By the looks of it, industrial design is front and center at Apple again. But as recently as last summer, Ive says, he and the team were on the brink of quitting. “We were absolutely at wit’s end,’’ he says. The frustration had built up under CEOs John Sculley, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, for whom the studio had cranked out uninspired “beige boxes’’ that faltered in the marketplace. The designers made gorgeous but doomed prototypes on the side as ``sanity exercises.’’ Ive, a star design pupil who had given up a hot London consulting business in 1992 to work at Apple, consoled himself by designing early Newtons and the award-winning 20th-anniversary Macintosh. But then Amelio resigned last July and, by the end of the month, Jobs was back running the company. “Suddenly, the reason we came to Apple was back at Apple,’’ Ive says. “He didn’t have to say anything to persuade us’’ to stay.
Now, Ive and the “heavenly’’ team of international designers that he handpicked when he became director in 1996 are busy working only on real products instead of fruitless projects. But Ive knows that Steve Jobs is the reason design is back at the company’s creative center, a fact that gives him pause. “You realize that your effectiveness is reliant upon somebody else [who might leave],’’ he says.
But for now Ive is cheerful about finally working with an executive who he says understands the “emotional side of objects.’’ Ive recalls that the early days-long brainstorming sessions about the iMac revolved not around chip speed or market share but squishy questions like How do we want people to feel about it?'' and "What part of our minds should it occupy?'' Ive won't reveal much else about those talks with Jobs except that the old Jetsons’’ TV cartoon emerged as a conceptual touchstone–it’s “a comforting portrayal of the future that’s nostalgic,’’ he explains. Ive emphasizes that the real genius of the iMac is how different groups worked together at every stage of production; for example, engineering and design collaborated to create the doughnut-shaped circuit board in the mouse.
The result is disarmingly simple, whimsical, human. The turquoise used in the casing was named Bondi blue, because it reminded someone of the ocean at a beach in his native Australia. Weather-worn rocks inspired the shape of the mouse because “pebbles are nice things to hold.’’ These are touches that illustrate Ive’s determination to make Apple products people can love. “We’re all feeling like we’re just getting started,’’ he says in his mild London accent, eyes gleaming. Anticipating long nights ahead, he ordered two beds for the studio, and some of the designers are buying sleeping bags. He’s still cagey about giving more details about his team. “Headhunters,’’ he says.
