Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [27]
Apple’s Snow White designs went on to win scores of design awards, and the ideas eventually became so widely adopted by competitors that they became the unspoken industry standard for case design. All the beige computers shipped throughout the 1980s and 1990s by Dell, IBM, Compaq, and others now look pretty much the same and that’s because of Snow White.
The Macintosh, Jobs’s “Volkscomputer”
Before Esslinger became Jobs’s main designer, Jobs was already honing his design sensibilities. In 1984, while working on the original Macintosh, Jobs began to develop a design process marked by the constant revision of prototypes. Under his close guidance, Jobs charged Manock to come up with the Mac’s exterior case. Then a full-time Apple employee, Manock worked closely with another talented Apple designer, Terry Oyama, who did most of the initial drafting.
Jobs wanted the Mac to be a kind of crankless Volkswagen—a cheap, democratic computer for the masses. To make his “volks computer” cheap to produce, Jobs took a leaf from the book of one of his heroes, Henry Ford. Jobs would offer only one configuration for the Mac, like the Model T, which notoriously was said to come in any color as long as it was black. The original Mac would come in beige, and it would have no expansion slots and very limited memory. These were controversial decisions at the time, and many predicted they would doom the machine. No one would buy such an underpowered computer that couldn’t be easily upgraded. But like Ford, Jobs made the decision primarily to save money on production costs. But it also had a secondary effect that Jobs predicted would be beneficial to the consumer: it simplified the machine.
Jobs wanted the Mac to be immediately accessible to anyone who picked it up, whether they’d laid eyes on a computer before or not. He insisted the new owner shouldn’t have to set it up; they shouldn’t have to plug the monitor into the case; and they definitely shouldn’t have to learn any arcane commands to use it.
To make it easy to set up, Jobs and the design team decided the Mac’s screen, its disk drives, and its circuitry would all be housed in the same case, with a detachable keyboard and mouse that plugged into the back. This all-in-one design would allow them to dispense with all the wires and plugs of other PCs. And to make it smaller on the desk, the Mac would have a then-unusual vertical orientation. This put the disk drive below the monitor, instead of to the side like other machines at the time, which were shaped like flat pizza boxes.
The upright layout gave the Mac an anthropomorphic appearance: it looked like a face. The slot for the disk drive resembled a mouth and the keyboard recess at the bottom, the chin. Jobs seized on this. He wanted the Mac to be friendly and easy to use, and guided the design team to make the case “friendly.” At first, the designers had no idea what he meant. “Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” Oyama said later. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”7
Jobs disliked the design of the Mac’s predecessor, the Lisa, which had a thick band of plastic above its screen. It reminded Jobs of a Cro-Magnon forehead. He insisted the Mac’s forehead be much slimmer and more intelligent. Jobs also wanted the case to be durable and scratch resistant. Manock selected a grade of tough ABS plastic—the kind used for Lego bricks—and gave it a fine texture that would disguise scuffs. Manock colored it beige, Pantone 453, which he thought would age well in sunlight. Lighter colors used in earlier machines turned an ugly bright orange. Plus, an earth tone seemed to be the best color to blend into offices and homes, and it was similar