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.’"

"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?”"

"device,” Steve Jobs walked into a routine divisional meeting. He was in a bad mood and didn’t look good. Then he pulled out his prototype iPhone, which looked worse. The keys in his pocket had cut a huge gouge across its plastic screen. He threw the unit onto the boardroom table toward Steve Zadesky and demanded: “Make it glass.” It wasn’t the first time the idea had come up. In September 2006, just four months earlier, Jobs had grown angry about smaller scratch marks and complained to a mid-level executive: “Look at this, look at this—what’s with the screen?” The executive responded, “Well, Steve, we have a glass prototype, but it fails the one-meter drop test one hundred times out of one hundred times.” Jobs cut the executive off. “I just want to know if you’re going to make the fucking thing work.” Now, in January, Jobs wasn’t taking excuses. Apple had just"