Steve Jobs

computer that suggested a Zen ice cube. Like bell-bottoms that turn up in the back of a closet, some of these models looked better at the time than they do in retrospect, and they show a love of design that was, on occasion, a bit too exuberant. But they set Apple apart and provided the publicity bursts it needed to survive in a Windows world.
    The Power Mac G4 Cube, released in 2000, was so alluring that one ended up on display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. An eight-inch perfect cube the size of a Kleenex box, it was the pure expression of Jobs’s aesthetic. The sophistication came from minimalism. No buttons marred the surface. There was no CD tray, just a subtle slot. And as with the original Macintosh, there was no fan. Pure Zen. “When you see something that’s so thoughtful on the outside you say, ‘Oh, wow, it must be really thoughtful on the inside,’” he told
Newsweek
. “We make progress by eliminating things, by removing the superfluous.”
    The G4 Cube was almost ostentatious in its lack of ostentation, and it was powerful. But it was not a success. It had been designed as a high-end desktop, but Jobs wanted to turn it, as he did almost every product, into something that could be mass-marketed to consumers. The Cube ended up not serving either market well. Workaday professionals weren’t seeking a jewel-like sculpture for their desks, and mass-market consumers were not eager to spend twice what they’d pay for a plain vanilla desktop. Jobs predicted that Apple would sell 200,000 Cubes per quarter. In its first quarter it sold half that. The next quarter it sold fewer than thirty thousand units. Jobs later admitted that he had overdesigned and overpriced the Cube, just as he had the NeXT computer. But gradually he was learning his lesson. In building devices like the iPod, he would control costs and make the trade-offs necessary to get them launched on time and on budget.
    Partly because of the poor sales of the Cube, Apple produced disappointing revenue numbers in September 2000. That was just when the tech bubble was deflating and Apple’s education market was declining. The company’s stock price, which had been above $60, fell 50% in one day, and by early December it was below $15.
    None of this deterred Jobs from continuing to push for distinctive, even distracting, new design. When flat-screen displays became commercially viable, he decided it was time to replace the iMac, the translucent consumer desktop computer that looked as if it were from a
Jetsons
cartoon. Ive came up with a model that was somewhat conventional, with the guts of the computer attached to the back of the flat screen. Jobs didn’t like it. As he often did, both at Pixar and atApple, he slammed on the brakes to rethink things. There was something about the design that lacked purity, he felt. “Why have this flat display if you’re going to glom all this stuff on its back?” he asked Ive. “We should let each element be true to itself.”
    Jobs went home early that day to mull over the problem, then called Ive to come by. They wandered into the garden, which Jobs’s wife had planted with a profusion of sunflowers. “Every year I do something wild with the garden, and that time it involved masses of sunflowers, with a sunflower house for the kids,” she recalled. “Jony and Steve were riffing on their design problem, then Jony asked, ‘What if the screen was separated from the base like a sunflower?’ He got excited and started sketching.” Ive liked his designs to suggest a narrative, and he realized that a sunflower shape would convey that the flat screen was so fluid and responsive that it could reach for the sun.
    In Ive’s new design, the Mac’s screen was attached to a movable chrome neck, so that it looked not only like a sunflower but also like a cheeky Luxo lamp. Indeed it evoked the playful personality of Luxo Jr. in the first short film that John Lasseter had made at Pixar. Apple took out many patents for the design, most crediting Ive, but on one of them, for “a computer system having a movable assembly attached to a flat panel display,” Jobs listed himself as the primary inventor.
    In hindsight, some of Apple’s Macintosh designs may seem a bit too cute. But other computer makers were at the other extreme. It was an industry that you’d expect to be innovative, but instead it was dominated by cheaply designed generic boxes. After a few ill-conceived stabs at painting on blue