The team struggled to solve Extrudo’s problems, but engineering tests made it clear this particular design direction wouldn’t work unless the plastic endcaps for the radios got bigger. But bigger caps would ruin the clean Extrudo look. “We made books and books filled with pages of designs trying to figure out how not to break up the design because of the antenna, how not to make the earpiece too hard and sharp, and so on,” said Satzger. “But it seemed like all the solutions that added comfort detracted from the overall design.”
The Extrudo design had another problem that nagged at Jobs: The metal bezel detracted from the screen. The design didn’t “defer” to the screen, which had been one of Jony’s original goals. Jony later recalled his flush of embarrassment when Jobs pointed it out.
Apple killed Extrudo; the team was left with Sandwich.
The Sandwich design did have several advantages over Extrudo, one of which was that the rounded edges didn’t hurt the designers’ ears. But the engineering prototypes came back big and chunky, and Jony’s team struggled to slim it down. They were trying to cram in a lot of technology, much of which hadn’t yet been miniaturized enough for a device as complex as the phone everyone envisioned.
The Jony Phone
By February 2006, several redesigns had come and gone. Jony was so dissatisfied with the progression that, during one of the brainstorms, he asked designer Shin Nishibori to make an exploratory version of the phone with Sony-style design cues. Later, he would contend that his request was not to copy Sony specifically, but to inject some fresh, “fun” ideas into the process.
Shin Nishibori had been a well-known young designer in Japan for years before coming to work at Apple. Traces of a Sony/Japanese influence have appeared in Nishibori’s work on Apple products since 2001, and Steve Jobs, Jony and other Apple designers had often expressed admiration for Japan’s minimalist aesthetic.
In February and March 2006, Nishibori designed and built several phones that borrowed elements seen in Sony products of the time, including a jog wheel, which was a control-wheel-cum-switch that was used on Sony’s CLIÉ personal digital assistants. Nishibori even put the Sony logo on the backs—except for one that he jokingly labeled a Jony.
Years later, at the Apple v. Samsungtrial, one of Nishibori’s mock Sony phones would be presented as evidence that Jony’s design team hadn’t developed the iPhone on their own, as they contended, but instead copied other companies’ designs. But Apple successfully argued that the Sony/Jony design was merely Sony-style decoration on a device they’d already designed.13As Apple’s attorneys pointed out, Nishibori’s designs are asymmetrical and none of the Sony-style buttons and switches were adopted in the released iPhone.
In early March 2006, Richard Howarth expressed his frustration with the state of the development of P2. In comparing P2 to Nishibori’s Sony-style design, Howarth complained about its size, and how Nishibori had managed to achieve a slimmer profile. “Looking at what Shin’s doing with the Sony-style chappy he’s able to achieve a much-smaller looking product with a much nicer shape to have next to your ear and in your pocket,” Howarth wrote in an e-mail to Jony.
“I’m also worried that if we start cutting volume buttons on the side, then it removes some of the purity of the extrusion idea and seems like the wrong shape for the job. We can only add so much to it before it becomes a style/a shape, rather than the most efficient construction method and that would be bad.”14
Jony’s team had also tried a curved design, which at one point looked like a promising direction. By adding a curve, more technology could be packed into the middle bulge. It’s a trick Apple has used in many of its newer products, from the iPad to the iMac.
From the beginning, Satzger remembered, the team had a “strong interest” in a design that used two pieces of shaped glass. One of the prototypes they built had a split screen. Above was the screen, below a software-driven touch pad that changed depending on function. Sometimes it was a dial pad, at other times a keyboard. But the problem of making glass convex proved too difficult.
Although Howarth was still using the Extrudo design as a comparison piece late in development, engineering tests seemed to affirm that the Sandwich-style direction would prevail. Then engineering prototypes of the Sandwich design came back with a bad report: They were too big and fat. With the realization that all the technology just couldn’t be squeezed into a pleasing shape, the decision was made to kill the Sandwich design too.
“We didn’t know enough about antennas, we didn’t know enough about acoustics, we didn’t know enough about packing everything in,” said one former executive. “It worked, but it just wasn’t attractive.”
Faced with a dead end, Jony’s team reversed course. They turned to an old model they’d made early in the process but had discarded in favor of the Sandwich and Extrudo. The discarded model looked very similar to the phone that would actually ship, with an edge-to-edge screen interrupted only by the single home button. Its gently curved back snapped seamlessly onto the screen, like the original iPod. Most importantly, it maintained Jony’s infinity-pool illusion. When the phone was off, it appeared to be a single, unbroken, inky-black faceplate; when switched on, the screen magically appeared from within.
It was a voila! moment. “We found something that we’d overlooked,” said Stringer, “something that we, once adding detail to it and really spending some time with it, decided was the absolute best choice for us at that time.” He remembered the ease with which the final, unornamented design for iPhone was chosen. “It was the most beautiful of our designs,” he explained. The front face bore neither the company logo nor the name of the product. “We also knew from our experience with iPod,” Stringer explained, “if you make a startlingly beautiful and original design, you don’t need to. It stands for itself. It becomes a cultural icon.”
In the fullness of time, Jony resurrected the Sandwich for the iPhone 4, another example of the team revisiting earlier designs and spying qualities that they’d previously overlooked. The main structural element of the iPhone 4—the steel frame between the two plates of glass—would double as the phone’s antennas. Unfortunately, that proved problematic because, if the user’s hand made a contact between a gap, effectively shorting the two antennas, the phone would drop calls. Reportedly, Apple could have easily avoided the issue if the antennas had been clear coated, but Jony didn’t want to ruin the integrity of the metal.
Beyond matters of form, the team focused on the function of the multi-touch. Most touch devices at the time used resistive touch screens, based on two thin sheets of conductive material separated by a thin gap of air. When the screen is pressed, the two layers make contact, registering the touch. Resistive screens were typically made of plastic, and were common in pen-based devices like Palm Pilots and Apple’s Newton.
Jony’s design team tried using a resistive screen for the iPhone, but were unsatisfied with the results. Pressing on the screen distorted the picture, and the screen tired the fingers because the user had to press pretty hard. It just didn’t live up to the promise of the name (“touch screen”), which the designers thought should convey the illusion that the user was literally touching the content.
Moving on from the resistive screen, the hardware team set out to build screens based on capacitive touch, registering changes in electrical charges (or capacitance) across its surface. Human skin is electrically conductive, and a capacitive touch screen uses that characteristic to detect even the lightest touch. Apple had been using capacitive touch technology for several years with the iPod scroll wheel, laptop track pads and the Power Mac Cube, which had a capacitive on-off button. But the technology hadn’t been applied to transparent screens.
One problem was that there was no supply chain for capacitive screens. No one was producing them on an industrial scale at the time—but Apple found a small company in Taiwan called TPK that was producing them for point-of-sale displays using an innovative but limited-run technique. Jobs made a handshake deal with the company, promising that Apple would buy every screen the factory could produce. Based on this agreement, TPK invested $100 million to rapidly ramp up their manufacturing capabilities. They ended up supplying about 80 percent of the screens for the first iPhone, growing rapidly to a $3 billion business by 2013
From Plastic to Glass
While Apple’s operations group was working out how to manufacture the iPhone, Jony’s design team was having doubts about their original choice of material for the screen.
Jony and his team planned to use plastic, mostly because it was shatterproof. Although all of the iPhone prototypes had plastic screens, the designers were never happy with it.
“The original plastic face had this weird flexibility to it,” said Satzger. “It was a matte finish. If it goes to glossy plastic, you see this waviness to it, which makes it look really crappy.” Jony instructed the team to try textured plastic, but that didn’t work either. In a gutsy next move, they decided to try glass, despite the facts that glass breaks easily and no one had made a consumer electronic device with such a big piece of glass.
The story of the shift to glass is variously remembered: Although Jony’s group was already investigating glass, Jobs is credited by some as initiating the move to glass. As the story goes, he’d been using an iPhone prototype, which he kept in his pocket with his keys. He was reportedly furious that they scratched the screen.
“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” Jobs said later. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”15
A deeper version has it that the development took more like six months in advance of launch, not six weeks. Apple’s operations group was charged with finding the strongest glass available. The search led them to Corning Incorporated, a glass manufacturer headquartered in upstate New York.
In 1960, Corning had created a nearly unbreakable reinforced glass they called “muscled glass” or Chemcor. The key to its manufacture was an innovative chemical process in which glass is dipped into a hot bath of potassium salt. Smaller sodium atoms leave the glass, and are replaced by bigger potassium atoms from the salt. When the glass cools, the bigger potassium atoms are packed in so tightly they give the glass exceptional damage resistance. The glass can withstand pressures of 100,000 pounds per square inch (normal glass handles about 7,000). Chemcor’s market future seemed bright, but it never took off. Other than its use in some airplanes and American Motors Javelin cars, the material sold poorly and Corning discontinued it in 1971.16
When Apple’s operations group came calling in 2006, they found Corning had been thinking about bringing back the old superglass for a couple of years. They’d seen Motorola use glass for its RAZR V3 phone and begun to explore ways to make Chemcor thin enough to be suitable for cell phones.
Jony’s ID group came up with spec: The glass needed to be 1.3 mm to fit into the iPhone design. Jobs told Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks, they had six weeks to create as much of it as they could. Weeks replied they didn’t have the capacity and actually, Chemcor had never been created in this way or in such volume. “None of our plants make the glass now,” he told Jobs. But Jobs cajoled the CEO. “Get your mind around it,” he said. “You can do it.”17
Almost overnight, the company completely remade its manufacturing processes, based in Kentucky, changing several of its LCD-making plants to muscled glass, by then renamed Gorilla Glass. In May 2007, Corning was making thousands of yards of Gorilla Glass.
Corning’s glass, in combination with the aluminum back, marked another change in Jony’s design language. It was a striking, almost shocking, minimalism in hard metal and glass.
To hold the glass screen in place, Jony’s team came up with a shiny stainless steel bezel, which doubled as a structural element. The bezel would give the iPhone strength, but it also needed to look good.
Jony’s team worried that the glass would smash if the phone was dropped. “We were putting glass in close proximity to hardened steel,” said Satzger, who pointed out that, “if you drop [the phone], you don’t have to worry about the ground hitting the glass. You have to worry about the band of steel surrounding the glass hitting the glass.”
The solution was a thin rubber gasket between the glass screen and the stainless steel bezel. But the gasket created a gap that, at least at first, the designers hated for a very personal reason. “Because many of us in the ID team rarely shaved and had beard stubble, it used to yank our facial hair when we held the device up to our faces,” said Satzger, laughing at the memory. The team played around with gap size until they got it right“We designed several increments of gap size between the metal and glass until we got one that didn’t yank our face hair.”
Countdown to Macworld
One morning in the fall of 2006, Jobs gathered the iPhone leaders in Apple’s boardroom to talk about the state of iPhone development. Fred Vogelstein of Wireddescribed the scene as a horror show of bad news.
“It was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, ‘We don’t have a product yet.’”18
The fact that Jobs seemed calm—instead of bringing his usual fire and brimstone—spooked everyone in the room. Vogelstein said one executive described the moment as “one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill.”
Because the iPhone announcement was going to be the main event at Macworld in a few weeks, any sort of postponement would have been disastrous. “For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers,” Vogelstein wrote. “Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.”
The problem was that everything was new and nothing worked. The touch screen was new, so were the accelerometers. The proximity sensor, which turned off the screen when the user held the phone up to their face, developed a problem in a late prototype: It worked for most people, but it didn’t work if the user had long dark hair, which confused the sensor.
