Steve Jobs

thing . . .” This time the “one more thing” was “Think Profit.” When he said those words, the crowd erupted in applause. After two years of staggering losses, Apple had enjoyed a profitable quarter, making $45 million. For the full fiscal year of 1998, it would turn in a $309 million profit. Jobs was back, and so was Apple.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

     

DESIGN PRINCIPLES
     
    The Studio of Jobs and Ive
     

     
    With Jony Ive and the sunflower iMac, 2002
     
    Jony Ive
    When Jobs gathered his top management for a pep talk just after he became iCEO in September 1997, sitting in the audience was a sensitive and passionate thirty-year-old Brit who was head of the company’s design team. Jonathan Ive, known to all as Jony, was planning to quit. He was sick of the company’s focus on profit maximization rather than product design. Jobs’s talk led him to reconsider. “I remember very clearly Steve announcing that our goal is not just to make money but to make great products,” Ive recalled. “The decisions you make based on that philosophy are fundamentally different from the ones we had been making at Apple.” Ive and Jobs would soon forge a bond that would lead to the greatest industrial design collaboration of their era.
    Ive grew up in Chingford, a town on the northeast edge of London. His father was a silversmith who taught at the local college. “He’s a fantastic craftsman,” Ive recalled. “His Christmas gift to me would be one day of his time in his college workshop, during the Christmas break when no one else was there, helping me make whatever I dreamed up.” The only condition was that Jony had to draw by hand what they planned to make. “I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.”
    Ive enrolled in Newcastle Polytechnic and spent his spare time and summers working at a design consultancy. One of his creations was a pen with a little ball on top that was fun to fiddle with. It helped give the owner a playful emotional connection to the pen. For his thesis he designed a microphone and earpiece—in purest white plastic—to communicate with hearing-impaired kids. His flat was filled with foam models he had made to help him perfect the design. He also designed an ATM machine and a curved phone, both of which won awards from the Royal Society of Arts. Unlike some designers, he didn’t just make beautiful sketches; he also focused on how the engineering and inner components would work. He had an epiphany in college when he was able to design on a Macintosh. “I discovered the Mac and felt I had a connection with the people who were making this product,” he recalled. “I suddenly understood what a company was, or was supposed to be.”
    After graduation Ive helped to build a design firm in London, Tangerine, which got a consulting contract with Apple. In 1992 he moved to Cupertino to take a job in the Apple design department. He became the head of the department in 1996, the year before Jobs returned, but wasn’t happy. Amelio had little appreciation for design. “There wasn’t that feeling of putting care into a product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made,”Ive said. “All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit.”
    When Jobs took over and gave his pep talk, Ive decided to stick around. But Jobs at first looked around for a world-class designer from the outside. He talked to Richard Sapper, who designed the IBM ThinkPad, and Giorgetto Giugiaro, who designed the Ferrari 250 and the Maserati Ghibli. But then he took a tour of Apple’s design studio and bonded with the affable, eager, and very earnest Ive. “We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Ive recalled. “We were on the same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company.”
    Ive reported, at least initially, to Jon Rubinstein, whom Jobs had brought in to head the hardware division, but he developed a direct and unusually strong relationship with Jobs. They began to have lunch together regularly, and Jobs would end his day by dropping by Ive’s design studio for a chat. “Jony had a special status,” said Laurene Powell. “He would come by our house, and our families became close. Steve