Apple in china, p.6
Apple in China, page 6
Apple, of course, played down the decision. A spokesman implied the Dalai Lama just wasn’t well known enough in Asia. But it was an obvious fib. The Asia campaign had instead gone with Amelia Earhart. The removal of the Dalai Lama from the campaign was soon forgotten. But a precedent was set. It’s the first known instance of Apple kowtowing to China. There would be many more to come.
CHAPTER 5 “UNMANUFACTURABLE”—THE iMAC
Chris Novak, recently married and just back from vacation, was getting settled into Apple’s Product Design office on a rainy morning in November 1997 when two of his direct reports walked over. They looked flummoxed. “Chris, have you seen the new model?” asked Ken Jenks. He hadn’t. Jenks told him that he and colleague Glen Walters had visited the Industrial Design studio while Novak was on vacation, and they suggested he go look immediately. “We can’t make it,” Jenks added, “and they’re gonna be pissed!”
It was uncharacteristic of either engineer to be unimaginative or stubborn, so Novak stealthily crossed the two-lane street from his office in Valley Green Six to the Industrial Design studio—the den of creative designers who’d been empowered by Jobs to think radically about the look and feel of Apple products. Laid out before him was a model of the Columbus prototype, soon to be named iMac. It looked like nothing he or anyone else had built before. “Make it lickable,” Jobs had told Jony Ive. And Ive had delivered. The prototype, machined from a durable cast plastic and painted a bright color, was see-through along the sides and around its exterior, and shaped more like an egg than the boxy, angular form of every computer made before it.
Novak eyed the iMac up and down. The plastic casing around the display featured horizontal grooves acting like decorative accent lines. In the back was a recessed handle placed just so, but, curiously, lacking any support structure. “Undercut city” is how Walters described the design, referring to the myriad recesses, cavities, and other cuts to the plastic structure that would necessitate all sorts of complex tooling. Novak was impressed, no doubt; ID was defying all conventions of what was possible in design. But he was scared, too; his team had to transform the pretty prototype into a functioning product—to ensure a computer could be housed inside and then be manufactured at scale. “Oh. My. God!” Novak muttered to himself, realizing Jenks was right. “We can’t make this.”
Novak had been a veteran of Product Design at Apple since 1981, but given all the leadership changes the organization had undergone, he felt like he’d worked for three different companies. Product Design had once been a boundary-breaking innovation hub, but quality deteriorated substantially when Apple had come under pressure from the PC industry. Leadership responded by making faster, cheaper computers that could be assembled easily. “All the designs I was doing at the time were idiot proof,” Novak says. “They snapped together, with giant snaps. You could do it blindly.”
Novak now expected that designs would get more ambitious. He was enthused about the good ol’ days making a comeback, about saving a company following months of existential crisis. But until that rainy morning, nobody had yet experienced what “saving Apple” would mean in practice. Novak stared at the prototype, then shook his head. It was unmanufacturable. Maybe it didn’t defy physics, but it defied the tools they had.
Standstill
The technique Apple would use to build the iMac enclosure dates back to a shortage of billiard balls in the late nineteenth century. The balls were typically made of ivory sourced from tusks, but the game’s popularity was growing faster than hunters could kill elephants. When a billiard equipment maker offered a $10,000 prize—more than $3 million today—for someone to come up with an alternative, an American inventor took up the challenge. He melted plastic, then injected it into a casing—a metal mold in the shape of a small sphere—and let it cool. Once the plastic solidified, he removed the casing and out popped a billiard ball. A patent for plastic injection molding was granted in 1872, and over the next 125 years the process became more intricate, automated, and repeatable. There was nothing unique about plastic injection molding the case of a computer, but Apple’s Industrial Design studio was intent on pushing the boundaries of what was possible.
Novak liked a challenge, but as he squinted at the horizontal lines on the front cover that wrapped around the display, he concluded the design just wasn’t possible. When molding plastic, the steel moves in one direction, but the horizontal texture lines ID had drawn up ran in perpendicular fashion. Technically you could mold one—but just one, because it was never going to come out of the mold. Novak experimented. Failed. Then experimented again.
He took the issue directly to Danny Coster, the New Zealand–born industrial designer who was leading the iMac project. It was Coster, a surfer, who among other things had come up with the computer’s Bondi Blue color, naming it after a beach in Sydney. “Chris, you’re gonna have to do this,” Coster said. “This is what we want. And we know it can be done.” Novak, humbled, gathered every senior tooling engineer at Apple into a single conference room. He showed them the design and asked for ideas on how to pull it off. “And every one of ’em said: ‘No, can’t do it.’ ”
The recessed handle, Novak believed, was another challenge verging on impossible. Referring to ID, he says, “They wanted to make it so you couldn’t tell how it was attached. It wasn’t even visible. And I’m like, ‘This thing’s gonna weigh forty pounds! The handle is gonna come right out when the customer picks it up.’ ” But ID was standing firm. They knew it was going to be difficult. It was supposed to be difficult. Ive and Coster told the engineers: “This will be a world-class design, and we need world-class mechanical engineers and world-class manufacturing engineers.” Anyone who wasn’t up for the challenge could leave.
The stakes were enormous. Steve Jobs knew that Apple couldn’t compete with PCs on price and distribution, so instead he’d developed a hardware strategy to cultivate desire through breathtaking design. Apple’s comeback was premised on this single hit product, the hope being that it would establish a new design language for all Apple hardware. Every talented engineer on the project understood that “this is it, or it’s game over.” But in the very month Jobs originally wanted the computer to be shipping—March 1998—the project had stalled. “We can’t do anything,” an increasingly frustrated Novak told a meeting of engineers. “ID wants it this way. We can’t make it that way. And we’re at a dead stop.” The back-and-forth with ID had lasted months until the standstill. Eventually ID concluded: “Well, Chris is not the world-class engineer we need. Let’s get someone who is.”
Novak, pissed off and offended, was demoted, and replaced by David Hoenig, a thirty-three-year-old mechanical engineer who’d been with Apple since 1994. Hoenig brought new energy to the team but was no less mystified by what ID was trying to accomplish. “The product could not be built,” he says. The problem wasn’t just that you couldn’t mass-manufacture it. “It was as fundamental as you couldn’t build one in the lab,” he says.
Hoenig describes the difficulty of the eggshell shape like this: “Imagine you have an egg that’s horizontal,” he says. “If you cut it at the center, right in half, then there’s a core side and a cavity side, and I can mold that. But the iMac design was like, ‘We wanna go below the halfway point.’ So you have this thing called the undercut. Like, there’s steel that has to be inside of that egg to build a form. How am I gonna pull that inner steel out when I’ve got this egg curving back around? You literally can’t. So we literally couldn’t make it the shape because of the way the curvature was.” Two specialty contractors were brought in to focus on the problem. They tried molding the part so it wasn’t undercut, then forming it into the right shape afterward. Two months went by before they abandoned the effort.
The stress got to the team. “Everything was driven by ID,” Hoenig says, “and they weren’t taking no for an answer.” They demanded constant experimentation. A whole wave of senior engineers who wouldn’t get with the program were let go. Others quit. “They wanted ‘can do—we’ll figure it out’ attitudes,” Hoenig says. “It probably took about six months to a year for them to kinda weed out those more seasoned engineers who said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’
“One Fucking Share of Apple Stock”
Somehow Steve Jobs hadn’t been fully plugged in on just how many problems the manufacturing engineers were having until he showed up for a meeting at Infinite Loop 6, on the fourth floor of Apple’s campus. The iMac team was having a meeting scheduled as a “tooling review,” but once Jobs arrived, the nature of the meeting changed drastically. “Tooling review, my ass,” says one participant, “it was an entire product review.”
Jobs went on a tirade. “Ninety-five fucking hundred jobs are depending on you, and you’ve failed!” Jobs fumed to Jony Ive, hardware chief Jon Rubinstein, technology chief Glen Miranker, director of engineering Josef Friedman, and a few others. “You’ve screwed the pooch,” Jobs continued. “I’m going to sell my one fucking share of Apple stock!”
Jobs, his face red, yelled about their failure, their incapabilities as engineers, their unseriousness. One participant characterized the episode as “explosive rage-fueled profanity,” reminiscent of a mob-run fish market in New Jersey. Brian Berkeley, one of the original engineers on the first Macintosh, arrived late to the meeting just as Jobs was laying into the executives. “I naïvely didn’t fully understand the significance of the iMac until the product design reset meeting,” he said in 2021. “Steve vigorously informed the senior staff present… that we had blown it. I quickly grasped that Apple’s survival really did depend on our project success, and if the team wasn’t focused prior to that time, we surely were afterward.”
Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson briefly recounted the event, with Jony Ive calling the rant one of Jobs’s “displays of awesome fury.” In Isaacson’s telling, quoting Jobs, Apple’s manufacturing engineers “came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn’t do it. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of grudgingly did it.” But Jobs’s recollections of events were often simplified if not fabricated, and this was no exception. The reality was that Jobs told the engineers he would send the blueprints to Acorn, his favorite design consultancy, then located in south Fremont. “I’m gonna send them all of our design files and ask them if they can make this,” Jobs warned, “and if they tell us they can do what you say you can’t do, you guys are all outta here.”
The threat was harsh, but it was a sound strategy. Jobs had inherited Apple’s Product Design team, a ragtag crew of veterans who had survived three CEOs. When they couldn’t make what ID had envisioned, he needed to figure out whether the problem was their incompetence or something else. The two men running Acorn, Ken Haven and Tim Lau, had founded the group in 1993 after building hardware for NeXT. “Ken was a spectacular mechanical problem-solver, of ‘What if we did this?’ kind of ideas,” says an Apple engineer who worked with both. “And Tim was a world-class injection mold tooling debugger of what’s possible. So you put those two together, and they were an unstoppable duo. So if these two couldn’t figure it out, nobody could.”
The duo had proved themselves making the cube-shaped computer at NeXT, when Steve wanted “no draft angles, no parting lines,” meaning that the sides of the cast part would be perfectly parallel to the direction the part was ejected from in the mold. “Tim and Ken figured it out,” this person says. “And it was absurdly expensive, but that was a defining experience. So if Jobs was having a hard problem and these guys say, ‘It cannot be done,’ then it really can’t. But if these guys say, ‘It can,’ then it’s just really hard. Acorn was almost his brain trust or sounding board for, is this possible or is this crazy?”
Tim Lau recalls when he took the phone call and agreed to a meeting. “We were like a 911 design house for them,” he says. “They’d call us if there’s a fire.” So a team of Apple engineers showed up at Acorn with multiple rolls of blueprints and spread them across the table. The group went over the whole design in detail. Lau took a deep look and spotted the same challenges Novak and Hoenig had been stuck on for months. “The biggest issue we saw was there was no structure,” Lau says. The handle wasn’t anchored to anything, nor was there a place it could anchor because the printed circuit board sat directly under it. His conclusion was unequivocal. “You don’t have a quality product,” he told them.
Hard Reset
Getting that message to Jobs wasn’t easy. He would fume about it, and for good reason. “This incident was earthshaking,” says Lau. “This was the first product that Steve was doing after his comeback. If he couldn’t launch it, it was basically the end of Apple.”
Jobs was calmed down by Brian Berkeley and David Lundgren, an MIT-trained engineer who worked with Jobs at Pixar before joining Apple’s Product Design group in 1989. Both had attended the Acorn meeting and had to break the news to him. Jobs then implemented a “hard reset,” with a new goal to ship by August.
Lundgren hadn’t been working on the iMac until now, but he joined the project in a leadership role to manage Product Design. Before he came in, there wasn’t much structure in how the project was scheduled. An engineer would say something would take two weeks, and they’d go off for two weeks, maybe longer, with little communication to the team. Lundgren brought in a top-down view, giving everyone a sense of what was progressing well, what needed work. He also staffed up the project and liaised with ID to improve discussion. “He was our General Patton,” says Bob Olson, a PD veteran who also joined the iMac project.
Several changes were made to get the project over the line, beginning with tweaks from Industrial Design. Jony Ive realized he’d pushed engineering too far. He oversaw changes that made the iMac easier to manufacture and offered more room inside for the logic board. The horizontal pinstripes that were so difficult to make became vertical instead, aligning with the movement of the plastic injection tools. The transparent blue plastic case was redesigned to give only a foggy view into the interior. Tweaks allowed for screws, bolts, and mounts to be carefully hidden below the surface so the recessed handle was structurally robust.
The team created bonds and really started working together. “We didn’t have any trust in that first [attempt] because everything was new to everybody,” says a person from ID. Afterward, “everyone knew that we were absolutely dedicated to making the best possible end result, in quality and volume, of a beautiful unimagined object.” This person emphasizes that the essence of ID’s original vision was maintained. Some things were tradable, but the big idea was never compromised.
Within a few months, ID’s original work didn’t look like a flawed design so much as a leadership exercise. They’d weeded out engineers who weren’t willing to try the impossible. In driving too far with plastic injection molding, they’d found limits that would’ve otherwise been undiscovered. Or, as someone from ID put it, in skiing terms: “You gotta do a triple diamond to do a blue slope easily, don’t you?”
Jony Ive emerged from the hard reset with newfound powers and influence. Jobs had made it crystal clear that ID’s zero tolerance for defects was integral to a new culture that would cascade across product development and then throughout the organization. The new approach hit Apple in waves. “I remember these other groups being like, ‘I’m glad I’m not in your shoes!” ’ Hoenig says. “But sure enough, it just literally rippled through the organization over the course of a year, and every group eventually suffered.”
Engineers in other departments gained a respect for Ive because of his diplomatic skill. “What Jony did was—he understood that Steve’s cruelty, his savagery, his impatience would cause people to split and just quit the company,” says a senior person on the project. “That happened a lot. And he would run interference with them. He was a Steve handler as much as he was a visionary, detail obsessed, brilliant designer.”
After the first team was pushed aside, the second crew ended up looking like saviors. But Hoenig says he and others were given too much credit. It’s not as though they solved something where the previous team had failed; they were just given a task that wasn’t impossible. As for Novak, he thrived under Lundgren, who later named him an “iMac hero” along with ten others. Jony Ive recognized it too. Late in the project, Ive invited Novak into his conference room in ID. Novak walked over, worried he was going to be taken to task for having said the original design wasn’t manufacturable. “And he sat me down, just him and me, and he apologized,” Novak recalls, describing Ive as a pure gentleman. “He said, ‘I’m sorry for what happened. You went through a lot of grief on this. It won’t happen again.’ ” From that point on, Ive and his team got way more involved in the production process, getting educated on materials, tooling, and more of the engineering so as to never make the same mistake again.
Years later, Novak was working in Japan with aluminum forging and machining, finding it difficult. “I would say, ‘Hey, Jony, I’m not sure you can do that. ‘He goes, ‘Well, we are.’ ” Ive’s team had already been to Japan, worked with the supplier, and made damn sure their vision was achievable.
