David Hoenig

"Jobs had little reason to know what Ive was capable of, and even less reason to care. Three weeks earlier, on July 9, 1997, Jobs stood before several dozen Apple staffers in shorts and sneakers, displaying an unkempt beard. “Tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he stated firmly. Without waiting for an answer, he exclaimed: “It’s the *products!* The products suck!” Then he offered remarkable clarity of vision, scribbling out a two-by-two chart on a whiteboard. Apple, he declared, would make desktop and portable computers, each coming in consumer and professional versions. Everything else was dead. In an instant, the number of Apple products in development was cut from forty to four. Reception to the strategy was mixed, but at least, finally, there *was* a strategy. “It felt like we may have all been driving off a cliff,” says product designer David Hoenig. “But at least we were all going together in the same direction for once.”"

"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."