Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [30]
Grudgingly, the hardware engineers created a new design, investing several thousand dollars to produce a prettier circuit board. But, as predicted, the new motherboard didn’t work, and Jobs was forced to drop the idea.13
Jobs’s insistence on excellence sometimes delays products; and he’s quite willing to kill projects that his team has worked on for years. But his unwillingness to compromise ensures that Apple products are never rushed out of the door until they are polished to his satisfaction. Like the great carpenter, he takes an artisanal approach to mass-produced products.
The Great Washing Machine Debate
Jobs famously lived in a mansion in the early eighties that was nearly empty of furniture because he couldn’t bear substandard furnishings. He slept on a mattress, surrounded by a few giant photographic prints. Eventually he bought a German grand piano, even though he didn’t play, because he admired its design and craftsmanship. When Apple’s former CEO John Sculley visited Jobs, he was shocked by the unkempt appearance of the house. It looked abandoned, especially compared with the perfectly manicured palaces surrounding it. “I’m sorry I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs apologized to Sculley, “I just haven’t gotten around to it.”14
Sculley said Jobs was unwilling to settle for anything but the best. “I remember going to Steve’s house and he had no furniture; he just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed,” Sculley told me. “He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around, but he was incredibly careful what he selected.”15
Jobs has a lot of trouble shopping. At one point, when searching for a new cell phone, he couldn’t decide which one to buy because he disliked all of them. “I end up not buying a lot of things,” he said in response to a query about what gadgets and technologies he buys, “because I find them ridiculous.”16
When he does go shopping, the process can be laborious. Searching for a new washing machine and dryer, Jobs roped his whole family into a two-week debate about which model to select. The Jobs family didn’t base its decision on a quick glance at the features and the price, like most other families would. Instead, the discussion revolved around American versus European design, the amount of water and detergent consumed, the speed of the wash, and the longevity of the clothes.
“We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.”17
In the end, Jobs opted for German appliances, which he thought were “too expensive” but washed clothes well with little water and detergent. “They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about,” Jobs said. “These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.”
The great washing machine debate seems excessive, but Jobs brings the same values—and the same process—to the task of developing products at Apple. Industrial design at Apple isn’t treated as the final gloss on a product that’s already been engineered, as it is at