The Mac mini looked relatively simple, but its case was surprisingly complex. The mini’s square case was made from sheet aluminum extruded into a square shape, which was then machined to achieve the right tolerances and finish, especially on the top. Then the case had to be anodized. Again, the design group had exacting requirements, as the anodized layer had to be just the right texture, color, gloss and thickness.
Satzger spent months working with the U.S. supplier but as the deadline approached, the company failed to produce sample cases. A stressed-out Satzger went to the operations group. “We reached a point in the program where I said to the representative of the operations team that was pushing the move toward manufacturing in the USA, ‘We have a really tight schedule, and the [US manufacturer has] not yet delivered a part in spec from the extrusion machine; they haven’t delivered a finished part. When are they going to do this? If they don’t deliver, we don’t have a product. Where is our backup plan?’”
There was none. An increasingly frustrated Satzger observed that the American supplier had no concept of the quality that was required by Apple. “At Apple, good enough is not good enough,” said Satzger. “American companies could not understand the quality that is required for a customer-facing part on an Apple product—the little things that customers notice.”33
By contrast, when Jony’s team went overseas for other projects, the Asian suppliers bent over backward to get the contract. “We first went to Japan, and started using titanium, and moved from there onto aluminum for the first iPods and PowerBooks,” remembered Satzger. “Then we were able to take that knowledge and experience and move, along with a couple Japanese companies, into China and we could say to people such as Foxconn, which had been molding parts for us, ‘Can you make basic sheet metal for us?’ and we started working with them from there. In China, their attitude was very much, ‘We’re going to work on a product to make sure it meets all its specs.’”34
The Mac mini would be produced in Asia, along with iPod minis and other products, at Foxconn.
Another product, the Power Mac G5 tower, would mark a big shift in the relationship between Apple and Foxconn. The design group wanted to make the tower in aluminum instead of plastic, as it had done with its predecessor, the Power Mac G4. Even by Apple’s standards, the project was immensely challenging. “Multiple people got shifted [to different jobs] because they just couldn’t do it,” said Satzger.
The project took more than a year. One cause of the delays was the 2003 outbreak of SARS, which quarantined some of the design team at Foxconn, including Jony. “I stayed for three months in a dormitory to work on the process,” he said. “Ruby and others said it would be impossible, but I wanted to do it because Steve and I felt that the anodized aluminum had a real integrity to it.”35
Jobs wanted the case to be an extruded part, and he thought the big swooping handles on the previous towers were really important to the image of the product. Jony’s team started looking for a huge extruded aluminum tube that could be flattened like a lozenge, and then have two holes scooped out to create the handles. But they found that the only extruded aluminum tubes at the time were eighteen-inch tubes made for plumbing, which would be too small to suit their needs. Jony’s team investigated whether they could take two extrusions and join them together.
As they struggled, Satzger suggested that instead of using extrusions, the case could be done by the process of roll forming, the way steel gutters are made. A flat sheet of aluminum could be bent at various points as it is passed through a series of rollers to make the lozenge shape. When Satzger suggested this in one of the group’s biweekly brainstorming meetings, one of the other designers said it wasn’t a good idea because Jobs had set his mind on an extruded case.
“You don’t get it,” the other designer told Satzger. “Steve wants it extruded.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Satzger replied, “it’s not possible.”
Finally, Satzger went to Jobs and persuaded him to go with the roll process, despite the opposition of the whole team. The sheets were roll formed into a C shape, with a large door installed on the open side. At first, Jony’s team was concerned about the two small joints on the open side (they wanted it seamless), but eventually decided they could live with it because the joints couldn’t be seen from the front.
Because customers would be opening the machine up, Jony decided they had to design the internal components too. “That was the first time we went internal,” said Satzger. “We controlled board color [the color of the motherboard]; we controlled every connector, every cable. We designed every part inside it: the fan housing, the plenum for the air flow.”
Jony’s team spent months trying to find a good way to lock the door in place. Their first efforts were elaborate locking mechanisms on the door itself, but those ruined the case’s austere surface. Next they decided the G4 tower would have a locking ring, like the recessed deck latch on a sailboat. In one of the brainstorms, Satzger suggested putting the latch on the back of the machine. “I finally said, ‘Why does it have to be on the door? Look at the hood latch on your car. Don’t interrupt a surface with other details. Leave it for the Apple logo.’”
The team designed a latch that resembles an automobile hood latch connected to a pair of slender deadbolts. The latch is indeed on the back of the machine and, when activated, it slides deadbolts on the insides of the door at the top and bottom that hold it in place. It’s complex but elegant, with no sign of the mechanism from the outside.
When the first cases came off the line, Jony saw that the new machine would become a showpiece. Machines in this category were usually put under a desk, but this one looked so good, Jony figured, it would be put on top of desks instead. That meant all the surfaces had to be treated like the front.
With most products, the front is what’s called an “A” surface. As the best surface, it has to be finished to the highest standards. The sides are “B” surfaces, the backs “C,” the insides “D” surfaces. But, said Satzger, “This product was so beautiful, everything was an ‘A’ surface.”
When the design team conveyed this directive to the manufacturer, Foxconn was flabbergasted. “They were like, ‘What do you mean? This is crazy,’” recalled Satzger. “It got to the point where Foxconn’s team said we’ve never done anything like this, we just can’t.” In the end, they would meet Apple’s standards.
Offshore
For better and for worse, Apple has become the poster child for the ills of offshore manufacturing. Foxconn assembly plants in particular have attracted criticism; after a rash of worker suicides in 2009, negative international attention resulted in investigations that exposed a host of labor abuses.
Foxconn had as many as half a million workers in some of its plants, assembling iPhones and iPads by hand. The workers, mostly young, lived in dormitories, ate in shifts in gigantic communal canteens and often worked eighty- to one-hundred-hour weeks. Apple had its Nike moment, becoming the focus of anger about digital sweatshops and worker exploitation, even though Foxconn’s factories make products for almost all the major electronics firms, not just Apple.
Long before the controversy, however, Apple helped change the game in manufacturing, forging close relationships with Chinese manufacturers, constantly pushing the limits of what their factories are capable of doing. But the process involved a certain amount of bemusement as to the ways of the Asian companies.
Satzger for one was both impressed by Foxconn and amused at how they did things. “There was a lot of politics,” he said. “They would stage things for us. Lots of theatrics. They would bring managers into meetings and yell at them in front of the Apple group.”
On one occasion, the Apple group was carefully positioned outside of a conference room with big glass windows. Inside, a Foxconn executive was yelling at his staff. As the Apple group looked on, he brought his fist down on the glass conference table and shattered it.
“He completely set that up,” said Satzger.
Foxconn has a mixed reputation, but Satzger said all the engineers—everyone who dealt with Apple at a higher level—were really happy and engaged. However, the assembly plants have been the critical lightning rod, as thousands of workers perform repetitive tasks assembling the products.
The designers spent a lot of time flying out to China to work with Foxconn and other contractors. Satzger would never spend more than five days at a time there. If need be, he’d fly back to California for the weekend, then fly out again the following week. Jony, on the other hand, would sometimes be gone for weeks, and some of the other designers for months.Of course, they were pioneering new materials and new means of manufacture for Apple’s extraordinary products.
Over the years, the elevated status of Jony’s group would be reflected in their accommodations. According to a former operations engineer, “When all of the teams went to China, the PD [product design] guys and the ID guys, we usually all worked together in the factory. But when we left, the ID guys got picked up in stretch limos and we had to take a taxi,” the source said. “All the ID guys stayed in 5-star hotels while most of the PD guys stayed in 3-star hotels. This was different from 10 to 15 years earlier, when in the middle of the build-up to make the iMac, all the designers, including Jony and Danny Coster, lived and ate in the same hotels as the engineers and the rest of the Apple crew.”
CHAPTER 10The iPhoneWhen we are at these early stages in design . . . often we’ll talk about the story for the product—we’re talking about perception. We’re talking about how you feel about the product, not in a physical sense, but in a perceptual sense.—JONY IVE
One morning in late 2003, just before the launch of the iPod mini, Jony and his team gathered for a biweekly brainstorming meeting. As usual, the team assembled around the studio’s kitchen table. One of the industrial designers, Duncan Kerr, did a show-and-tell. Kerr, who joined Apple’s design team in 1999 after having spent a few years working at IDEO, had a lot of engineering experience, and he loved to tinker with new technology.
Kerr had been working with Apple’s input engineering group, which was exploring alternative inputs for the Mac, with the hope of doing away with the keyboard and mouse, the mainstay of computing for more than three decades. When Kerr told the group about what he’d learned, his words were greeted by some stunned expressions.
“It was amazing,” said Doug Satzger, shaking his head in disbelief. “It was a really amazing brainstorm.”
Around the table was the core IDg: Jony, Richard Howarth, Chris Stringer, Eugene Whang, Danny Coster, Danny De Iuliis, Rico Zorkendorfer, Shin Nishibori, Bart Andre, and Satzger.
“I remember Duncan showing us how, with multi-touch, you could do different things with two fingers and with three fingers,” recalled Satzger. “He showed us on-screen rotating and zooming—and I was really surprised that we could do that stuff.”
That morning was the first time the team had even heard of multi-touch. Today it doesn’t seem exceptional, but back then, touch interfaces were pretty primitive. Most touch devices, such as Palm Pilots and Windows tablets, used a pen or stylus. Screens that were sensitive to fingers, not pens, like ATM screens, were restricted to single presses. There was no pinching or zooming, no swiping up and down or left and right.
Kerr explained to his colleagues that the new technology would allow people to use two or three fingers instead of just one, and that it would afford much more sophisticated interfaces than simple single-finger button presses.
Excited by Kerr’s explanation of what a sophisticated touch interface could do, the team members started to brainstorm the kinds of hardware they might build with it. The most obvious idea was a touch-screen Mac. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, users could tap on the screen of the computer to control it. One of the designers suggested a touch-screen controller that functioned as an alternative to a keyboard and mouse, a sort of virtual keyboard with soft keys.
As Satzger remembered, “We asked, ‘How do we take a tablet, which has been around for a while, and do something more with it?’ Touch is one thing, but multi-touch was new. You could swipe to turn a page, as opposed to finding a button on the screen that would allow you turn the page. Instead of trying to find a button to make operations, we could turn a page just like a newspaper. I was really surprised you could do this stuff.”
Jony in particular had always had a deep appreciation for the tactile nature of computing; he had put handles on several of his early machines specifically to encourage touching. But here was an opportunity to make the ultimate tactile device. No more keyboard, mouse, pen or even a click wheel—the user would touch the actual interface with his or her fingers. What could be more intimate?
The input engineering team had built a giant experimental system to test multi-touch. It was a big capacitive display about the size of a Ping-Pong table, with a projector suspended above it. The projector shone the Mac’s operating system onto the array, which was a mass of wires.
“This is going to change everything,” Jony told the design team after he saw it.1Jony wanted to show the system to Steve Jobs, but he was afraid his boss would pour cold water on it because it was still raw and unpolished. Jony reasoned that he had to show the work in progress to Jobs in private, with no one else around. “Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I didn’t show him stuff in front of other people,” Jony said. “He might say ‘This is shit,’ and snuff the idea. I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad because I know it was so important.”2
Jony followed his instincts and showed Jobs the system in private. The gambit worked, and Jobs loved the idea. “This is the future,” said Jobs.3
With Jobs’s seal of approval, Jony directed Imran Chaudhri and Bas Ording, two of Apple’s most talented software engineers, to shrink the massive capacitive array into a working tablet prototype. Within a week, they came back with a twelve-inch MacBook display hooked to a big tower Power Mac, which provided the computing power to interpret the finger gestures.
They showed Jony and the designers a demonstration with Google Maps. After bringing up Apple’s Cupertino HQ, one of them spread his fingers apart on the screen, zooming in on the campus. The designers were astonished. “We could zoom in and zoom out with touch gestures onto the Apple campus!” said Satzger.
Building a finger-controlled tablet looked like a real possibility. It wouldn’t happen overnight and, thanks to market forces, another revolutionary Apple product would emerge from the pipeline first.
