Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (19 page)

For reasons that no one seems to remember, P-68 came to be known among insiders as “Project Dulcimer.” Jobs had green-lighted it, but one main player on the project, Tony Fadell, not only didn’t work at Apple, he didn’t particularly want to. Fadell pitched Rubinstein on awarding the job to his start-up on a contract basis, but Rubinstein refused. Instead, he extended the reluctant Fadell’s contract.

As the project moved forward, however, Rubinstein got more and more uncomfortable with the arrangement: He wanted Fadell on board full time at Apple. Four weeks after the initial meeting with Jobs, Fadell was slated to present the iPod to a team of twenty-five Apple bigwigs, including Jony (who, at that stage, knew nothing of the new player’s progress). With Fadell busy streamlining his ideas, Rubinstein devised an ultimatum to get him to sign on with Apple.

Before the meeting—with Jony and the others waiting—Rubinstein gave Fadell a choice. If Fadell wasn’t going to take the job, Rubinstein threatened to call off the meeting. If Fadell didn’t sign on to Apple on their terms, it would be the end of the project and the end of the iPod.

Fadell took the meeting and the job.

Once on staff, Fadell assumed charge of the project’s engineering. Robbin headed up the software and interface team, while Rubinstein oversaw everything. The collective responsibility was obvious enough: create a product to satisfy Jobs’s desire for an MP3 player worthy of the Apple marque and to do it by the looming deadline. The team’s newest member, Jony Ive, would be responsible for the look, workmanship and usability of the finished product.

To meet the tight production deadline, Fadell matched up the drive from Toshiba with a cell phone battery and screen from Sony; a stereo digital-to-analog converter from a small Scottish company, Wolfson Microelectronics; a FireWire interface controller from Texas Instruments; a flash memory chip from Sharp Electronics; a power management/battery charging chip from Linear Technologies Inc.; and an MP3 decoder and controller chip from PortalPlayer.

Fadell took a trip to Asia to meet with suppliers. He didn’t tell them exactly what they might be building, but presented some vague specs for the work Apple wanted.

The earliest prototypes were built in reinforced Perspex boxes about the size of shoe boxes, which made them easy to debug. The big shoe boxes also helped disguise the fact they were working on a music player, because the team couldn’t tell anyone what they were working on, even inside the company. To further obscure what they were doing, the teams put the buttons and screen in different places each time a new prototype was made. One engineer noted that it was all a silly subterfuge; a single look inside revealed immediately it was a small pocket device.

Jony’s role, as he recalled later, was to help fulfill the design brief they’d been handed for Project Dulcimer. It was, in short, to create something “very, very new.”
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“From early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn’t think of it as having been designed,” Jony explained. The shape wasn’t the issue—“it could have been shaped like a banana if we’d wanted.”
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Given the parts of the device (the screen, the chip, the battery), the elements sandwiched naturally together into a box. “Sometimes things are really clear from the materials they are made from, and this was one of those times,” said Rubinstein. “It was obvious how it was going to look when it was put together.”
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Jony named Richard Howarth the lead designer, and they used Fadell’s chunk of Foam Core as a reference. The big challenge was to design the user interface. Locating the screen was an issue, and so was whether or not to use buttons. The method of selecting songs was critical. The process inevitably reduced and reduced, resulting in a device with four buttons mounted on a dial.

Jobs worked on the interface with Tim Wasko, a veteran user interface (UI) designer who’d been at NeXT. Wasko was also working with Robbin on the UI for iTunes. He’d previously impressed Jobs with the metallic interface he created for QuickTime 4, which Jobs eventually adopted in most of Apple’s software, so he was given the job of figuring out the UI for the iPod.

He started by mapping out all the options a user would face when selecting a song: the artists, their albums and finally all the songs on a particular album. “When I diagrammed it out it was a series of lists connected to each other,” he said. “It was a question of pressing a button to go down to the next list, and pressing another button to come back up.”
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Wasko created a demo in Adobe Director, a multimedia authoring
program, that was pretty simple and straightforward. Before he showed it to Jobs, he replaced the original cursor keys from a keyboard with a USB jog wheel for editing video. The jog wheel had a central dial for scrubbing through video, and several buttons above and below it. Wasko drew paper labels for the four buttons on the bottom (play/pause, backward, forward and menu) and ignored the buttons on top. It worked great. Jobs was delighted with the system but pushed Wasko to get rid of the fourth button. Wasko should have known better. “If you give Steve one thing, he’s going to hate it, even if it’s great,” remembered Wasko. “So you have to make some other crap to put on the table.”

Wasko had brought nothing to sacrifice, and so he tried to find a way to get rid of one of the buttons. He labored for weeks but he just couldn’t find a way to navigate the hierarchy with just three buttons. “We worked our butts off on that thing,” he said.

Jobs finally acquiesced to the extra button, and Wasko took his Mac and jog wheel over to show Jony at the ID studio. “It was a quick meeting,” Wasko said. “They already knew it was going to be a wheel. I just showed Jony how the interface worked.”

Jony started experimenting with different places to put the screen and scroll wheel, but the options were limited. His team initially wanted to put four buttons above the wheel, just below the screen, but then decided to put the buttons around the scroll wheel instead. This made them easy to press with a thumb while turning the wheel.

“Steve Jobs made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Jony would tell the
New York Times
. “It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device—which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.”
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To the consternation of a lot of users and reviewers, at least at first,
an on-off button was omitted. The idea of pressing any button to turn the device on—and then to have it turn itself off after a period of inactivity—was a stroke of minimalist genius.

“As such a radically new product, the iPod was inherently so compelling that it seemed appropriate for the design effort to be to simplify, remove and reduce,” Jony said.
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Other standard features of portable consumer electronics disappeared too, among them the battery compartment. Most gadgets had removable batteries, meaning they need a battery door, plus an internal wall to seal the device’s guts from the user when the battery door is opened. Jony dispensed with both. A tighter, smaller product resulted, and Apple’s research had already shown that no one changed their batteries anyway, even if they said they did. The sealed battery would cause an outcry, of course, because users (and reviewers especially) had come to expect a replaceable battery as a standard feature. But dispensing with it allowed the iPod’s case to be just two pieces, comprising a stainless steel back, called the “canoe,” which snapped into an acrylic face via an internal latching mechanism. Fewer parts also meant fewer “tolerances” (gaps) in manufacturing the product (when adjacent components are supposed to be flush, the design must allow for a tolerance; with fewer parts, alignment issues diminish).

Jony would use the same basic schema for subsequent sealed products, including several generations of iPods, the iPhone, iPad and MacBooks. “They are basically a screen and a back cover—just two parts,” said Satzger. “It’s a better product. A much better product.”

The stainless steel back turned out to be a contentious choice: It looked great right out of the box, but was easily scratched and dented. Even if it wasn’t the most obvious choice of material, the stainless steel worked, according to design consultant Chris Lefteri. “It is actually a completely irrational use of that material in that context,” he said,
noting that most other companies would have picked more durable plastic. “To put stainless steel on the back of a portable music player makes no logical sense, because it scratches easily, it dents, it is very heavy—but it absolutely worked.”
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One Apple executive said Jony’s group chose steel simply because it was the thinnest, strongest material they could quickly work with.

Apart from the back, the iPod was “beautifully made,” Lefteri said, demonstrating the design team’s mastery of plastic production techniques at that point. Each iPod case was hand polished, as were the weld lines inside. “Apple did not so much use new materials,” Lefteri explained, “but rather pushed the possibilities of existing ones. . . . That is Apple being very demanding of the materials, very obsessive about the levels of finish.”

The white color of the iPod was Jony’s idea. Jony regarded Apple’s Kubrickian white stage as a reaction to the crazy color stage, which itself was a reaction to beige. “Right from the very first time, we were thinking about the product, we’d seen [the iPod] as stainless steel and white,” he said. “It’s just so . . . so brutally simple. It’s not just a color. Supposedly neutral—but just an unmistakable, shocking neutral.”
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White also sent a message that the machine wouldn’t dominate the user, unlike black tech products that tended to come off as “technical” or “nerdy.”

“Shockingly neutral white” became the new normal for all of Apple’s consumer products at the time. The new iMac and iBooks, as yet unreleased, were also fashioned in white plastic. “There was a whole new design language going through the shop,” said the former executive. Product designer Satzger’s recollections agree: “The iPod was white because the second-generation iBook was white. Most of the things Jony Ive did historically at design school back in England were white, and he started pushing white at Apple.”

Initially, Jobs’s instincts were against white products. Satzger at one
point developed a keyboard in arctic white; when Jobs hated it, he’d presented different shades, none of them strictly white. His range of whites for plastic materials included shades he called cloud white, snow white, and glacial white. Another was moon gray, which appeared white but was actually gray. When Satzger showed Jobs a moon gray chip, he could offer reassuringly, “It’s not white.” A sly move, as Jobs approved the moon gray keyboard. Likewise, the iconic iPod headphone cables weren’t white, but moon gray. “Moon gray and seashell gray were shades developed by us at Apple that were so close to white as to appear almost white, but were in fact gray,” explained Satzger.

The white plastic face of the iPod was coated with a very thin, transparent Perspex layer that gave it its sheen. The transparent layer was raised so little above the iPod’s front that it could only be seen when held sideways on. This was the iPod’s clear, sealed lid. The clear coating also put “quite a strong, almost a halo around the product,” said Jony.
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It dazzled.

With the iPod coming together, everyone got more and more excited. Steve Jobs was working almost every day with Robbin and Wasko on iTunes and the UI, while Jony and his team were occupied with perfecting the ID. The pressure to deliver was high but, even at the time, the team sensed they were making something remarkable. “The design of the iPod turned into a really personal project,” said Jony. “I mean, I love music. The team loves music. And I think collectively, it’s a product we’re looking forward to getting our hands on.”
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New prototypes had to be delivered on Fridays, which was unusual, because prototypes were usually on hand in the middle of the week so that they could be worked on during rest of the week. Though Jobs’s daily involvement wasn’t widely known because the project was siloed, some members of the Dulcimer team suspected that Jobs was taking the prototypes home on Fridays, and playing with them over the weekend.
One reason for such suspicions was the rash of new demands that arrived on many a Monday.

Prior to launch of the new player, nothing was left out of consideration, including the new product’s packaging. The packaging became almost as important as the overall product design. Previously, boxes were designed primarily for shipping, but with the iPod, the design team focused on the customer, rather than the transport company. The decision was made to design separate shipping containers and retail boxes so the customer wouldn’t be taking home his or her iPod in a plain-Jane shipping box. The result was an elaborate box that cradled the iPod like a piece of jewelry. “The iPod was the first product where we thought about the packaging as almost as important as the overall product design,” Satzger explained. “Packaging, it’s just as important as everything else.”

In August, one of the physical iPod prototypes finally played a song. A group of people working late that night took turns listening to music on the new gadget, hooked up to headphones from someone’s old Sony Walkman. That first song was Spiller’s “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love),” a house-music dance tune with vocals by the British diva Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

“Oh, my God,” Jobs said. “This is gonna be so cool.”
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“We have something really exciting for you today,” said Steve Jobs on October, 23, 2001, at a special press event on Apple’s campus. Jobs had asked only a few dozen journalists to a product unveiling. The invite said simply, “Hint: It’s not a Mac.” Just a month after the September 11 attacks, and the world was still shell-shocked and, by Jobs’s showman standards, the event was low-key.

When Jobs first pulled the iPod from his jeans pocket, the reaction from the audience was muted. It didn’t seem that exciting, especially when the audience learned of its price: $499. Nearly $500 for an MP3 player—and one that worked only on the Mac, not Windows—seemed unrealistically high. Early reviewers were just as skeptical, with one saying that iPod stood for “Idiots Price Our Devices.”
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The iPod sold only modestly at first and didn’t take off until two years later, when it was made fully compatible with Windows. Still, the seeds of the iPod’s success were sown with the first device and Jony was confident in the new product.

“Our goal was to design the very, very best MP3 player we could; to design something that could become an icon,” Jony said in the iPod’s first promotional video.
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Looking back on the process, Jobs believed the creation of the iPod was quintessential Apple. “If there was ever a product that catalyzed Apple’s reason for being, it’s this,” he said, “because it combines Apple’s incredible technology base with Apple’s legendary ease of use with Apple’s awesome design. Those three things come together in this, and it’s like, that’s what we do. So if anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example.”
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Yet it was also an odd-duck project, led by engineering, not Jony’s design group as most of the products up to that time had been. Because of the rush to market, it was assembled from off-the-shelf parts and Jony was brought in to do a hated “skin job.” Yet he managed to put his mark on it by making it white, the color he’d championed for high-tech products since he was in college.

The project also earned him the nickname “Jony iPod,” and launched an armada of white tech products. The iPod would do for white what the iMac had done for translucent plastic. And Jony accomplished this tidal shift against the wishes of Steve Jobs, who had initially resisted white products.

The iPod introduced numerous design features that would be used to dramatic effect in subsequent products, including Apple’s first touch interface (albeit a simple one). The iPod set the standard for many later products with its sealed case, compact design and radical ease of use—all Jony’s team’s work. It was also Apple’s first mobile product in the Jony/Jobs era; its development allowed Jony’s team to perfect the design and manufacture of portable products, thereby setting the standard for seamless cases and sealed batteries that eventually the whole industry adopted.

The iPod stands as a remarkable accomplishment. U2’s Bono put its charm rather neatly when he said of the iPod, “It’s sexy.” Another adjective applies too: ubiquitous. The iPod’s appeal soon made the device a phenomenon.

“[The iPod] was the first cultural icon of the 21st century,” said Dr. Michael Bull, a lecturer at the University of Sussex whose studies have earned him the nickname “Professor iPod.” “Roland Barthes argued that, in medieval society, cathedrals were the iconic form. Then, by the 1950s, it had become the car. . . . I argue that 50 years later, it was the iPod, this technology that let you fit your whole world into your pocket. It was representative of a key moment in the social world of the 21st century.”
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