Apple, Design

On Apple’s Industrial Design

06.13.07 | Comments

I don’t know how I managed it, but somehow I had never heard of the Technology Review until a few days ago. Yes, I know, shoot me now. Thank goodness I was bored and wandering around the magazine aisle in the library, because I knew instantly upon gazing at their sexy cover of the Helio Ocean that it would become a staple of my tech diet. But this post isn’t about the Ocean, though I covet it so, rather I wanted to point to an excellent piece by Daniel Turner about Apple’s much-lauded focus on industrial design.

It’s long, but oh so worth it. Much has been written praising Apple for their industrial design sense already, but Turner’s article is by far one of the most enlightening. I especially liked this:

“Critical to Apple’s success in design is the way Jobs brought focus and discipline to the product teams,” ­Norman says. “[Jobs] had a single, cohesive image of the final product and would not allow any deviation, no matter how promising a new proposed feature appeared to be, no matter how much the team complained. Other companies are more democratic, listening to everyone’s opinions, and the result is bloat and a lack of cohesion.

“The difference between BJ and AJ, Before and After Jobs, is not the process,” he continues. “It is the person. Never before did Apple have such focus and dedication. Apple used to wobble, moving this way and that. No more.”

While Apple consistently churns out great products, it sounds like it would be a truly awful place to work if you cared about your opinion mattering when it came to design elements. And although I’ve decried it in the past, it seems that Steve Jobs’s tyrannical management style is also the key to their design success:

“Jobs is a dictator, but with good taste,” says Norman. “He is good and driven to the perfect experience. He doesn’t want good design; he wants great design.” Brunner similarly lauds Jobs’s “driven, singular focus.” And Rolston says, in what is perhaps the best explanation of Apple’s design ascendancy, “It’s a happy coincidence at Apple that the designer in chief is the CEO. He has a fantastic sense of what people want. And after all, that is design.”

Although Jobs sounds unbearable to work with, it’s talk like this that makes it apparent that he really is the single most important part of Apple. I don’t necessarily think this is a strategy that every company should adopt (you need Jobs’s charisma to really make it work), yet there are lessons from this singular top-down approach to design that Microsoft and others should recognize. It’s definitely part of the “magic” of Apple.

I also love that this article really makes Noah Wyle’s portrayal of Jobs in “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” all the more telling:


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    The strength of Apple however is also its weakness. Jobs has a great vision in mind for the look and feel of the products that Apple produces. However, the downside to Apple is that vision is the only one you get. Control? Customizability? Barely present in Apple products and when so, usually more through hacks than built in.

    Maybe the computer industry should learn something from the car industry about merging design with function. Those are large corporations that tend to do a much better job overall with producing a variety of designs (some functional, some beautiful) with a variety of functionality (some cheap, some durable). And yet most car companies don't have the dictatorial (or should I say Papal?) power that Jobs has.
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    Indeed, Apple seems to be an example of design at the extreme. What's interesting is that compared to a company like Lenovo/IBM, which is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum because they emphasize engineering, Apple is doing significantly better in the consumer market.


    Still, both companies seem stuck in smaller niche markets. What they really need to do is combine the two as you suggest. Only then will they break out of the holes they've basically dug for themselves.

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