After Steve - Tripp Mickle
Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!
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The company had only three C-suite titles before Jobs’s death: chief executive officer, chief operating officer, and chief financial officer. Another seven people served as senior vice presidents on the executive team. There were about ninety vice presidents, who developed and managed the products the company sold. Below them, there were senior directors and directors. On paper, everyone reported to the finance chief. The structure eliminated bureaucracy, a feature Jobs disdained and disregarded by communicating directly with some of Apple’s most talented employees.
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Ive was believed to have been granted more than $60 million, but his award was not disclosed because he had arranged to avoid being classified as an officer of the company to keep his compensation secret.
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IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, Mike Ive encouraged his son as the boy began to disassemble radios, alarm clocks, and whatever he could find, analyzing their parts for clues about what made them work. For Christmas, his favorite gift included one day of his father’s undivided attention in the workshop at Middlesex Polytechnic, a nearby college where Mike had taken a job instructing design teachers. Jony could make whatever he could imagine—a go-cart, furniture, a treehouse—on one condition: first, he had to draw it by hand. The practice of sketching before making made him realize how much care people put into products. As Jony got older, he joined his father for weekend drives around the country to visit stores and peruse their shelves. Side by side, they would pick up an item such as a toaster and discuss how it had been made. “Why did they use rivets instead of screws?” Jony would ask. He listened as his father provided answers drawn from years of experience teaching and designing. Fellow teachers considered it a tedious way to pass a Saturday but admired how father engaged with son, knowing it was one of the most significant factors in a child’s future achievement.
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Ive’s drawing skills made an immediate impression on his peers. He would use light-colored pens in pale blue, softened yellow, and faded brown to sketch an image and sharpen it with a fine black Profipen before adding shadow and depth with a smudged pencil. In his first year, he put his drawing skills to an unusual test. He lived on a tight budget, and the cost of the weekly letters and sketches he mailed to Heather in Stafford added up, so he decided to draw a stamp on an envelope. He sketched a perfect rendering of Queen Elizabeth and dropped the envelope into the mail. When Heather replied, he knew it had fooled the Royal Mail. “It went through,” he told his friend Sean Blair with a grin. Invigorated, Ive turned his bid to save money into a game. Each week he drew stamps that became less and less realistic until, in creative rebellion, he was drawing a cartoonish queen.
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Ive entered a competition for a telephone. He had long found it unnatural to put his hand to the side of his face to grip a phone. He thought it created a disconnect between the two things that were actually needed to operate a phone: the mouth and the ear. He reimagined the phone as a jaunty, angular device with a slim, toothbrush-size receiver that people could hold and speak into like a microphone. It looked like a question mark. To get it right, Ive filled his apartment with hundreds of Styrofoam models with subtle differences in shapes and angles. The final version was made of white plastic with lavender buttons for dialing. He called it the “Orator.” “I was feeling quite smug about it,” he said of the name decades later. The model, which won a £500 travel prize, stunned his classmates. “It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen,” said Craig Mounsey, who was a year ahead of Ive at Newcastle. But Ive considered it a failure. When he took it to an office to photograph people using it, they were uncomfortable holding it because it looked so unusual. It exposed a flaw that he would wrestle with for years: it wasn’t enough to make a product that looked radical; people had to connect with it. They had to understand how it functioned innately. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use it.
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Though Ive wasn’t earning a huge salary, he splurged on a Rega Planar turntable for his flat, buying it before he purchased any furniture. It was part of what would become an expensive lifelong obsession with collecting well-made, artfully designed products.
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Staff called it Valhalla. Located on the top floor of building number 1 at Infinite Loop, the executive wing was the epicenter of Apple’s commercial empire. The company’s executive team, a group of ten, gathered in the wing’s boardroom each Monday for a four-hour discussion of company business. The weekly meeting reflected the hierarchy of a sprawling tech giant where a small group evaluated every detail of the business from the development of new stores to the exploration of new product categories.
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Cook ignored the noise and followed Jobs’s advice: “Don’t ask what I would do. Do what’s right.” He continued waking up each morning before 4:00 A.M. and reviewing sales data. He drilled down into small details, discovering through questions that one model of iPhone was outselling another in a small city in Georgia because the AT&T stores there were running different promotions from those being run in the rest of the state. He held a Friday meeting with operations and finance staff, which team members called “date night with Tim” because it would stretch for hours into the evening, when Cook seemed to have nowhere else to be. For the most part, he focused on business and operations and avoided meddling in the creative areas of the business that Jobs had led, such as design and marketing. He declined invitations to join meetings with the software design team, and he seldom swung by the place where Jobs could be found daily, Apple’s design studio.
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Forstall’s doubt irritated Ive. The designer believed that ideas were fragile, tentative things that came at unexpected times from unknown places. Rising up out of the ether, they initially seem obvious and brilliant but can quickly be deemed impossible, squashed by the recognition of some insurmountable hurdle that could prevent them from becoming a reality. He and Jobs shared a belief that ideas should be nurtured, not crushed. Now one of his most important ideas in months was being battered by a colleague’s misgivings.
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Forstall worked on NeXT’s software tools for applications and tried to stay on Jobs’s radar. Each quarter, the Apple cofounder hosted an all-hands meeting with the company’s four hundred employees. Forstall would spend hours the night before scribbling down questions he hoped would impress the CEO. The following day, he would lob his most challenging and imaginative question at Jobs. His colleagues viewed each calculated exchange as a testament to his eagerness and ambition.
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THE HIGHER FORSTALL ROSE at Apple, the more he aped Jobs’s style. BusinessWeek called him “the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Like his mentor, he favored black shirts and jeans and demanded excellence from staff. He obsessed over minor details such as speeding up the rate the iPhone’s screen refreshed. At the time, some images on the screen updated as slowly as thirty times a second. He wanted faster updates so that scrolling to the bottom of a contact list, for example, would be seamless and match the speed of a finger swiping up the screen. “If we lose a frame, we break the illusion of the device. People will just see it as a computer,” he told his software team. Engineers told him that they couldn’t refresh the screen that often because the graphic processing chips were too slow, but Forstall insisted. Eventually, they found a way to refresh the screen sixty frames a second, a software leap that made it harder for rivals to copy the iPhone’s performance. Forstall’s ascent came at a cost. To create the iPhone, Jobs pitted Forstall’s software team against a hardware team led by Tony Fadell, a godfather of the iPod. Forstall and Fadell vied against each other for talent and clashed over Forstall’s strict secrecy around the software team’s work. After Forstall’s design ideas triumphed, the animosity between the teams deepened because the hardware engineers believed that Forstall had blocked new features, such as a better camera, by discouraging his software engineers from prioritizing them. Forstall also rankled services chief Eddy Cue by insisting that the iTunes system for the iPhone be developed by the software team instead of Cue’s staff, which had been managing the music service on computers for years. “Scott was very controlling on the iPhone,” said Henri Lamiraux, a top lieutenant. “It was his world, and he didn’t want anyone else in. He thought if people took pieces of the iPhone software, it was going to collapse.”
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Williamson approached Forstall and Schiller to tell them that the project wouldn’t be ready on time. The deadline was tight, the goals were ambitious, and the team was struggling with the data. He worried that customers were so dependent on maps that a single flaw would lessen their loyalty to iPhones. He proposed keeping Google Maps on the iPhone and offering a prerelease of Apple Maps, known as a beta version, so users would know that it was being improved. “We don’t ship betas,” Schiller said.
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IN APRIL 2012, charter buses rolled into the parking lot at Infinite Loop to ferry Apple’s leaders to an annual corporate off-site meeting at Carmel Valley Ranch, a resort south of Monterey. The event, known as the Top 100, was an exclusive gathering of the company’s top decision makers and most talented staffers. For years, Jobs had finalized the list of attendees and required everyone to ride in buses to the gathering—a tradition that Cook continued.
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Jobs had favored rivalries between executives, encouraging people with egos to advance ideas that he could pick from to make great products. He could keep those dueling personalities in check. Whereas he might have torched Forstall and fired a subordinate directly responsible for Maps, Cook used the fiasco to eliminate disharmony on his leadership team and send a signal to the company that he wanted everyone to work together more than they had in the past. Without Jobs there to connect all the different areas of their businesses, they would have to make those connections themselves. In the process, Cook had eliminated one of the only perceived rivals to his leadership. He also rewarded Apple’s most important employee, Ive, with a responsibility the designer had long wanted, influence over the way Apple’s software looked. Cook had taken an action that would earn him loyalty, but his fear of being abandoned by his top lieutenants was something he would have to face again and again.
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During the presentation, Ive remained mostly quiet as he processed what the engineers presented. His relative silence was typical of his leadership. He seldom spoke in meetings, and when he did, he often strung together several ideas being discussed and raised a possibility that no one else had imagined. Eventually, a few electrical engineers opened a black Pelican case that Apple used to conceal and securely transport unreleased devices. The lid of the case rose to reveal a series of square iPod Nanos with black wrist straps. Engineers removed the iPods from the case and clasped them onto the executives’ wrists. Ive held out his left hand and watched as an engineer strapped the iPod tightly around his wrist. He shook his head. “I like to wear a watch loose on my wrist,” he said before relaxing the band to create a few millimeters of space.
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THE KEY TO A PRODUCT’S SUCCESS is purpose. The iPod dominated music because it put a thousand songs into people’s pockets. The iPhone flourished because it combined a music player, phone, and computer into a single device. Not every gadget starts with such transformative goals in mind, but every one that succeeds springs from a well of deep thought and consideration. As the watch developed, Ive was thinking hard about what it should do. One of the first things he wanted to evaluate was the existing marketplace. The smartwatch industry was nascent with only about a half-dozen companies making gadgets that they claimed worked like the two-way wrist radio in Dick Tracy comics. Ive wanted to know about them all. One day, he welcomed an engineering team to the studio that had gathered information on competitive offerings and printed summaries on eleven-by-seventeen-inch sheets of paper with details about their features and their dimensions. He gathered the group around one of the studio’s tables and flipped through the sheaves of paper explaining each watch. He turned past images of a square Sony smartwatch the width of a shirt sleeve and an Italian-made device as thick as a Zippo lighter. As he scrutinized the pages, he grimaced. “These products lack humanity,” he huffed. Ive stared at the bulky gadgets with disgust as some in the group around him nodded in agreement. The devices had only one thing in common with traditional watches: they told time. Ive’s team hadn’t finalized Apple’s design, but Ive knew that Apple’s watch would look very different from anything else on the market. It would need to be informed by the past to prosper in the future. The very fact that people would wear it made the way it looked matter more than for something they might slip into their pocket, drop into a bag, or lay on a table. It would be intimate, constantly resting against the skin, and perpetually visible, a battery-and-processor-powered extension of them. A computer that looked like jewelry. A product with soul.
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Cook reviewed Schiller’s note. He always kept his emails brief, long enough to show he’d read them, but short and direct enough to spur action. He wrote: If we need to do this, we should get going.
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“We have always thought of design as being so much more than the way something looks,” said Ive. “It’s the whole thing, the way something actually works on so many levels. . . . It’s about bringing order to complexity.”
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John Browett, who had been let go alongside Forstall, had lasted only a few months. With Cook’s support, the former head of the U.K. electronics chain Dixons had embarked on a cost-cutting mission that had aggravated retail staff and sparked a minor rebellion in Apple’s stores. Though the push had flowed from Cook’s long-standing desire to make the stores more efficient, the CEO had dumped the high-profile hire because Browett wasn’t a good fit with the company’s culture.
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Ive’s ambitions for the watch challenged one of Jobs’s principles. Upon his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs had eliminated 70 percent of the products the company was making and drawn a four-square chart on a whiteboard. He had written “Consumer,” “Pro,” “Desktop,” and “Portable” in the squares and said the company needed to make one great product for each quadrant—four products in all. It reflected his philosophy that deciding what not to do was as important as deciding what to do. With the watch, Ive was testing those boundaries, pushing three cases in two different sizes, available in several colors, plus an array of complex bands. His pursuit of personalization would end up with fifty-four different configurations. Instead of a narrow focus, he pushed a broad undertaking that required more decisions and more bureaucracy. While some managers find empowerment from adding head count under their umbrella, Ive viewed it as an annoyance of corporate bloat that could create obstacles for his creative ideas. More and more engineers and operations staff filtered into the studio to manage all the elements of the watch and a push by Apple’s product marketing arm to diversify the iPhone with a lower-priced model in five colors. The newcomers brought Cook’s back-office concerns about operations and costs into the sacrosanct studio. Ive’s unwritten rules began to be broken.
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To alert people to an incoming message, they worked with the product design team to develop a so-called taptic engine that would subtly tap a user’s wrist. The concept created an engineering challenge. The taptic engine was composed of a linear resonant actuator, essentially a spring with a weight on the end that bounced on command. In a phone, it got people’s attention because it vibrated at the same frequency as a mosquito’s buzz, a sound humans are evolutionarily disposed to hearing. But no one wanted mosquitos buzzing on people’s wrists, so the engineers worked to virtually eliminate the sound of that vibration until all that remained was the feeling of a gentle touch on the wrist.
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In Jobs’s absence, Cook had implemented a collaborative approach to marketing that required Ive to provide more input about how Apple sold its products to the world. Ive had such a distinct vision for what the watch should be that he embraced that responsibility. As the timepiece came together, his conviction about its purpose deepened. He constantly characterized it as Apple’s most personal device and preached that its success would depend on people’s willingness to wear it. Selling the watch would require the endorsement of cultural tastemakers, particularly in the world of fashion, an industry with unseen influence over what people wear. In a marketing meeting, he told colleagues that the reaction of tastemakers such as Vogue editor Anna Wintour and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld would have more bearing on the watch’s success than would the tech reviewers who assessed the latest Macs. “Our future isn’t in the hands of people like Walt Mossberg,” he told Apple marketers, referring to the longtime product reviewer at the Wall Street Journal. He respected Mossberg but believed the watch needed to transcend tech reviewers to gain acceptance. The focus on fashion struck some colleagues as being out of step with Apple’s historic focus on marketing technology features. Product marketer Phil Schiller wanted to pitch the watch as an accessory of the iPhone or a fitness device, emphasizing its ability to bring messages to wearers’ wrists or keep track of their workouts. Members of Apple’s Marcom team worried that Ive was using the watch as a wedge to push the company in a direction that personally interested him. They considered his focus on fashion vain and self-serving. Ive bristled at their resistance. He remained convinced that no one would wear the watch if it was marketed like a computer. People close to him saw his interest in fashion as an extension of Jobs’s legacy of marrying technology with culture. In their eyes, the iPod alone hadn’t resurrected Apple; its connection to music had. If the watch was going to succeed, Apple would need to forge relationships in the creative world and win over thought leaders in fashion the same way it had won over record labels and musicians.
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Word spread through the company that Cook wanted its next major device to deliver at least $10 billion in sales, an artificial benchmark to ensure that any project Apple pursued would be more than a rounding error for a company now reporting $170 billion in annual revenue. The financial target spoke to the law of large numbers, a business theory holding that as the sales of a blockbuster product expand, it becomes harder and harder to deliver the rate of growth that investors expect. Publicly, Cook called the theory a “dogma . . . cooked up” to create fear. He assured investors that Jobs had created a culture in which numbers didn’t limit thinking. Instead, he said, the focus at Apple was on creating products that would produce the numbers. But inside Infinite Loop, numbers had begun to inform product development and business strategy. Cook believed in Ive’s vision for the Apple Watch and its potential to post the kind of sales numbers Apple needed to deliver revenue increases, even as the iPhone matured. But the perpetual backup planner and risk mitigator anticipated that it might take more than one new business to meet investors’ expectations, so he searched for opportunities of his own.
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Pained by the thought of such extraordinary costs, Cook stressed over how to bring the effort’s spending under control. He realized he needed someone who could squeeze costs, strip out excesses, and strike world-class bargains in order to save Apple hundreds of millions of dollars. He needed a man known inside Infinite Loop simply as the Blevinator. A diehard negotiator from the small Blue Ridge Mountains town of Jefferson, North Carolina, Tony Blevins refused to buy almost anything at price. He pridefully wore a cheap puka shell necklace that he had bargained down to $2 from $5 as a reminder to his staff that nothing should fetch full price. He bragged to friends about his personal triumphs, including his purchase of a man’s vintage car worth $8,000 for $2,500. When friends reminded him that his stock in Apple had made him a millionaire and he could afford the car’s list price, he shrugged. “But I wasn’t going to let him get what he wanted,” he said. His unyielding passion for winning negotiations had vaulted him to the top of Apple’s operations team. After Ive selected the kind of glass he thought Apple should use, Blevins invited glassmakers from Germany and China to the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong. He reserved a series of adjoining conference rooms at the hotel and put each bidding company into its own room. He then went from room to room, pressuring the bidders to lower their prices. He told the Germans, who were seeking upward of $500 a square foot, that the Chinese were asking a fraction of that. He told them they had ten minutes to lower their price. “If you don’t agree to this number, the guys next door said they would,” he said. Moments after issuing the ultimatum, he exited the room, leaving his astounded colleagues to process his bluffs. As the clock ticked, the various bidders scrambled to figure out if they could reduce their prices and still make enough profit to make the project worthwhile. Meanwhile, Blevins cycled from room to room, intensifying the pressure. “The project is not moving forward,” he said. “We have a cost problem. You have fifteen minutes to give me the best possible deal you can offer.” The blend of bluster and whirl of demands worked. By the time the final bid was accepted, Blevins had reduced Apple’s glass cost by hundreds of millions of dollars.
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THE ENGINEERS WERE growing restless. As the watch project hurtled ahead, a few began to think about what big thing Apple could do next. They didn’t get a satisfying answer. In the void, a handful of the company’s senior engineers decided to depart en masse. Their abrupt resignation ripped through their divisions and reached the ears of Cook. Some of the engineers were members of the architecture and core operating systems team. They set Apple’s road map, developing the chips and internal capabilities that brought its products to life. Many of them were longtime Apple employees with tremendous institutional knowledge. Losing one would be disappointing. Losing them all would be a brain drain. Cook faced a conundrum. To halt the exodus, he directed his engineering leaders to empower and inspire the mutinous engineers by asking what they would they like to pursue next. A car, they answered. They wanted Apple to make a car. At the time, Tesla was in the process of doubling its staff and plowing money into the development of more sophisticated batteries for its electric vehicles. The electric vehicle company was recruiting dozens of Apple engineers, who told former colleagues that the company’s founder, Elon Musk, was going to be the next Jobs. In nearby Mountain View, Google had been working on its own self-driving car and trying to partner with established automakers to bring it to roads nationwide in a few years. The entire peninsula buzzed with the possibility of a transportation revolution. A group of engineers gathered in a conference room to discuss how to proceed. They reviewed marketing analysis drawn up by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. It showed that Apple already accounted for the majority of the profits in the $500 billion consumer electronics industry and needed to move into other areas to deliver sales increases for shareholders. The largest options were the $2 trillion auto industry and the $7 trillion health care industry. Turning to MBA-style analysis was disorienting for some engineers. Steve Jobs had disdained consultants; he had thought they made recommendations and moved to their next project without working to determine whether their ideas succeeded or failed. But Cook’s hunger for numbers and data led the group to turn to traditional sources of business information as they sought and eventually won the CEO’s support for the project. Initially, they focused on developing an electric vehicle that they hoped would disrupt the auto industry in much the same way the iPhone had disrupted the communications industry. It would not be the first, but it would be the best. They called the new effort “Project Titan.”
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Ive could feel his creative spirit dimming. Behind the scenes, he had spent much of the past three years engaged in corporate conflict. He had tussled over whether to develop a watch with former software chief Scott Forstall. He had then battled over which of its features to promote with chief marketer Phil Schiller. Concurrently, he had confronted rising concerns about costs as he selected construction materials for Apple Park. And he had been sapped by the additional responsibility of managing dozens of software designers. He navigated it all without the support and collaboration of Jobs, the creative partner whom he hadn’t fully mourned. The entirety of it left him feeling exhausted and lonely.
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For decades, Apple embraced its identity as a technology company, and it was difficult for some to watch it distance itself from that legacy to adopt strategies from fashion. Its sales executives, who oversaw the rollout of Macs, iPhones, and iPads, worried the embrace of luxury tactics would undermine one of Apple’s strengths: its identity as an accessible, premium brand. Under Jobs, Apple had commanded the highest prices in technology by combining Ive’s sleek designs with easy-to-use software. Cook’s operations wizardry had kept their prices affordable. They feared the watch would make the brand less democratic and more exclusive, turning off loyal customers.
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During the product’s development, Ive had played the role of Jobs and himself, overseeing industrial and software design, as well as directing marketing. The work had pulled him out of the design studio and into more and more meetings. The influence he had once sought over all aspects of a product’s development had burdened him with endless obligations and stress that took a physical toll. He fretted that he’d missed time with his eleven-year-old boys. He grew sick and caught pneumonia. Compounding his frustration about it all was a feeling that he had shouldered many of those responsibilities alone. Jobs had visited the studio almost daily and supported the designers’ work, giving them direction and urging them onward. Cook, on the other hand, seldom came by, and when he did, it was only briefly. In a few years, Ive had gone from being Jobs’s favored disciple to being one of many leaders in Cook’s egalitarian world. He decided that he wanted out.
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APPLE GAVE EVERY PROJECT a code name, a special designation that filled its employees’ work with mystery and secrecy. The tradition dated back to the late 1970s, when the company had launched a project to develop an inexpensive computer under the code name of an engineer’s favorite apple, the McIntosh. Some names were more practical than imaginative. The music effort took its name from the idea that the company would fuse the recently acquired Beats business with its existing Apple music business.
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When the iPhone found itself at a development crossroads that year, he proved more decisive. At the time, Apple’s most important product had fallen into a release cadence known as the “ticktock cycle.” The company would overhaul the iPhone’s design in a “tick” year, triggering a surge in sales, and refine the design in the subsequent “tock” year, when sales would wane. The strategy helped spread the costs of labor and new machinery over two years. But for the first time the company’s product road map called for its ticktock tactic to miss a beat. After overhauling its iPhone design with the iPhone 6 in 2014, the company planned to refine that phone in 2015 and 2016. The resulting ticktock-tock cadence created internal pressure to do something truly dramatic in 2017, a year that would mark the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. Cook pressed for ideas that would reinvigorate the product. A group of engineers from a recently acquired Israeli chip and technology company called PrimeSense advanced the idea of miniaturizing a technology for gaming consoles. The system, which they had developed, used cameras and sensors to process users’ hand gestures. They proposed taking the nine-by-three-inch concept and shrinking it tenfold so that people could unlock their phones with their faces. The facial recognition technology would enable Apple to eliminate the home button and expand the phone’s screen from edge to edge, blurring the display into the space around it like an infinity pool. It was an ambitious concept that would require huge engineering leaps, but Cook endorsed a plan that would minimize the risks. The PrimeSense technology would become part of a premium iPhone that would sell at a higher price. The cost increase would offset the pricier components, but perhaps more important, it would moderate the demand for a product that many feared would be hard to make in the numbers a popular new iPhone would sell, upward of 50 million units in about three months. They would fulfill the excess demand—and hedge against a possible facial recognition failure—by complementing the premium phone with another minor update to the iPhone 6. The plan was a master class in risk management.
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The number of subscriptions to Apple Music showed that the criticisms hardly mattered. Despite the troubles—Iovine’s struggles onstage, Taylor Swift’s attack, the damning reviews—Apple Music took off. The former Beats marketing team, unnerved by Cook’s ambitious subscription targets, watched with wonder as the app proliferated across half a billion iPhones. The three-month free trial brought in millions of new customers, and many of them stuck around. It had 10 million paid subscribers in six months, a milestone that its rival Spotify had taken six years to hit. Within a year, the number would hit 20 million. Cook could only smile. He knew that Apple had built a distribution machine.
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Ive erupted. It was clear to everyone involved that the project was suffering under the weight of its ambitions. Ive’s vision for a fully autonomous vehicle had contributed to the build-out of a massive team of programmers and sensor experts, while hardware chief Dan Riccio’s focus on creating an electric vehicle had led to the development of a massive team of battery and automotive experts. The project had three leaders who appeared more focused on building out their corporate fiefdom than on moving a unified project forward. The challenges were reminiscent of the corporate infighting that plagued the Apple Watch.
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Members of the Project Titan team shared his displeasure. The special project group had swelled to a thousand-person organization with a mutant culture that blended the grinding determination of Apple executives hell-bent on doing the impossible with the experienced skepticism of outsiders savvy about the challenges of self-driving vehicles. Old-timers and newcomers alike knew that Jobs had built the iPhone using a different approach: he had relied on a lean team of mostly existing employees in various divisions whom he had guided. But in Tim Cook’s new collaborative kingdom, Apple’s CEO no longer led product development, and that void continued to challenge the company’s efforts to innovate.
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Rather than wallow in the monotony of Cupertino, Ive often met members of the design team in San Francisco for briefings on their work. He would reserve the Musto Bar at his social club, the Battery, and hold design reviews inside the library-themed speakeasy-style space. The intermittent gatherings changed the group’s cadence. For years, they had met three times a week at the same kitchen table in the studio. They had reviewed the latest update to every ongoing product and discussed how the prototypes could be improved. The regularity of those sessions had allowed them to make incremental adjustments in a span of days to refine their work, like sculptors chiseling away at raw marble. When he had been alive, Jobs had guided those changes. Later, Ive had approved each adjustment and refinement. Initially, the design team had done well in Ive’s absence. They had swiftly defined the direction of the tenth-anniversary iPhone, due in 2017. With the planned facial recognition system set to replace the home button, the group quickly coalesced around creating a nearly full-screen display that included an indention at the top where they could inlay the camera system that would recognize a user’s face and unlock the phone. Form followed function and won Ive’s approval.
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Some of them took to calling that period “the Hawaii days.” With Ive seldom around, it was more romantic to assume that he was spending most of his time at his Kauai estate, seated beside an outdoor pool and surrounded by palm trees, than imagine him an hour up the interstate in nearby San Francisco. Similar inefficiencies tormented the software designers. Staff considered the approval of software concepts by Alan Dye, whom Ive had tapped to lead the division, as temporary authorizations. Ultimately, they wanted Ive’s assessment. The dynamic led everyone to look forward to a monthly “design week,” when Ive promised to spend an entire workweek in the studio, reviewing and discussing their work. The problem: he rarely, if ever, showed up. Ahead of one design week in late 2016, Johnnie Manzari, who was in charge of Apple’s Photos app, stood before more than a dozen eleven-by-seventeen-inch images of changes he planned to pitch. He was reviewing his work when word trickled through the studio that Ive wasn’t going to come. “What am I going to do now?” Manzari said to a colleague with disappointment. It wasn’t that Manzari or anyone else on the team needed Ive to make every decision, but most of them craved time with him. He had some of the world’s most refined eyes, and he always challenged them to do better.