Ive

"Jobs eventually canceled the other phone ideas and declared multi-touch the future. He was adamant there’d be no keyboard, so the phone would be as full screen as possible. Apple’s engineers suddenly had to find suppliers that could build multi-touch displays at scale—something that didn’t exist at the time. There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager. By early 2006, they had a full-screen prototype enclosed in brushed aluminum. Jobs and Ive “were exceedingly proud of it,” journalist Fred Vogelstein would later recount. “But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they’d created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well.”"

"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.”"

"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.’ ”"