There was an overarching idea of a computer your mom could use. So the typefaces couldn’t look like those weird monospaced computer fonts. I looked at Helvetica and Times New Roman and the kinds

Outsiders have tended to assume that because cofounder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs was a champion of products in which hardware and software work together seamlessly, Apple itself was a paragon of cross-collaboration. In fact, the opposite was often true. And though Jobs was without a doubt the single most important figure in the company’s history,

Macintosh had been an under-resourced research project, a prototype with no clear path to shipping. Steve saw it had a chance to be the future of the personal computer industry.

of type you’d see in magazines, anything that might look familiar to people. The goal, always, was real-world references. I was from suburban Philadelphia, so I named the fonts after stops on the Paoli Local—so Rosemont, Paoli, Ardmore, Overbrook. Steve thought city names were fine, but he asked why would we pick these little cities that nobody had

The challenge in delivering simplicity is, marketing wants to bring more functionality to bear, engineering wants to bring more options to bear—and all of that just

There’s no magic to the product planning cycle at Apple beyond a ruthless focus on a limited set of use cases. What each product does in the first iteration is going to be narrow, but those things are going to be airtight.

Neither Ive, nor anyone else at Apple,

started while Jobs was running Pixar and NeXT.

Ive explained the use of colors as a way to make the iMac “more egalitarian, more accessible, and more open.” Instead of going into a computer store and making a decision based on the speed of a computer’s processor and the size of its hard drive, customers were simply asked which color they wanted.