Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [25]
Jobs disliked this amateurish, hobbyist aesthetic. He wanted to sell finished computers to paying customers, the more the merrier. To appeal to ordinary consumers, Apple’s computers had to look like real products, not half-finished Heathkits. What computers needed were nice cases that signaled their function as consumer products. The idea was to build ready-assembled computing appliances—an appliance good to go, no assembly required, like a coffeemaker. Plug it in and you’re ready to start computing.
Jobs’s design crusade began with the Apple II, which came off the drawing board shortly after the company’s incorporation in 1976. While Wozniak worked on the groundbreaking hardware (for which he won a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame), Jobs focused on the case. “It was clear to me that for every hardware hobbyist who wanted to assemble his own computer, there were a thousand people who couldn’t do that but wanted to mess around with programming . . . just like I did when I was 10. My dream for the Apple II was to sell the first real packaged computer . . . I got a bug up my rear that I wanted the computer in a plastic case.”3
No one else was putting computers in plastic cases. To figure out what it might look like, Jobs began scouting department stores for inspiration. He found it in the kitchen section of Macy’s while looking at Cuisinart food processors. Here was what the Apple II needed: a nice molded plastic case with smooth edges, muted colors, and a lightly textured surface.
Knowing nothing about industrial design, Jobs went looking for a professional designer. Typically, he started at the top. He approached two of Silicon Valley’s top design firms, but was rejected because he didn’t have enough money. He offered them stock in Apple, which was worthless at the time but would soon be worth millions; they refused. They’d later regret that decision.
Asking around, Jobs eventually found Jerry Manock, a freelance designer who’d just left Hewlett-Packard a month before and needed work. It was a good match. Jobs had only a little money, and Manock was nearly broke. “When Steve asked me to design the case for the Apple II, it didn’t occur to me to say no,” he said. “But I did ask to be paid in advance.”4
Manock designed a utilitarian case whose shape was dictated by Wozniak’s motherboard. The most important consideration was that it could be quickly and cheaply cast. Manock put a sloping wedge at the front for the built-in keyboard, and made it taller at the back to accommodate the expansion slots. Jobs wanted it to look pretty when users opened the case, and asked Manock to have the cases chromed inside, but Manock ignored him and Jobs didn’t press it.
To get the case ready for the Apple II’s big debut at the first West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977 (which is now considered the event that heralded the birth of the personal computer industry), Manock had a small batch of cases made at a local low-price plastic molding shop. When the molds came back they were pretty rough. They had to be sanded to make the lids fit the bases, and some had to be filled and painted to look presentable. Manock prepared twenty for the Faire, but only three were finished with circuit boards inside. Jobs put these machines on the front desk. He stacked the remaining empty machines—very professionally—at the back of the booth. “Compared to the primitive stuff on view elsewhere at the Faire, our finished plastic blew everyone away,” recalled Manock. “Even though Apple was only a few months old, the plastic cases made it look like we had already achieved high-volume production.”5
The molded case helped Jobs position the Apple II as a consumer item, just as Hewlett-Packard had done with the pocket