It’s open plan, with thirtysomethings of indiscriminate nationality, and very discriminate grooming, working quietly in front of desktop iMacs. There are long wooden break tables near a small kitchen with a gleaming espresso machine that appears more worshiped than used. The floors are concrete. The music is indie, the lighting crisp.
The wall-length bookcase has the meticulously unarranged look of every design bookstore you’ve ever lost an hour in. The only hint that this is Apple’s magic room is a curtain. Behind it, says Ive, is the industrial design studio, where there are explorations in progress, milling machines, and a few remarkable futuristic things that he cannot, alas, remark upon. 3D Touch came to life back there.
Several years ago the designers and engineers realized that phones contained so many functions—messaging, maps, apps, links, photos, songs—that people were wasting a lot of time retreating to the home button to bounce between them. This is the ne plus ultra of First World problems, but Apple exists, unapologetically, to eradicate even the tiniest bit of friction between its products and its users.
“‘Inevitable’ is the word we use a lot,” says Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of user interface design. From the iPhone’s rounded edges to its imperturbable Genius Bar employees, Apple would like its customers to think of it as an effortless company, where transcendent technology emerges like freshly baked bread from an oven.
It’s just as much an illusion as Disney’s happiest place on earth. ] does is unbelievably hard,” says Schiller. ] are going to use. Schiller believes that 3D Touch is a breakthrough, but the designers aren’t so sheltered that they’re oblivious to his point. “I mean, it’s remarkable that within a corporation that has to deal with so many absolutes … so many metrics …” Ive says, trailing off.
Apple design projects have no formal start and no predetermined finish. Months of wrong turns and scenic routes are common, and there are countless schemes going on simultaneously. And what if the phone understood this desire based entirely on changes in the pressure you applied, Everyone knows Apple is a design-first company, but the degree to which this is true has, if anything, been underappreciated. The relationship between the designers and the nondesign executives is a little like the relationship between American Pharoah and his trainer.
One side is nominally in charge, but it’s conspicuously in service to the other. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, says that at most software companies the designers decide what they want and the engineers respond with what’s easy to build. ] it was only at the moment where we finally got a design experience that’s like, ‘Yes!
This is what we want! The answer: really hard. But not as hard as it would be for a competitor. 200 billion in cash on hand) that it’s been able to collect many of the world’s top specialists, across a variety of fields, and stash them for a rainy day.
3 billion acquisition of Beats last year had nothing to do with headphones; it was about buying Beats Chief Executive Officer Jimmy Iovine’s savant-like knowledge of the music business. “If you need to solve a particular problem, usually the best person in the world already works here,” says Dye. Still, working backward from a design idea to create a real-world, fail-safe, supply chain-able product for hundreds of millions of people can’t be done with resources alone.
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