there with our sketch books and sketch and trade ideas and go back and forth. That’s where the very hard, brutal, honest criticism comes in and we thrash through ideas until we really feel like we’re getting something that’s worth modeling.”8
Sketching is fundamental to their workflow. “I end up sketching everywhere,” said Stringer. “I’ll sketch on loose-leaf paper. I’ll sketch on models. I’ll sketch on anything I can put my hands on, quite often on top of CAD outputs for want of better things to do.” Stringer likes CAD printouts, he’s said, because they already have the shape of the product. “You’re working with something that already has the perspective set up and the views in a way that you can sort of add in lavish detail upon them,” he said.9
Jony is also an inveterate sketcher. He is a good at it, but emphasizes speed over detail. “He always wanted to get a thought down on paper so that people could understand it really quickly,” said Satzger. “Jony’s drawings were really sketchy, with a shaky hand. His drawing style was really interesting.”
Jony’s sketchbooks are “really cool,” remembered Satzger, but he regards the artists of the group as Richard Howarth, Matt Rohrbach and Chris Stringer. “Richard Howarth would come in saying he had a crap idea and ‘you guys are going to hate it’ but then shared these amazing sketches.”
When the group was designing the iMac, the table was covered with loose sheets of copy paper for sketching on, but Jony’s group moved on to use sketchbooks, often hardbound volumes from Cachet by Daler-Rowney, a small British company. The studio’s office supply stockroom is stacked with them. With bindings made of high-quality canvas, they don’t fall to pieces. Howarth and Jony chose blue sketchbooks about three times as thick as the Cachet sketchbooks, with ribbon markers.
The sketchbooks make it easy to go back and look at earlier ideas, which is vital, as the group’s practice is to document everything generated during a brainstorm. These sketchbooks would later became a contentious issue at the Apple v. Samsungtrial.
A lot of sketching happens in these weekly sessions. At the end of the brainstorm, Jony will sometimes instruct everyone around the table to copy their sketchbooks and give the pages to the lead designer on the project under discussion; Jony will later sit with the lead designer and carefully go through all the pages. The lead and his two deputies will also pore through the pages trying to find ways to integrate new ideas.
“Some days I’d be engaged and have ten pages of stuff,” Satzger remembered. “Sometimes you could feel when a designer wasn’t engaged in the material, when they weren’t filling up pages of things.”
Model Making
Before presenting ideas to Jobs or another executive, the making of realistic mock-ups are outsourced to a model shop. The goal is to create models that look as much as possible like a final, finished product, which requires specialist equipment and skills. Jony’s group frequently uses Fancy Models Corporation, a model-making company based in Fremont and run by Ching Yu, a model maker from Hong Kong. Most of the iPhone and iPad prototypes were made by Fancy Models. Each model costs in the range of $10,000 to $20,000. “Apple spent millions on models made by that company,” said a former designer.
By contrast, the CNC machines at Apple, though capable of making pretty refined models, are used mainly for fairly crude early models, or parts that are needed quickly, such as plastic shapes and smaller aluminum bits. The Apple CNC machines are rarely used to produce final models.
The models play a crucial role in deciding on the final design. When designing the Mac mini, Apple’s relatively inexpensive “headless” Mac, Jony had about a dozen models made up of different sizes. The models ranged from very large to very small. He lined them up on one of the presentation tables in the studio. “We were there with some of the VPs and Jony,” said Gautam Baksi, a former Apple product design engineer. “They pointed at the smallest one and they said, ‘Well, obviously that is too small; that kinda looks ridiculous.’ Then they pointed at the other side and said, ‘Well, that’s too large; no one wants a computer that big. How do you find what’s right in the middle?’ And they talked through that process.”
The decision about the size of the case might seem trivial, but it would influence what kind of hard drive the Mini could contain. If the case were large enough, the computer could be given a 3.5-inch drive, commonly used in desktop machines and relatively inexpensive. If Jony chose a small case, it would have to use a much more expensive 2.5-inch laptop drive.
Jony and the VPs selected an enclosure that was just 2 mm too small to use a less expensive 3.5-inch drive. “They picked it based on what it looks like, not on the hard drive, which will save money,” Baksi said. He said Jony didn’t even bring up the issue of the hard drive; it wouldn’t have made a difference. “Even if we provided that feedback, it’s rare they would change the original intent,” he said. “They went with a purely aesthetic form of what it should look like and how big it should be.”10
Jony’s Role
Jony’s role at Apple evolved, as he became more managerial than design driven. Jony both ran the group and recruited new members. He was the conduit of information between the design group and the rest of the company, especially at the executive level. He worked very closely with Steve Jobs when he was alive—and now with Apple’s executives—to select what products to work on and what directions they should take. Nothing is done without his input, whether it’s the color of a product or the detail of a button. “Everything is reviewed by Jony,” said one of the designers.
According to Rubinstein, “Jony is a good leader. He is a brilliant designer, and his team respects him. Jony has very good product sense.” Satzger shared this assessment.
“Jony is very effective as a leader,” Satzger reported. “He is a soft-spoken English gentlemen who had Jobs’s ear.” It was clear in the past that, in many ways, Jony was the hand implementing Jobs’s vision. If Jobs didn’t like something, he’d say so, but that was the only direction he gave. His feedback was always non-directive. He never suggested how something should be changed but rather pushed Jony and his designers to come up with a better solution.
As their relationship grew, Jony was also known to manage up. “A lot of times, it was Jony who would drive Steve,” said Satzger. “He might say to Steve, ‘I think we should change this,’ if he felt that it was important to do something different.” Nor was Jony afraid to go around his executive colleagues to Jobs directly if someone battled or challenged him or his team.
Jony is very protective of his design team, especially in context of the other departments at Apple. “He’ll take the blame personally for screw ups,” said Gautam Baksi. “He’d fall on the sword for the weakest part of the design. If it’s something not up to snuff, he’d personally say it was his fault. I never felt like he threw any of the other ID members under the bus.”
Although the ID team was close-knit, this collegiality did not necessarily extend to other people at Apple. A former engineer in the product design group, who worked with IDg for almost a decade, said interactions with Jony and his team were formal and strained, and he was constantly reminded of the primacy of the design group at Apple.
“I only spoke when I was spoken to,” said the engineer Baksi. “These guys get paid a lot more than me and could make my life hell. I went in [the ID studio] with a purpose and left immediately afterwards. I never spent any extra time in there. I didn’t socialize with the ID guys.”
Jony’s designers, however, often socialize together after work, especially those living in San Francisco. For many of the designers, social life and work are one. At Macworld, they often got a limo—sometimes full of Bollinger champagne—and headed out to dinner and for drinks afterward. A former product design engineer remembers being at a black-tie event at the Clift San Francisco Hotel. “Around midnight in rolls the ID crew for the after-party that is going on in the hotel lobby,” the engineer said. “Stringer, Ive, Whang and a bunch more were there. . . . They’re always very trendy, into trendy music.”
Many of Jony’s team have kids. Even though the design studio is off-limits to outsiders, the designers frequently bring their youngsters in. Satzger, for one, brought his children into the studio all the time. His daughter, who was interested in pursuing a design career, wrote a college essay about growing up in the Apple ID studio, about process and how things were built and why. “She was part of the group; she could be found there for eight to ten hours,” said Satzger.
Jony was the exception as he kept his wife and twin sons, Charlie and Harry, removed from the bustle of the Apple campus. Some of the designers who live in San Francisco know his family, but to the others they are a mystery. It’s an odd paradox for a man whose father had such a strong influence on his son’s interest in design.
CHAPTER 8Design of the iPodApple has created an art object for hardware and software to live in.—BONO
In the early 2000s, Apple had stabilized. The Mac was a hit, and Apple had just introduced Mac OS X, a new operating system. OS X applications were in the works for editing video, storing photos and burning DVDs (iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD). What was missing was an application for digital music.
