Apple Design Studio

The biography details Apple’s top-secret design studio where Jonathan Ive and his team create their latest products. It features a main room with tables for displaying models, and a computer-aided design studio with molding machines and work stations.

Steve Jobs originally conceived the iMac, released in 1998, as a computer without a hard drive, designed primarily for networking and Internet-related tasks. Eventually, another Apple executive persuaded him to add a hard drive, making the iMac more of a desktop PC.??í

Jobs was inspired enough by Sony factory workers’ uniforms to propose that Apple employees wear a distinctive vest. That idea crashed and burned, but it also led to Jobs creating a uniform for himself: The black turtleneck he wore at keynotes and other public events.

Jobs felt that Google Android “ripped off” the iPhone, and he was willing to launch “thermonuclear war” and spend all of Apple’s considerable cash reserves in order to destroy the rival software platform. “It’s a stolen product,” he told Isaacson.

When it came to creating the iPod, Jobs realized that simplicity was best, as opposed to a device overloaded with buttons and functions. “We needed to limit what the device itself would do,” he said. “Instead, we put that functionality in iTunes on the computer.”

Jobs reserved some choice words for Microsoft, terming it a company that had “fallen from their dominance” and was “mostly irrelevant.” He also suggested that the company wouldn’t rebound “as long as [CEO Steve] Ballmer is running it.”

Jobs hinted that he’d finally solved how to create a television interface that was “simple and elegant” along the lines of Apple computers or media players. Whether Apple actually produces a television (and Apple TV replacement) remains to be seen.??í

Jobs incubated the idea of making a tablet for years before the iPad’s release. Jobs and Ive decided on the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen by intuition, playing around with a variety of screens until they settled on the appropriate one.

“I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” Jobs explained to Isaacson, “but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create.”

At the end of the biography, Jobs ruminates on death. “Perhaps it’s like an on-off switch … click! And you’re gone,” he’s quoted as saying. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”