Drive Off the Cliff to Prove the Brakes Don't Work

"Unless what ID asked for defied the laws of physics, whatever ID said was the way it would be. Saying no to ID was possible, but only if you had reams of experimentation behind you and the data to make your point. A common saying was: “You’d have to drive the car off the cliff to prove the brakes don’t work.”"

"But it’s not as though other divisions were simply taking marching orders. The respect went both ways. ID’s job was pushing the limits while conceiving only of products that were feasible to build. How they would be built was the role of PD and MD, where the ideal employees loved the steepness of the learning curve on every product. “It’s loads of hard work,” says a veteran of Ive’s ID studio. “But the engineer that you want to talk to is just like, ‘I have no fucking idea how to make that, but I’ll figure it out.’ ”"

"By empowering ID, Jobs had created a design-first organization that had zero tolerance for imperfection from the earliest stages of product creation. That approach cascaded down the pyramid, so the Ops team couldn’t accept imperfection, either. Mike Bell, a vice president in the 2000s, recalls that for the Titanium PowerBook, an especially difficult-to-engineer laptop released in 2001, Product Design engineers “had to come up with methods of production nobody had ever done before.” He characterizes this whole time period as “designing the impossible, then manufacturing the impossible.” Engineers would joke that Jobs had asked for “anti-gravity” or wanted them to make the next product out of “unobtanium.”"