Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [24]
But when the iMacs slid out, the lights beaming brightly down on them, the reporter was extremely impressed. He wrote: “And you know what? He’s right. The iMacs do look better when the lights come on earlier. Odwalla bottles are better with twist-off caps. The common man did want colorful computers that delivered plug-and-play access to the Internet.”1
Jobs is a stickler for detail. He’s a fussy, pain-in-the-ass perfectionist who drives subordinates crazy with his persnickety demands. But where some see picky perfectionism, others see the pursuit of excellence.
Jobs’s Pursuit of Perfection
Jobs’s no-compromise ethos has inspired a unique approach to developing products at Apple. Under his guidance, products are developed through nearly endless rounds of mockups and prototypes that are constantly edited and revised. This is true for both hardware and software. Products are passed back and forth among designers, programmers, engineers, and managers, and then back again. It’s not serial. There are lots and lots of meetings and brainstorming sessions. The work is revised over and over, with an emphasis on simplification as it evolves. It’s a fluid, iterative process that sometimes means going back to the drawing board, or scrapping the product altogether.
Like the introduction of the iMacs, things are done over and over again until they are done right.
Throughout the design process, Jobs insists on an unprecedented attention to detail that ensures that Apple turns out products with a fit and finish worthy of an artisan. Apple’s products have consistently won design awards big and small, and instill in customers a loyalty bordering on mania.
Jobs’s pursuit of excellence is the secret of Apple’s great design. For Jobs, design isn’t decoration. It’s not the surface appearance of a product. It’s not about the color or the stylistic details. For Jobs, design is the way the product works. Design is function, not form. And to properly figure out how the product works, it has to be thoroughly hashed out in the design process. As Jobs explained in a 1996 interview with Wired: “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”
The original Macintosh took three years to design. Three years of incredibly hard work. It wasn’t knocked out in the hectic schedule typical of many technology products. It went through revision after revision. Every aspect of its design, from the precise beige of its case to the symbols on the keyboard, was exhaustively worked on, and worked on, and worked on, until it was right. As the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi said: “Simplicity is complexity resolved.”
“When you start looking at a problem and think it’s really simple, you don’t understand how complex the problem really is,” Jobs told the Mac’s designers in 1983. “Once you get into the problem . . . you see that it’s complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level. That’s what we wanted to do with the Mac.”2
In the Beginning
Of course, part of design is aesthetics. Jobs’s interest in computer aesthetics goes all the way back to the company’s first computer, the Apple I. Designed by Steve Wozniak and assembled by hand in Jobs’s parents’ garage, the Apple I was little more than a bare-bones motherboard covered in a few chips. At the time, personal computers were sold to a tiny niche audience: