Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [28]
Oyama made a preliminary plaster model and Jobs gathered most of the development team to critique it. Andy Hertzfeld, a key member of the team who wrote a lot of the system software, thought it was cute and attractive and had a distinct personality. But Jobs saw room for improvement. “After everyone else had their say, Steve cut loose with a torrent of merciless criticism. ‘It’s way too boxy, it’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bezel. But it’s a start,’” Hertzfeld recalled. “I didn’t even know what a chamfer was, but Steve was evidently fluent in the language of industrial design, and extremely demanding about it.”8
Jobs paid close attention to every detail. Even the mouse was designed to reflect the shape of the computer: it had the same dimensions, and its single square button corresponded to the shape and placement of the screen.
There was only one switch on the Mac—the on/off switch. It was put at the back, where the user couldn’t accidentally hit it and turn off the computer. Because it was hidden at the back, Manock thoughtfully put a smooth area around the switch to make it easy to find by touch. By Manock’s estimation, it was this kind of attention to detail that elevated the Mac into an object of historical interest. “That’s the kind of detail that turns an ordinary product into an artifact,” Manock said.
Jobs also gave a lot of thought to the way the Mac’s design could be fashioned to determine the user’s interaction with it. For example, he removed all the function keys and cursor arrows, which were standard issue on keyboards at the time. He didn’t want users hitting function keys to interact with the machine—they would have to use the mouse instead. It was an early example of function following form. The absence of these keys had another, secondary effect: it required software developers to completely rewrite their programs for the Mac interface, instead of simply porting over their Apple II software with minimal changes. The Mac’s GUI represented a new way to interact with computers, and Jobs wanted to force software developers to fully embrace it.
Every month for several months, Manock and Oyama made new models, and Jobs assembled the team for their feedback. Every time there was a new model, all the old ones were lined up next to it for comparison. “By the fourth model, I could barely distinguish it from the third one, but Steve was always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that I could barely perceive,” Hertzfeld recalled. Manock and Oyama made five or six prototypes before Jobs finally gave his approval, and then they turned their attention to making it into a mass-produced case. To celebrate—and to acknowledge the artistry of the entire effort—Jobs held a “signing party,” which was celebrated with champagne and the signing of the inside of the case by key members of the team. “Artists sign their work,” Jobs explained. 9
The Mac team would be no different.
However, when the Mac was finally released in January 1984, it was seriously underpowered. To save money, Jobs had given it only 128K of memory, a fraction of what it needed. Simple operations like copying files were painful affairs requiring users to swap floppy disks in and out of the disk drive. Early users loved the Mac in principle, but not in practice. “What I (and I think everybody else who bought the machine in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine,” wrote science fiction author Douglas Adams.10
The Mac shows Jobs’s commitment to making technology for the masses. He wanted a friendly, approachable “volkscom puter” that was instantly usable by everyone and anyone—and he would achieve that through good design. He was also developing what would become his signature design process—“discovering