Apple's New Core

Wednesday, Feb. 05, 2003 By JOSH QUITTNER

Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive spent 2 years designing the new iMac

MICHAEL O'NEILL FOR TIME

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A misstep can be fatal in the fast-moving computer business. And Jobs, a perfectionist when he settles on a project, tends to get his ideas from his gut rather than, say, focus groups. Some analysts argue that Apple should abandon innovation in favor of building a cheaper box; a $500 iMac would fit the bill. Others say the company should have pursued the post-PC dream and started turning out Internet appliances, tablet PCs or personal digital assistants, as competitors have done. Instead, Jobs' gut tells him that the PC isn't dead at all. It tells him, in fact, that what people really want is a better PC. That what they really want is a Mac.

There comes a time in every important Jobs project, usually when the thing appears to be finished, that he sends it back to the drawing board and asks that it be completely redone. Some people say this trait is pathological, a sign of his control-freak perfectionism or his inability to let go. "It's happened on every Pixar movie," Jobs confesses. It's also what he did when Ive presented him with a plastic model of what was to be the new iMac. It looked like the old iMac on a no-carb diet, a leaner iMac in the Zone. "There was nothing wrong with it," recalls Jobs. "It was fine. Really, it was fine." He hated it.

Rather than give his O.K., he went home from work early that day and summoned Ive, the amiable genius who also designed the original iMac, the other-worldly iPod music player, the lightweight but heavy-duty titanium PowerBook and the ice-cube-inspired Cube desktop, to name but a few of his greatest hits. As they walked through the quarter-acre vegetable garden and apricot grove of Jobs' wife Laurene, Jobs sketched out the Platonic ideal for the new machine. "Each element has to be true to itself," Jobs told Ive. "Why have a flat display if you're going to glom all this stuff on its back? Why stand a computer on its side when it really wants to be horizontal and on the ground? Let each element be what it is, be true to itself." Instead of looking like the old iMac, the thing should look more like the flowers in the garden. Jobs said, "It should look like a sunflower."

This might have irritated some people. But Ive synchs with Jobs, readily playing Sullivan to his Gilbert. Ive, the son of a silversmith, likes to talk about industrial design "as product narrative. My view is that surfaces and materials and finishes and product architecture are about telling a bigger story." The story the new iMac wanted to tell, he says, was about a flat display so light, fluid and free that it could almost fly away.

He had a good working sketch of the new design within a day. But engineering the machine--squeezing all the gear into the little box that Jobs wanted--took nearly two years.

There are some things in the world of Jobs that you can rely on. On warm days, he will always appear at work shoeless and in hiking shorts. The rest of the time, he will always wear Levi's jeans, no belt and one of the hundreds of black, mock-turtleneck shirts a clothing-designer chum made for him many years ago. (Not having to worry about what to wear to work every day allows him to concentrate more on work, he says.) And he will always take any opportunity he can to lay out the wider context, the framework--and how Apple fits in. Pull up a chair, because Jobs is about to paint you the big picture.

The way Jobs sees it, the world is entering the third phase of personal computing. (For those of you who haven't been following along, the first era was all about utility--folks using their thinking machines to do word processing, run spreadsheets, create desktop graphics and the like. The second phase was about wiring all those machines together on the Internet.) Now that we're all interconnected and productive, we're ready for the next great era: people using computers to orchestrate all the new digital gear that has steadily crept into their lives.

At this point, Jobs likes to draw a diagram, which begins with an outer ring; he draws gadgets on that ring. "We are surrounded by camcorders, digital cameras, MP3 players, Palms, cell phones, dvd players," he says. Then he draws a computer in the center of the ring. "Some of these things are plenty useful without a personal computer. But a personal computer definitely enhances their value. And several are completely unusable without a PC--a PC meaning a Mac, in our case."

Now he fixes you with his famous pay-attention-here stare and furrows his Salman Rushdie eyebrows: "We believe the next great era is for the personal computer to be the digital hub of all these devices."