Apple Takes Off with Jony Ive

a household name in electronics. Now, if this is your first time hearing about all this, you should look at the episodes I published last Monday and Wednesday first, because I've already covered a lot of ground and we're just

gonna pick up from there now. I ended the last episode a little rushed with a summary of ives work on the iPod, and as I mentioned in that episode, the iPod would go on to become an iconic piece of technology that would extend Apple's influence beyond the faithful customers who had been Apple's bread and butter for so many years. You know, I gotta keep in mind that Apple was really facing a huge uphill battle while the iMac was a big hit, and you know, especially in

like the educational sector. The truth of the matter was is that Windows PCs still had most of the market share, like mac had only carved out that tiny little slice of the market share in comparison. So while while the iMac really helped Apple out and and helped it, you know, reel back from falling over the precipice, it was this

expansion into electronics that would really change Apple's fate. So the iPod would ultimately reach folks who had never owned any other Apple product, but it took a while, and one reason for that had nothing to do with the industrial line of the iPod, but rather the lack of compatibility with non Apple computers. So the original iPod, the first generation, required a Macintosh in order to synchronize the

iPod with the user's music collection, which was on iTunes. Now. Also, at this point in Apple's history, you could not buy digital music off of iTunes and there was no music store. Instead, you would take your CD collection because that's what we used to keep music on kids, and you would insert CD by c D you would RiPP music from the CD into iTunes. Then you could transfer the music from your iTunes library to your iPod using a physical cable, which is also how you would charge the iPod. It

was a FireWire cable back in the day. So this was a point where Apple was really keeping everything within its own ecosystem for the most part. Now, the reason you couldn't buy digital music off iTunes in those early days that had a lot to do with the music industry,

not with Apple. So this was a transitional phase where the record labels held most of the leverage, though sales of CDs and other media were starting to flag, and it wouldn't take very long for Apple to switch that around to get the upper hand over the music industry. It was not instantaneous, and it did progress in phases,

but it totally happened. One other thing I wanted to mention before we move on is that last year, this past year one for those of y'all listening for the future, Uh, that was iPods twentieth anniversary, So it had come out twenty years earlier, and this year in Apple finally discontinued all iPod models. But anyway, last year a software company called Panic actually showed off a prototype of the iPod and it looks absolutely nothing like what Apple would ultimately launch,

and that was on purpose. So this prototype iPod, it's funny to even talk about. It was enormous. It was like the size of a DVD player, and it was also pale yellow in color. Uh had a mechanical scroll wheel in the upper left corner of the front face of this thing. It had four physical buttons that had little labels that were taped onto the prototype and the label said up, down, left, and right, so there was

like a physical switch for each of those. And it had the Apple logo with the word iPod underneath in the upper right corner of the device. And according to Tony Fidel, the interior of the device was mostly empty space. It wasn't like filled with circuitry or anything. And the team who made it purposefully avoided anything that would look like what the final design was supposed to be be like. And that was just to avoid any potential leaks or

anything like that. As for the real thing, I've was inspired by a much older piece of technology, the nineteen fifty eight Brown T three radio, which was designed by an industrial designer, famous industrial designer named Dieter Rams. I've, like Rams believed in the mantra, less but better meaning the design of whatever you're working on should not be burdened with flourishes and unnecessary touches. I have a feeling

that Johnny I've detests baroque. If he walked through say Hurst Castle, his eyes would probably pop out of his head because it is probably the gaudiest place I've ever been to, and I've been to Pigeon Forward, y'all. Now, if you google image search the nineteen fifty eight brown that's b R A U N T three, you'll see a small radio that, when it stood on its end, has a speaker that's at the top, and below that

is a radio tuning wheel. And you'll look and you'll say, yeah, that does look a lot like an iPod where you had the screen at the top and then you had the little scroll wheel, the circular wheel you could, you know, physically mechanically move in a circle. With that first generation on there, you could definitely see the similarities. The T three is larger than the iPod, but the T three's influence on I've is unmistakable. That's not to say that

I've didn't make this design his own. He totally did. But you can see sort of the pedigree of the iPod design by comparing it to this this old radio. Now, Johnny i'ves design of the iPod brought in a material that Apple had not really been using for its products up to that point, which was stainless steel. So the front of the iPod would be white. Actually the name of the color of the original iPod is moon gray.

The back of the iPod would be stainless steel, and the company logo would be on the back of the iPod on the steel side. Now, some questioned i've's decisions. They thought it made more sense for Apple to put the logo on the front of the device, not on the back. But I didn't want the logo to intrude on the experience, and he wanted to use stainless steel partly because it would actually give the iPod some heft.

It would it would have some weight to it, and I was thinking that weight in the hands of the user might be associated with the work that artists were putting into their music. That you were actually listening to this idea that it should be heavy. It can hold up to a thousand songs like it's a It's an interesting leap there, because obviously music doesn't weigh anything unless you're trying to carry a musical instrument or a lot

of sheet music. But you know, music doesn't weigh anything, but the idea of no, but we need this device to make it feel like it should weigh something because it's able to hold an entire library is worth of music. Well that's what they thought back in the day. Turns out that people can collect way more than a thousand songs, So that was an interesting choice one that I don't I don't know how I fall. I mean, I like the feel the weight of that first generation iPod. Actually

like the way that feels. Um. I don't necessarily associate it with the amount of work artists put into their music, but that may be a lack of imagination on my part. Now, one component that wasn't ives idea on that first generation iPod was that mechanical scroll wheel, right, that circle that you could spin around to go through menus and stuff. That was actually Phil Schiller's idea. Schiller was head of marketing, uh.

He would actually step in for Steve Jobs a few times when jobs health was in decline, and Schiller had pitched the idea of an input device that gave physical feedback. The clicking of the wheel in this case, and so that element did not come straight from Johnny Ives group. Now, like I said in the last episode, the first iPods sold well, but they it wasn't the breakout hit that later generations of the iPod would become. I mean, if Apple had stuck with the way they did the first iPod,

we probably wouldn't be calling these things podcasts. We'd be calling them something else. But Apple did more than a hundred thousand units between when the first iPod came out in early to mid November of two thousand one and then the end of the year, So in uh, you know, a little more than a month, they sold a hundred thousand units. That's not shabby. By January two thousand three, Apple had sold more than six hundred thousand iPods, which wasn't bad, but it did show how Apple's customer base

at this point was still fairly limited. In fact, the company had only added support for Windows machines in August of two thousand two. But in two thousand four things really picked up. Apple introduced the iPod Mini, which was a slimmed down version of the iPod that was available in several colors, so not just moon gray that I've really favored. In addition, the Mini was made out of

anodized aluminum, giving the iPods a different feel. Uh they you know that the texture was different, and Ivan his team had worked hard to find just the right material and colors to create a line of devices that still had the right weight and feel to them and would be inviting. And Apple's iPod sales climbed above two million but into January two four by the end of the year, so that was at the end of January, but by the end of the year they went to more than

ten million units sold. That's an astronomical climb in sales, right, Like, it was two million by the end of January two four by the end of the next ten eleven months rather more than ten million. Incredible. So the iPod success was huge both for I've as a designer and for Apple as a company. And we'll talk about what that

meant for Apple when we come back from these messages. Okay, So the iPod was a huge hit, and that huge hit was enough to really convince Steve Jobs, not that he needed much convincing anyway, but it really sealed the deal that his own preference, which was to put it as much emphasis on design as on things like functionality. That was the way to go that you had to have designed be a prime component of any product. That couldn't just be what does the software do or how

do you access it? What's the user interface? But the actual physical design of the product had to be just as important, if not more so. Now you have to remember that back then, Apple was not the brand that it is today. The company had its rabid fans back in you know, two thousand, two thousand one, but they were in the minority. Apple had been the butt of jokes in the mainstream, Like people joked about how the

Apple Mac was. You know, you don't even play games on an Apple Mac, like there's there's nothing to play. That wasn't true, by the way, but that was the perception. So things were starting to turn around now, right because the Imax had really started to catch capture a lot of attention. They were just very fun and and love lead designed like you wanted you wanted to have one. It looked like candy. The iPods were a huge hit. So now the general public, we're starting to want to

get their hands on Apple products. It was it was going beyond the Apple Faithful, and those attractive computers and iPods were really transforming the company. One computer that got attention and not all of it was positive, was the iMac G four computer, which was released in two thousand one,

so same year that the iPod came out. And if you take a look at this, if you look at the iMac G four, which had a couple of different names throughout its history, you can definitely see that the evolutionary step that existed between the iMac G three models, which were those really colorful CRT screen computer systems that were all in one computer system, and then you can also see the following step after the iMac G four, which are the more modern IMAX, which are kind of

all in one devices where you've got a flat screen with the computer integrated right behind the flat screen and it's on a stand. Right, That's been the IMAX of recent years. Well, this one, the iMac G four, is kind of in between those, though I'd say it's more it's closer to the more recent IMAX than the old

uh G three's. So the base of this computer was a little dome and that's where all the computer elements were, right like that's where the optical drive was, That's where you would plug in your peripherals, and that dome is kind of what I think of as the nod to the IMAX three days now. At the top of the dome was an attached arm that you could tilt kind of like a desk lamp, and on the end of that arm was the flat panel display for the computer.

So it didn't have the computer incorporated behind the flat screen. It was instead incorporated in this little dome. So it wasn't quite the same as modern IMAX. So that's why I say it was kind of in between. And this was a bold move for the company. It differentiated Apple's computers from the beige desktops associated with Windows machines, and the company called it the New iMac at the time. Later on they would rename it the iMac G four.

The l c D display on the New iMac wasn't cheap, and so the New iMac was pretty expensive machine, and the education sector, which again was one of Apple's really big customers, kind of lagged on adopting the iMac G four because it was so expensive. A lot of them kept on buying the G three until Apple stopped selling them.

In two thousand four, Apple would unveil the iMac G five. Now, this was the first of the Imax to incorporate the computer behind the flat display itself, and it would all be supported on an L shaped stand that would be on your desk. Now, unlike later Imax which would have aluminium cases like the most recent ones have aluminium cases, the iMac G five had a white case, and I've insisted on that. He felt that the screen was meant to capture the user's attention, like all their attention should

be on the screen. The screen was beautiful, it was the focal point for the computer. So he wanted a really minimalist approach on the case so that you wouldn't your eyes wouldn't be drawn to something else, You would be focused on what was important, and everything else like the keyboard and the mouse would all be a simple white as well, again not to pull focus from the display. Now back to the iPod. The introduction of the iPod Nano in two thousand five, which would replace the Mini,

would change things up again. The first generation of the Nano was available only in white or black, and it had a screen measuring just one point eight inches on the diagonal. The second generation added a few more features as well as some more color options. The third generation would change the form factor by having the candy bar like dimensions of the first two generations trade off for I don't know, like a Graham Cracker kind of dimension.

It was more squarish than a rectangle. Uh So the actual physical form factor changed and that design would flip flop a bit between those over the following generations until Apple just playing Out discontinued the nano. So yeah, So again it was Ive's team kind of working on different things to try and experiment with different design layouts, and sometimes they would go back to an idea that they

had had before, you know, refined it a bit. So it wasn't like you know, the I Pod, the nanos of of you know, two thousand ten looked exactly like the ones from two thousand seven. It wasn't like that, But they did kind of experiment with those different form factors. I've also had a hand with the iPod Shuffle, which didn't have a screen at all on it, so you had no screen to look at. Instead, you would load music on this device, you would play it in shuffle mode.

You could play it in just you know, regular nodes that would play in order, but typically it was shuffle mode and it would just sort of randomly shuffle up the song order for you and play whatever. And it had simple controls for advancing or going back through songs, plus volume controls and a play pause button and that was about it. Like it had the little headphone jack and that's you know, he didn't have much more after that. The first one looked kind of like a stick of gum.

You could actually pull the end off. It was a cap for a USB that could be you know, plugged into a computer. The second generation looked more like a stamp, like it was you know, rectangular in dimension. The third generation of the Shuffle would be the boldest of the designs because I've and his team created one that lacked

any physical controls other than a power control. So instead all of the controls for changing the volume or advancing through a track, all of that moved to Apple's iPod earbuds, which I've also designed, which meant that initially, at least the third generation of the Shuffle had limited functionality if you weren't using Apple's own earbuds, so you couldn't just you know, plug any earphones into a shuffle of this

generation and be able to control it. You'd be able to listen to music, but you wouldn't be able to do things like change the volume, So if it was too loud or too quiet, you couldn't do anything about it. And if a song came on that you didn't want to hear, there was no way to skip it unless you were using the the Apple earbuds which had the

controls on them. Eventually, third parties would come up with their own earbuds that would have controls that were interoperable with this shuffle, but this was one of those decisions

that had people kind of complaining about Apple. Apple has a reputation for uh making moves to trap people into an ecosystem, whether it's with peripherals or with their approach to software um and that you know customers, consumers tend to like to have a lot of options, right Like a lot of people would much prefer to be able to pair their favorite headphones with their favorite music device.

But Apple was taking an approach where, at least to have the ideal experience, you really need to be all in on Apple, something that I think was really true even when Apple opened up iTunes to Windows machines. But I've complained about that too many times in the past, so I'm not going to pick that up again here.

The fourth generation Shuffle would actually bring back those physical controls onto the device itself, which seems to be an admission that perhaps the third generation may have gone too far. I mean, some bold moves just end up being the wrong ones, it turns out, or at least maybe if you want to say it's not the wrong move, it might be a move that just doesn't resonate with the general public as well. And then after all that, we would have a device that really would push Apple into

the next level. So to to kind of some up what we've been looking at so far. With the Johnny Ives tenure at Apple, you know, he came in during a tumultuous time where the company was heading toward disaster. He was encouraged by Steve Jobs to help design a new generation of Macintosh computer that brought attention back to Apple on a level that had not been there for years, Like positive attention, the company had largely been dismissed at

that point. He had helped introduce a new product line with iPods a new whole business for Apple, which when paired with iTunes and the iTunes store, would end up being a lucrative business for Apple. But what would come next would really push the company into the stratosphere. We'll talk about that when we come back after these messages. All right, this is where we're getting up to round two thousand seven. And if you know Apple and you know your timelines, you know that two thousand seven is

when we get the iPhone and who boy. So the iPod established Apple as a household name in electronics. The iPhone would move the company into hyperspace. So when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone back in two thousand and seven, it took the world by storm, which was particularly remarkable because I don't know how many of you remember this, but here in the United States, when the iPhone launched, it was exclusive to a T and T. You could

not have the iPhone running on any other carrier. So if you were a Sprint customer, or a Verizon customer or T Mobile customer, then you would have to switch carriers if you wanted to get an iPhone. There was a big limitation, and yet the iPhone was still a remarkable hit for Apple, and when Steve Jobs took the stage in two thousand seven to talk about this to unveil it, he drilled home to the audience that he was going to introduce products that represented an iPod, a

mobile phone, and an Internet communications device. And the implication at first was that these were three different products. But then he reveals, no, I'm talking about one thing that that happens to be all three of these, and that was the iPhone. So he gave a very long presentation about the iPhone that day. It's like a couple of hours. You can actually find it on YouTube. You can watch the whole thing if you like. And he spent some of that time to talk about the design of the phone.

Although it was in pretty general terms. He pointed out that there were minimal physical controls on the device. There was a home button that would take you back to the home page wherever you happen to be. There was a wake slash sleep button, so you could, you know, turn the phone on or off. There was a volume control, and there was a switch to turn the phone to ring or silent mode. It also had front facing and rear facing cameras, had a back that was made out

of aluminum. The front was originally going to be plastic, but Steve Jobs noticed that his early model he was carrying around was starting to get scratched up, and so the team at the last minute had to change the determination to make it go to glass. The one that you'll see in the presentation that that Steve Jobs is showing off, that's the one that has a plastic face. The one that would go to market would have a glass face. Now that design change, uh was a big one.

I'll talk about it a little bit more and what the team had to do in order to make it work. It was pretty remarkable, and the design of the iPhone overall followed that less but Better philosophy. So, unlike other smartphones,

iPhone did not have a physical keyboard. If you look at the smartphones around two thousand seven, you'll see that all of them pretty much have a third to about a half of the phone taken up by a display and the rest of the phone taken up by a physical keyboard with little plastic keys and some navigation buttons.

And Steve Jobs hated that he wanted to have a touch screen device, and because of that, it meant that you could dedicate the entire almost the entire front of the phone to the screen, which measured three and a half inches on the diagonal for the original iPhone. Now above the screen was the front facing camera, the speaker for your ear, that kind of thing. Beneath the screen was the home button, and there was a fairly narrow

bezel on either side of the screen. So it was a pretty simple and elegant approach to a smartphone with most of the focus going on the display, just like with the newer iMac computers that were coming out. The glass that would cover the iPhone was special, and it ended up being a special kind of glass that Corning had been working on in its R and D department. Uh, you know, because Apple was looking everywhere to find someone who could deuced glass that wouldn't scratch or shatter easily.

They needed something that was going to be durable, especially for a device that could, you know, on occasion, maybe slip out of your hand and hit the floor. So they looked at this special glass Corning had developed, and this was stuff that would later evolve with the commercial name Guerrilla Glass. That's a popular brand of glass that

has scratch and shadow resistant properties. It's really cool. I once wrote an article on how guerrilla glass works for how stuff works way back in the day, so um yeah, and that was great. I got to talk to people at Corning and everything to learn more about the actual engineering that was required to make this happen. Now, at the time that they were using it for the iPhone, this stuff hadn't really found its way into any consumer products. It was still kind of an R and D thing.

So this is an example of how Steve Jobs and Johnny I would go to great links to make sure that their vision would be realized, even if it meant having to make use of an experimental material in order to do it well. I should also add that Jeff Williams played a critical part in getting the glass from

Corning incorporated into the iPhone design. I know, when I talk about this, it makes it sound like Johnny Ivan Steve Jobs did everything at Apple on their own and just raised it from the mud and put it into the heavens. That's not the case. There were clearly hundreds and thousands of people working at Apple who made these things possible. Some of them took on, you know, leadership roles, so people like Jeff Williams and Johnny I've and Steve Jobs.

But you know, I don't ever want to take away from the fact that these things exist because of the collaboration of lots of incredibly talented people. Now, a lot of the design elements of the iPhone would obviously find their way into the iPod Touch. In fact, you know, a lot of people said the iPod Touch was really just an iPhone only without the phone part. And the iPod Touch had also a multi touch display, meaning that you could do multi finger gestures on it, like pinch

to zoom, that the stuff. But it also had a lower resolution screen than the iPhone did, so it wasn't as sharp as what you would get with the iPhone. It also lacked physical volume buttons for the first generation of the iPod Touch, which was something that irritated some reviewers and some users. Uh. You could actually use an iPod Touch as a phone if you enabled the WiFi and you used apps like Skype. Actually know someone who

did that for a while. My buddy I as actor who uh who produces content for a c net he um for a while was using an iPod Touch as his primary phone. And uh, one of these days I'm just gonna have to have him on the show again and talk about how that worked out for him and was it convenient or what did he like about why did he hate about it? Sometimes I think having a WiFi only phone would be great because anytime I'm not

around WiFi, I wouldn't have any notifications. And I'm just I've I've obviously reached the age where uh notifications are the bane of my existence, and I tried to avoid them at all costs. Anyway, back to Ivan Apple, you would also clearly see Johnny i'ves influence and the release of the iPad, which came out in twenty And in case some of y'all didn't know, I usually say this whenever I talk about the iPad, so you probably have heard me say this before, even if you haven't heard

the original episode. Way back in the day, I infamously dismissed the iPad when it was first coming out. I said, this is not gonna work. It's gonna be a flop. No one's gonna want this. I could not imagine that people would flock to a tablet computer, and the reason for that was because in the past, tablets had really only found a place in niche markets, Like you know, in the medicine field, there were places where you know, doctors and nurses were using tablet computers, but it just

never managed to take off as a mainstream product. And I was convinced that that was just that was just gonna be the case, that even Apple would not be able to produce something in that form factor that would appeal to the average person. And I could not have been more wrong. So I've actually provided a bit of philosophy. When he talked about the iPad later on, he once said, quote, when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works,

it's sort of becomes magical. And that's exactly what the iPad is. End quote, which I think of a sort of paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, the science fiction author. Clark once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That if the technology is advanced enough to someone not schooled in that tech, it would seem to be impossible.

And you think about that, like if you were to somehow go back in time to I don't know, the Renaissance and show off a computer somehow get it running, I don't know how you would do it as the results. But let's say you did, everyone would think that you were you were, you were magical, and you probably would be persecuted because that's just the way the world goes right anyway, he was more or less saying that the

iPad was magical. It fell into that realm martely because of the way that you would interact with the device. You know, you literally had to put your hands on whatever it was you were doing. And there is something to that, right that your interaction when you're touching something directly, even if that directly is through a screen, it creates

some more connected experience. You know, Steve Jobs, when you introduced the iPhone, talked about getting your hands on your music because you were physically touching your screen in order to play specific songs, as opposed to typing something out on a physical keyboard, which adds a bit of distance between you and whatever it is you want to do. It's that connection that cuts out those other input forms that could otherwise act as sort of a barrier between

you and whatever it was you were doing. It's an interesting thought. I don't know how much I buy into it, but I do think there is something there. Uh and it meant that you were going to be able to interact with stuff on a screen very much like an iPhone, but on a size at much greater scale. Obviously, now we're going to start to to wind down here because I have one more episode in this series I want to do, and it really ties into the decline of

Steve Jobs as health. His health would obviously have a huge impact on the operations at Apple and on Apple's future. Uh. He had first been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back into

thousand three. He underwent a surgery to remove it, and he mostly kept it under wraps from even his close friends at Apple until two thousand four, when he did send out a message to everyone at Apple letting them know what had been going on, and there was hope that the surgery he had undergone had had removed all the cancer and that he was cancer free and healthy.

But obviously over the following years that would change. So in our next episode, we're gonna talk about Steve Jobs and his failing health and ultimately his his passing, how that affected Apple in general and Johnny I've in particular, and how at least some people say that set the path for Johnny I've ultimately to step away from the company he had fallen in love with um not that it was the one and only factor that that went into that decision, but that that was the starting point.

We'll talk about that in our next episode. I hope you've been enjoying these It's been really interesting to dive into Johnny i've's history and his influence at Apple, something that was clearly really important. And in the next episode we'll also talk about what we might expect with Apple moving forward without Johnny ivan It. But that's for the next episode. If you have suggestions for episode topics, well let me know. One way to do that is to

download the I heart Radio app. It's free to download. You can navigate over to the tech Stuff podcast page use that little microphone icon to leave up to thirty seconds of a voice message let me know what you would like me to talk about, or you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff hsw and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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