How Jony Ive saved Apple from bankruptcy

He’s the London-born designer who turned an ailing brand into the behemoth it is today. Leander Kahney counts the ways Jony Ive saved Apple from crumbling
Leander Kahney27 November 2013

Jony Ive is the most celebrated designer of his generation. He’s won every award under the sun, from Designer of the Year to the BBC’s “Most Influential Person on British Culture” (he beat JK Rowling and Ricky Gervais). By March 2013, the 46-year-old was named in more than 600 patents; and all this in a stretch of just 10 years. And in the nearly two decades that Ive has been at Apple, the company has pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy and is now one of the world’s most valuable companies. So how did the Chingford-born Ive put the “i” in Apple?

It was 1997. Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple. The company was struggling badly. Microsoft put the boot in with Windows 95, and Apple was just months from bankruptcy.

The problem? The products stank. Apple made boring beige boxes that cost twice as much as anything else. To save the company, Jobs cut the company back to the bone. But he needed a hit, and he needed it fast. Ive was already there, running a design department that struggled to get management’s attention. Jobs was about to fire the entire crew when he took a tour of the studio. What he saw astounded him: it was full of colourful, plastic computers that the previous management was too timid to release.

Jobs and Ive set about making a computer that was dead easy to get on the internet. It was a huge risk. They bet the company on it. If it failed, Apple was going out of business. To give it personality, Ive persuaded Jobs to make it in bulbous, see-through plastic. He added a handle, not for carrying, but to encourage people to touch it, which made it less intimidating, more approachable.

The iMac was a mega hit, and it changed the computer industry for ever. No longer did consumers much care about megahertz, they wanted gadgets with personality. They wanted tech that was easy to use. They craved devices that could be shown off instead of hidden under a desk.

FIVE WAYS IVE MADE APPLE ICONIC

1. White

Making the iPod white was Ive’s idea. He’d grown tired of the multicoloured crazy colour stage, itself a reaction to beige. At first, Steve Jobs was against the idea, so Ive’s designers showed him prototypes of products in very light grey, which weren’t technically white but very close. Jobs reluctantly agreed, and soon everything going through the design department was in white. The iPod, with its telltale white earbuds, was the first one to make a splash.

White sent a message that the gadget wouldn’t dominate the user, unlike black tech products that tended to come off as “technical” or “nerdy”. The new iMac and iBooks, as yet unreleased, were also fashioned in white plastic. Curiously, all the things Ive did at design school years before were white, and he started pushing white at Apple.

2. Plastic

The iMac was going to be made in plastic — it would be an “unashamedly plastic” product, in Ive’s words — but plastic came with difficulties. “We didn’t want it to look trashy,” Ive explained later. “There’s a fine line you walk between affordable and cheap.”

To make it look classy, Ive and his designers made it transparent. There was also a subtle psychological reason. You can see inside transparent objects, which make them just a little less more mysterious. It was a time when technology was intimidating to a lot of people, and Ive worked hard to make it as friendly and as “transparent” as possible.

3. Lamp shaped desktop (iMac G4)

Ive always wanted Apple’s computers to have flat screens but in the early days the technology wasn’t there. In 2002, he and Jobs hit on the idea of separating the screen from the guts. The iMac G4 went on to become one of Apple’s most iconic products but it was one of the hardest engineering challenges Ive’s team faced.

For two-an-a-half years they tried all kinds of solutions. The answer was a stainless steel neck that borrowed heavily from the spring mechanism in the famous Anglepoise lamp.

The guts crammed a computer, drives, and a power supply into its hemispherical base. Ive says the design of the iMac G4 was ingenious not because of its shape but its unexpected unobtrusiveness. Although it looked like a freaky lamp on approach, everything but the screen disappears when you sit in front of it.

4. Aluminium

Eager to move away from plastic, Ive started investigating metals. His first experiments were with exotic metals such as titanium, which are light and strong but hard to work with. Ive’s first foray into aluminium would be the iPod Mini and it would influence a whole generation of products.

Like the iMac before it, the iPod Mini would come in a range of colours. Unlike with stainless steel, you could blast it and then anodise it to get interesting colours in a new way. Aluminium looked like a good material for laptop cases and iPods. It is strong and light, and it can be finished in a range of colours when an anodised coating is bonded to the metal.

Ive and his crew started researching camera manufacturers such as Sony, which produced a lot of cameras in aluminium. They tried to work with an American company to build the machine in the US but the Americans thought they were crazy. Instead they took it to Foxconn in China, which bent over backwards to make the computer to Ive’s standards.

Soon Apple had moved most of its manufacturing to Foxconn. But getting the clean look with the new material proved to be a challenge. As they struggled, one member of the team suggested that the case could be done by the process of roll-forming, the way steel gutters are made. A flat sheet of aluminium could be bent at various points as it is passed through a series of rollers to make the lozenge shape. The sheets were roll-formed into a C shape, with a large door installed on the open side. At first, Ive’s team were concerned about the two small joints on the open side (they wanted it seamless) but decided they could live with it because the joints couldn’t be seen from the front. When the first cases came off the line, Ive saw that the new machine would become a showpiece.

5. Touch-screens

We’re in the middle of the biggest shift in personal technology — the mobile revolution. Over the next few years, smartphones and tablets are going to be orders of magnitudes bigger than PCs ever were. The next billion internet users, for example, are going to be Africans connecting with smartphones.

It began with the iPhone, which was born in Ive’s design lab. A group of Apple engineers was trying to make smart trackpads that could replace the mouse and keyboard on a computer. Ive’s design team soon realised that the raw technology could be used to make a tablet.

The first prototype was made out of a notebook screen hooked to a giant computer. When Jobs saw it, he again bet the company on it. Apple’s best and brightest spent almost three years developing touchscreen technology behind the scenes — if it had failed, Apple would have been in deep trouble. The iPhone came first, in 2007, and three years later, in 2010, Apple launched the first iPad.

Apple has sold more than 400 million iPhones and 170 million iPads — the biggest-selling products in history.

Jony Ive by Leander Kahney (Portfolio Penguin, £14.99) is published on Thursday.

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