Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [31]
“It’s sad and frustrating that we are surrounded by products that seem to testify to a complete lack of care,” said Apple design head Jonathan Ive. “That’s an interesting thing about an object. One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities.”
Apple outsources most of its manufacturing, but not the design of its products. Quite the opposite. Apple’s industrial designers are intimately involved from the very first meeting.
Jonathan Ive, the Designer
An Englishman in his late thirties, Ive has a muscular wrestler’s build and his hair is closely cropped. He looks like a skinhead, but he is friendly and approachable. Ive is extremely soft-spoken, almost shy, which is quite unusual for someone in his position at the top of a hard-driving corporation like Apple. He’s so retiring, he once had Jobs get up on stage to accept an award for him, even though he was sitting right there in the audience.
The awards have come thick and fast. Ive has twice been named Designer of the Year by London’s prestigious Design Museum. In 2006, he was made a Commander of the British Empire, an honor awarded by the British monarch.
Ive can be hard to pin down on specifics. He has a tendency to talk in the abstract, and sometimes slips into corporate speak. He deflects personal questions, but get him talking about design and it’s hard to shut him up. He talks design with great enthusiasm, gesticulating passionately and scrunching his fingers for emphasis.
At one of Apple’s product presentations, I asked him for a couple of quick comments about the design of the aluminum case that houses Apple’s high-end professional workstations (the same case has been used for several years in a string of products, from the Power Mac G5 in 2003 to the current Mac Pro), which are made from austere slabs of raw aluminum that are as unadorned as the alien monolith in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey.
He was only too delighted to describe the philosophy—and all the hard work—behind the design of the machine. Like his boss, Ive is driven to simplify. He described the design process as one of simplification through iteration after iteration. “I guess every time you do something, you feel particularly pleased with something you just developed,” he said. “This one was really hard.” Ive walked over to a display model sitting nearby. He indicated its plain aluminum case. “There’s an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there’s real simplicity,” he said. “This looks simple, because it really is.”
Ive said keeping it simple was the overall design philosophy for the machine. “We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don’t see that effort,” he said. “We kept going back to the beginning again and again. ‘Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?’ It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for people to work with.”
Ive then launched into a passionate twenty-minute tour and description of the new computer’s design. He would have gone on longer if he hadn’t been cut short by a member of Apple’s PR team, who reminded him he had other appointments. Ive couldn’t help himself. Design is his vocation. Get him started, and he’ll talk at length with great sincerity and enthusiasm about the design of something as deceptively simple as a latch for an access panel. In parting, I asked Ive to compare the Power Mac G5 with high-design computers from the world of Windows PCs, such as those from Alienware or Falcon Northwest. These machines have sometimes tended to look like hot rod muscle cars, decorated with painted flames or chrome grilles.
“It’s really much more potent when you don’t put on a veneer pretending to be powerful,” he said. “I see it