Free Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney Page A

project over to Jony in the summer of 1993. Jony had just finished his work on the Lindy MessagePad 110 and, when handed the B&O Mac by Brunner, he knew he was facing a tough challenge. Going back to basics, he started with the design story.
    “On a technical level, we understood the challenges associated with packaging a lot of components into a very slim space,” Jony recalled later. “But philosophically, the project was more challenging. Like the first Macintosh, the design had no predecessors, which meant I had to come up with a new meaning for the product. I wanted the design to be simple almost to the point of being invisible.” 29
    Ultimately, Jony would keep the spirit of Brunner’s concept but change almost everything else. He redesigned the proportions of the computer. Where Brunner’s initial design was wide and curved andappeared to take over a desk, Jony made it taller and much narrower. He changed the size of the foot of the base (which was called the bale) and created a hinge that allowed the foot to double as a carrying handle. Handles would feature prominently in Jony’s designs. He redesigned the back panel, giving more room to the CPU and motherboard.
    In April 1994, after working on it all winter, Jony handed over his design to a pair of product design engineers to make a working prototype. As the prototype took shape, a marketing manager worked up an internal product brief. The machine gained the official code name “Spartacus.” After eighteen months, everything was on track to turn it into a real product.
    Then Spartacus stumbled into its first major hurdle. To keep it slim, Jony had planned to use components from the portable PowerBook, only to find the working prototype was seriously underpowered. Portable components then lagged behind their desktop counterparts by at least a generation, so Spartacus seemed painfully slow. In particular, video was poor and, because of the flat profile, the circuitry couldn’t be enhanced with a souped-up video expansion card like its cousins in the desktop department. This loomed as a major liability because Spartacus was to be sold as a desktop computer. Consumers would expect nothing less than desktop performance.
    Jony moved to a regular desktop circuit board (developed for the Performa 6400), but a new problem arose when the marketing department told him that no one would buy a desktop machine unless it could accommodate expansion cards. Even if Brunner was right about home users, the marketing experts advised that an un-expandable desktop would be commercial suicide. To accommodate a pair of expansion cards, Jony was forced to design a special clip-on “hunchback” that covered any cards the user might add. Dubbed internally the “backpack,” the add-on would ship with every machine.
    “With the original back in place, the design is powerful yet physically lean,” Jony would say. “But with the backpack inserted, it becomes a real power system, expressing on the outside the enhanced function contained on the expansion card inside.” 30 That may sound like designer doublespeak, but Jony tried to put a brave face on what was obviously a horrible kludge.
    Despite the misshapen hunchback, the design team became quite excited by the prospects of Spartacus. For an executive presentation in 1994, the group rustled up bigger and smaller versions, showing how the concept might be extended into a whole family of desktop products.
    At every step, they faced resistance from the engineers. “There were layers and layers of middle managers, many who had come from Dell or HP and didn’t understand the design-driven approach,” Brunner explained. “They were accustomed to slapping a cheap metal skin on a product, because that was the way they did it at Dell, and Dell sold a lot of computers. They didn’t really believe in what we were doing, and the very senior management of the company at the time didn’t step in. So that made for a fight at the second