Design the Impossible Then Manufacture the Impossible

“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.”

“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.’”