Design Crazy: Good Looks, Hot Tempers, and True Genius at Apple

They focused on making people love the product. And that’s the distinction at the end of the day. Everybody else was focusing on being smart. Apple focused on being loved.

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

A lot of companies start the design process by blocking things out with wireframes, like, the contact list goes here, and there’s a big wireframe with an X through it. Apple would start with these gorgeous mock-ups in Photoshop and Flash—or Shockwave at the time. There’s no code behind it, and you can only do one thing, but you get the feel.

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.

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

Neither Ive, nor anyone else at Apple,

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,

There was a debate [on the Lisa] team about the mouse. Was it going to have a mouse, and how many buttons should it have? Steve and I wanted one button, because if there’s one button, you never have to think about it. One of the former Xerox guys argued for six buttons. He said, “Look, bartenders have six buttons on those drink dispensers, and they

started while Jobs was running Pixar and NeXT.