Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [97]
Much of the design of the case was dictated by the computer. It had to have a removable lid, be high enough to house the cards that would slot into the motherboard, and be large enough to let some of the heat from the power supply dissipate. Mannock completed the drawings within three weeks. “I did a very conservative design that would blend in with other things. I wanted a good, honest statement in plastic and the minimum amount of visual clutter.” Once the general shape was settled there were only a few changes. A pair of indented handles on the side were eliminated because the whole case was slim enough to be gripped between thumb and pinkie. While Jobs was enthusiastic about the drawings Mannock presented for the case, he steadfastly refused to pay for a $300 foam-core mock-up produced for an advertisement.
Just as Ron Wayne’s design for the case was set to one side, so was his original logo with its academic overtones. At the Regis McKenna Agency Rob Janov, a young art director, was assigned to the Apple account and set about designing a corporate logo. Armed with the idea that the computers would be sold to consumers and that their machine was one of the few to offer color, Janov set about drawing still lifes from a bowl of apples. “I wanted to simplify the shape of an apple.” He gouged a rounded chunk from one side of the Apple, seeing this as a playful comment on the world of bits and bytes but also as a novel design. To Janov the missing portion “prevented the apple from looking like a cherry tomato.” He ran six colorful stripes across the Apple, starting with a jaunty sprig of green, and the mixture had a slightly psychedelic tint. The overall result was enticing and warm. Janov recalled Jobs’s demands: “Steve always wanted a very high-quality look. He wanted something that looked expensive and didn’t look like some chunky model airplane.” Jobs was meticulous about the style and appearance of the logo, buzzing to the agency and fretting at Regis McKenna’s home in the evening. When Janov suggested that the six colors be separated by thin strips to make the reproduction easier, Jobs refused.
To manufacture name plates for Apple’s computers, he hunted down the company that made Hewlett-Packard’s labels and came away with embossed logos on strips of thin aluminum. He rejected the first set of labels because the bands of color bled into each other. Most of the other computer companies settled for a plainer look: stamping their names onto sheet metal and refusing to pay the few extra cents to go first class.
Meanwhile, Holt was busy taming the computer. He felt, from the moment Jobs had enticed him to work for Apple, that the only way to produce a reliable, lightweight power supply that would stay cool was to resort to an approach that hadn’t been used by any of the other microcomputer companies. Instead of settling for a conventional linear power supply that hadn’t changed much since the twenties, Holt decided to take a more elaborate tack and adapt a switching power supply he had previously designed for an oscilloscope. A switching power supply was substantially lighter and considerably more complicated than a linear power supply. It took an ordinary household current, switched it on and off with dizzying rapidity, and produced a steady current that wouldn’t blow out any of the expensive memory chips. For computer hobbyists who cursed the heat of the chunky linear power supplies,