Brunner asked Jony and his Tangerine colleagues to push the boundary of the design but to keep the main elements of Apple’s then-current design language (mostly dark gray plastic with some soft bulges). The designs had to be based on real technology so they could conceivably be real products in the near future.
Jony, together with help from Grinyer and Darbyshire, worked on a tablet called the Macintosh Folio. It was a chunky, notebook-sized tablet with a pen-based screen and a huge built-in stand. Made of Apple’s then-usual dark gray plastic, it could almost be a predecessor to the iPad, despite being about five times thicker.
Jony worked alone on a special smart keyboard for the tablet called the Folio keyboard. But unlike today’s detachable keyboards for modern tablets, the Folio keyboard was conceived as an “intelligent keyboard” because it featured its own CPU, network jacks and a trackpad. In effect it was half a laptop, namely, the keyboard half.
Grinyer and Darbyshire worked on a pair of “transportable” desktops that were half desktop, half laptop. These were transformer-like computers, convertible machines with built-in keyboards and screens that could transform from a desktop into a portable and back again.
One was the SketchPad. Made of light gray plastic, it featured an articulated screen that could be adjusted for height and tilt. It could be folded up into a purse-shaped bundle with a carrying handle for easy transport. (Jony would later revive the idea of a built-in carrying handle with the first iBook.)
The second transportable desktop was called the Macintosh Workspace. It had a built-in, pen-sensitive screen, along with a split keyboard that folded underneath and to the sides when not in use. The Workspace could be folded flat—like a big fat tablet—for transporting, but spread its keyboard like a pair of chunky wings when opened for use.
“I remember one day seeing Jony with this foam model of the tablet on his desk,” said Phillips. “He was sitting away from it with his knees up, typing away on this foam keyboard, and saying ‘this feels good.’”39
“Jon’s was the most thought provoking and, as ever, beautifully detailed,” recalled Darbyshire of the Folio. “He sweated and sweated to get it right and he did just that. It was stunning.”40
With remarkable speed, Jony and the other designers on Project Juggernaut had developed about twenty-five models. In a matter of weeks, they presented the work to Brunner and his team and, over the next few months, the concepts were refined to four principal designs.41
As the project neared completion, Jony’s fears about messing it up almost came true. The fledgling company didn’t have its own model shop for making final prototypes, as such shops require special skills, tools and personnel, typically beyond the means of all but the biggest design studios. (Today, even a company as big as Apple uses external shops for finished models.) So the four Tangerine designers took their Juggernaut mock-ups to a local model maker who had done a lot of work with the film and advertising industry.
The model maker was very talented and his models looked “fantastic,” said Grinyer. They were perfect for showing off their ideas to clients. However, the models weren’t made to last. “When we got the models back, they looked fantastic but would break after you had used them once,” said Grinyer. “Apple had this pile of broken models they couldn’t do anything with. That was all a bit of a disaster.”42
Despite the rickety models, Brunner was mightily impressed with Jony’s contributions.
“Jony did a really, really sweet tablet,” said Brunner. “Really amazing. True to form with Jony, it was very clean, very sophisticated, super attention to detail. But still it had provocative qualities. . . . It was very developed, refined, sophisticated surfaces that were clean and beautiful but they still felt emotional. They weren’t dull and boring.”43
Brunner remembered that Jony’s Juggernaut designs stood out because they weren’t based on anything that Apple—or any other computer company—had done before. They were utterly original. “They had an emotional maturity that’s rare for someone Jonathan’s age,” Brunner added.44Jony was twenty-six at the time.
After six months of work on Project Juggernaut, Jony, Grinyer and Darbyshire were flown to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to make a final presentation. Since Phillips hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day work on Juggernaut—he’d been keeping the company afloat working for LG—he stayed behind.
Both Jony and Grinyer liked the vibe at Apple, but Darbyshire found it cliquey. “Apple is a deep culture,” he said. “You have to want to belong to it. It’s almost to the point of being a cult, and I have to say I find that kinda spooky. There are fantastic sides to the culture as well: a great sense of freedom, constant encouragement to develop and look for something new to perfect, but also a slightly cliquey weird side that I find too claustrophobic. It’s almost a religion and I can’t deal with that.”45
After the presentation, as they were packing up to go, Brunner pulled Jony to one side to speak to him privately. He told Jony that if he really wanted to “create something radical,” he should come to work for Apple full time.46
“It wasn’t super overt,” said Brunner. “It was more along the lines of me mentioning that the opportunity still exists, and him saying, ‘That’s pretty interesting, let me think about it.’”47
Jony did think about it, and back in London, he agonized over the decision. He had enjoyed working with Apple, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to leave both his homeland and his work at Tangerine. He also wasn’t sure whether his wife, Heather, would want to move to the States. But Project Juggernaut had opened a new window for Jony.
“Even though I had done a lot of interesting work up to that time, the issues I encountered on Juggernaut were unlike anything I had dealt with before,” he said. “The principal challenge—to give personality and meaning to a technology that was still being treated as though it were anonymous—interested me a lot. Also important was the fact that Apple offers a supportive environment. It’s the kind of place where a designer can focus less on day-to-day business and more on design as a craft.”48
But California was a long way from London. Trying to tip the balance, Brunner flew Jony and his wife, Heather, out to California for a second visit. On returning to London, however, Jony still couldn’t make up his mind.
The opportunity wasn’t a secret. Grinyer, Darbyshire and Phillips pushed him to move to California. ‘We all said, ‘It’s a great opportunity Jon, how can you not take it?’” said Darbyshire.49Phillips pointed out that the other partners all had children. They were “tied to London, and he [wasn’t], so it was a no brainer.”50
Ultimately, none of the Project Juggernaut designs would see the light of day. Even so, the project was instrumental in moving Apple away from its previous beige boxes. Key ideas like split keyboards and docking stations (an idea that later came to market as the duo dock), as well as the gray and black industrial design that Apple became famous for in the early 1990s, were by-products of Juggernaut thinking.
It also became increasingly clear that, at least in part, Project Juggernaut was an elaborate ruse by Brunner to recruit Jony. “We always suspected that the project was given to Tangerine to try and lure Jony to the sunny climes of California to see if they could poach him over to the States,” said Phillips.
Finally, Jony made the call. As he remembered, “through some sort of reckless sense of faith,” he got to Yes.51
Brunner had tried to hire Jony three times: when Jony first visited Lunar as a student, when Brunner first started at Apple and when Jony had just joined Tangerine and after Project Juggernaut. “He liked California,” said Brunner. “He liked the energy. So we managed to hire him on the third try. And that’s how you do it. You identify the people you think are great and work on it until you eventually get them.”
Another factor was undoubtedly that Jony was frustrated with consulting. He had achieved what many designers dream of: a successful practice with a lot of freedom. But consulting also restricted his ability to truly make an effect. “Working outside a company made it difficult to have a profound impact on product plans and to truly innovate,” he said.52In most cases, by the time his commissions had been accepted, many of the critical decisions had already been made internally. Jony had come to believe that to do something fundamentally new required dramatic change from within an organization.
“While I had never thought that I could work successfully as part of a corporation—I always assumed that I would work independently—at the end of this big program of work for Apple, I decided to accept a full-time position there and to move to California.”53
Tangerine would continue to thrive without him, and work on projects for Apple, Ford and LG. The company is still running with Darbyshire in charge. In recent years, they are best known for their work on the British Airways flat bed, an innovative first-class seat that converts into a bed. Still, Jony Ive has gone on, left them for the world of Apple. His former partners remained philosophical, understanding that Jony couldn’t be kept back. Brunner tried to ease the loss too. Phillips reported, “Bob was very kind when Jon had gone and gave us a nice big beefy project to boot as a bit of a sweetener. It was a nice chunk of money to say ‘sorry.’”54
CHAPTER 4Early Days at AppleI can’t have people working in cubicle hell. They won’t do it. I have to have an open studio with high ceilings and cool shit going on. That’s just really important. It’s important for the quality of the work. It’s important for getting people to do it.—ROBERT BRUNNER
In September 1992, at age twenty-seven, Jony accepted a full-time position at Apple. He flew to California with his wife, Heather. The couple moved into a modest house on San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, the highest hill in the city, from which they enjoyed a stunning view of the city that extended the length of Market Street to the skyscrapers downtown
Inside, the place reflected Jony’s design tastes. “There is a fireplace in the sparsely appointed interior and a tiny television sitting atop an upscale stereo with a turntable, and virtually all the furniture is on wheels,” wrote reporter John Markoff, who visited Jony and his wife for a New York Timesprofile a few years later.1“The room is lighted by a futuristic lamp, which appears to hang like a red orb, but there isn’t a personal computer in sight.”
Jony bought an orange Saab convertible for the commute to Apple, about thirty-five miles away down the Peninsula in Cupertino. He went to work in the IDg studio on Valley Green Drive, a short walk from Apple’s main campus on Infinite Loop. The IDg studio was Apple’s first and Robert Brunner’s brainchild. The choices Brunner made in setting it up were auspicious and they’d have a wide-ranging effect at Apple (that would be especially true after Steve Jobs’s subsequent return).
Previously Apple had contracted most of its design to Frog Design, a full-service design consultancy run by Hartmut Esslinger, a hotshot German designer. Esslinger had developed a unified design language for Apple called “Snow White” that catapulted the company to the top of the ID world. However, by the late 1980s, Frog was starting to get expensive. Its Apple billings rose to more than two million dollars a year, twice what it would cost to use most other outside design firms, and much more expensive than running a small in-house design team. But Apple was stuck with a contract that Steve Jobs had negotiated with Esslinger in the early eighties, and couldn’t get out without paying a huge penalty.
But money wasn’t really the problem. By that point, Apple had more money than it knew what to do with. The company was making vast sums riding the desktop publishing revolution. Thanks to the Mac’s graphical user interface, great layout software and cheap laser printers, Apple was selling boatloads of machines to newspapers, magazines and book publishers. At the end of 1988, the company had three factories working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Yet, despite a research and development budget of two hundred million dollars, Apple had no disciplined product pipeline.
Different product groups—peripherals, portables, desktops and so on—did have the next generation of products in the works, but nothing beyond. Without any coordination between groups, Apple was reverting to the pre–Snow White days when each division had its own design ideas. Products from the printer group looked nothing like those from the monitor division. It was as though Apple was four or five separate companies. The company needed a regimented product pipeline and a new, unified design language to give the products cohesion.
By 1987, there was a general recognition within Apple that the answer was an internal design team, but without a visionary like Jobs, the engineers had no idea where to start; since design had been outsourced to Frog Design, there were no designers on staff. Apple’s management first tried to find a superstar designer to replace Esslinger, thinking the firm needed someone with a world-class reputation.
In early 1988, they embarked on a global tour of the world’s most famous design studios on a quest to find a spectacular talent. They traveled to Europe and Asia, interviewing design firms like Porsche Design Studio. They visited top designers in Tokyo, London and Berlin, but none were quite right. In Italy, they visited Mario Bellini (the so-called crown prince of Italian design), who rudely dismissed them. Not to waste the trip, a meeting was set up with Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who in the next decade would be named “Car Designer of the Century.” Hired by Fiat at age seventeen, he was responsible for scores of gorgeous Bugattis, BMWs, Maseratis and Ferraris and was synonymous with Italian style, having designed more cars than anyone else in the twentieth century.
Apple executives visited Giugiaro in his giant, factory-like, ultra-secure Italdesign studio near Turin. They found him sketching with one hand, talking on the phone with the other, continually issuing orders to his many minions. The executives were so impressed, they gave “Il Maestro” a million-dollar contract to design concepts for just four products, which they wished to use as models for a whole line of products. Their hopes soon fell flat.
Accustomed to designing cars, Giugiaro worked from the outside in. He would make loose, impressionistic sketches of cars, which his model makers would use to make 1:1 clay models. Often, the finished models would differ quite a lot from the sketches. Over several months, the Apple engineers discovered that the Italdesign model makers made many design decisions; a Giugiaro sketch was more inspiration than blueprint. That was the opposite of the way things were done in California, so when Giugiaro applied the same methods to the Apple commission—his model makers designed the computer casings using clay, just as they would high-end Italian sports cars—the lack of regard to the internal components meant the models didn’t translate to manufacturable products.
