YouSaid · the spoken record

Henri Lamiraux

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117

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2019-04-19

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2019-04-19

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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “And so I thought that it was really more of a personal story. And so no, I didn't, I was imagining that maybe I would ask for forgiveness if somehow they didn't really approve. But I thought that I wouldn't really run into trouble.”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And I took a certain approach to it, which is that it's a positive take on Apple. I loved my career at Apple. So I didn't throw anybody under the bus because there was nobody that I thought deserved it. I limited myself to the Steve Jobs era, which is now sadly or for good or for bad, passing into history. And again, I was one of the few people who had this perspective, this opportunity to be there during the time that some of these products were getting made. And so, you know, again, with my background being in history and being in the liberal arts, I thought that it would be good if I collected these recollections, while I still do remember them well and tell the story.”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “But that is also one of the ways that just made it clear about if I was collaborating with someone like Boss or just some other engineer on the iOS engineering hallway, if I was the DRI for the keyboard, well, I was the one making the calls. And as long as I kept making good calls, I mean, if somebody else had an idea that they really, really thought they were going to go to the mat and they're going to say, no, I think Ken made the wrong call on this. Yeah, they could buck that up. The management hierarchy, but that was relatively unusual. Because, again, part of being a DRI is recognizing strong ideas that are coming from other people and including them in the work. And so that helps to describe some of the character of the collaboration that we had.”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “And one of the constraints that you have when you apply for patents is that you need to list the inventors. You actually need to be honest about who contributed to the specific invention. And so they would ask us, well, which one of you two came up with this specific idea so that we can write it into the claim language? And maybe if we're going to take that claim and move it to a separate patent, we know we have to know who to put as the inventor. And we would, Boss and I would look at each other and we would go, I don't know, we both came up with it. And so that's the sign of collaboration is that where the collaboration is so good that you don't know where it begins and where it ends, you're complementing each other so well that we did it. And there was no other way to describe it. And part of a concrete piece of advice or maybe a way of describing that.”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yeah, well, it's interesting that we were very, very good at combining complementary strengths, right? So we had this human interface design team, and I worked very, very closely over time with a couple of the folks in there. Of course, there were only a few folks in there in total. And what we would do is let's say the example of me working with boss ording on the iPhone keyboard. And so I was coming from the project primarily from an engineering direction. He was coming from the project primarily from a design direction. But Boss was pretty good at writing code. And I would fire up Photoshop and Illustrator. And so we would come up with these ideas and we would complement each other. And to the extent, and again, whatever you think of software patents, we got them for the work that we did in Apple.”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Making the products need to be a better reflection of the world as it is, right? That it's not just a bunch of computer geeks who went to maybe just a few high-powered schools that have good computer science departments.”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Yeah, it's a hard question. I mean, Steve was unique And unfortunately, he's not around anymore. And so I think it's kind of a fool's errand to go out and find who is the direct successor to Steve Jobs. It's just, you know, it's just like the questions are always changing. And so I think it's a matter of finding a place where you feel comfortable where you feel some sort of connection to what the organization is trying to accomplish and that you like the people and that you feel that you're bringing something. It's again this interesting contrast of both fitting in but then also I think providing more diversity. That's an ongoing challenge for high-tech companies is that again as the products become more and more important for our culture. I think the people who are”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “And really, it's unfortunate that there are so many questions like that. Well, obviously linked lists, we're still going to have need for those as we go into the future. But the work that much of the work that I did in my life, there was no way that I could have predicted. When I was handed a piece of hardware like this and it's like make a touchscreen operating system for a smartphone, well There were precious few examples that we could have looked at. And so how do you have experience in that thing? So again, I think getting a flexibility and being able to answer the sort of more general questions about what you like and what's good and what your higher level goals are. Because technology is going to change.”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Super, and that's counterintuitive in Silicon Valley, right? The suite of interview questions you typically encounter when you're interviewing for jobs are about linked lists. And do you know TensorFlow? And can you program in Python or whatever, as opposed to what's good?”

   2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “If you can't answer those questions for yourself, it would be then hard, as say a product designer, to then take on the responsibility of answering those questions for other people. Because that's what you do when you're a technologist and say a product company like Apple, you're going to be making decisions on products that are then going to go out in the world and be affecting other people. Other people are going to be putting those things and bringing them into their lives. And so how do you know what's good? And so that's a question that you should be prepared to answer for yourself. What do you like? And why? What are your goals? Why do you make a choice to make the product turn like this rather than that? And so it's this combination of learning about the technology so that you can actually implement your ideas. But then you've got to actually have good ideas. And again, it's the liberal arts that provides the grounding for that.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “So I think that, again, if you want to do something, just start doing it. So that's one piece of advice. And then the other piece of advice is, yeah, you do need to look at more than technology, again, for the reason that I said a few minutes ago, which is these technological artifacts that we're making now have become so important to people that if you don't know anything about people, I don't think that you're going to be successful in the long term. And so, yeah, read books. Read books. Study, philosophy. Go to art museums. Learn about what's beautiful and meaningful to you. Answer those questions for yourself.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Thousands of dollars. $1984. There was no way that I could afford one. And so now the barrier to entry is much lower. So if you're interested in making projects, well, just go out and join a community and start making them. Or maybe you don't even, you can even lurk in the community. You can download the software and try to make something of it yourself.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yeah, I think it needs to be a mix. I think if you're going to be a programmer, yeah, go write programs. I mean, the only way to get better at things is to do them. And one of the wonderful things we mentioned, open source a bit earlier, the barriers now have never been lower. To get involved, I knew that when I was a young person in college, I actually started in college in 1984, I couldn't afford a Mac, right? I wanted one.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Yeah, I love that story, that it was sort of a game that led to it as opposed to, all right, we're just going to do every possible pixel variation. We're going to bring people in to test it, and we'll see what works.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “And within a couple of days, of course, the game was actually fun, right? I finally got 20 out of 20, right? We determined that if you made a rectangle that was 57 pixels square that pretty much everybody could tap it 100% of the time. No matter where it was, again, since you were going quickly, you could tap it comfortably. And that number then, since he was working on springboard and it was his game, it was his app, he put that number into the app. He made the pixel 57 pixel square. And since that was a good number, we never changed it. And so that's what wound up shipping on the iPhone.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Before Angry Birds, we had the little angry rectangles as you're going around. Now, naturally, what he was doing, he also wrote the software so that he was tracking rectangle by rectangle whether people were succeeding or failing, and also based on where the rectangle showed up on the screen.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “And as soon as you did, it didn't tell you if you succeeded or failed. Because the idea was just go tap the rectangle as quickly as possible. You tap the rectangle, the next one would show up at some other random size and some other random position on the screen. And the idea was to just go as quickly as possible without, again, being sort of weighed down by the feedback of whether you were succeeding or failing. And so it was fun.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “In the hallway had an idea. And his name was Scott Hers. He was doing work on springboard, the icon launching program himself. And so he had this idea that I'm going to make a game It's the first ever iPhone game, right? Truly, because this is a point where we didn't even have all of our units still needed to be tethered to a Mac. We didn't have standalone enclosures yet. So we were still at this phase where we had touchscreens that still needed to have a wire tethered to it. But still, we were trying to figure out, well, what the ideal size is. And the game was the solution. And the game went like this. You would launch the game and there was a minimal user interface. All it was was a rectangle on the screen. That was a random size and a random position. And the game was tap the rectangle.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Yeah, so okay, so now going back to a phone that looks more like this is my original iPhone that I still have. So this is the screen size that we were dealing with. Now, one of the, again, now jumping back all the way to 2005, 18 months out from the product announcement, we were still in the early stages of trying to figure out, well, what is the home screen of apps going to look like and how is it going to work? And one of the fundamental questions that we had was, well, how big should the icons be? And again, I mentioned before, this apprehension of touching targets that were smaller than your finger. And we were still in the phase where we didn't know how big on-screen objects should be. And so we had some experiments, but this was still, we didn't have a good handle on it. And so one of the engineers”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “There's a problem with the number of time that we're spending looking at these screens, right? That we need now apps and features on the phone to help us track. Too much screen time, right? And so if we're going to have this object, this device, these experiences that are so important to us, so deeply ingrained, well, then it requires, I think, the care and attention and the thought about It's not just a technology artifact, it's a social artifact, right? It's a human artifact, right? And so that's where liberal arts comes in. Yes, you do need to have the technological background to come up with the hardware and the software and the networking and the services to get everything packed together so that a product like this is possible. You're going to ask, well, Well, what is it good for”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Well, I mean, it's all the process of designing experiences for people that are useful and meaningful. And I think that how do we define what's useful and meaningful? Well, we look to literature, right? We look to philosophy. We look to art. We look to the creative media, right? To decide what's useful and meaningful. And so, you know, I think, and I don't know, I didn't know Steve well enough to know what he thought, but the culture that he helped to create and that I found my place in that culture was the part of the approach was that these devices are part of people's lives. More and more now, to the extent that now we think that there”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “But again, the DRIs were responsible. You needed to bring him proposals, right? You might think of that keyboard demo example was, well, we were bringing him two keyboards and we wanted him to pick which one. No, that wasn't it. We were presenting him with a design we wanted to ship in the product. The design was going to have these two keyboards. He was the one who unpacked it. And to say we only wanted one of these. So no. And the point is that if you brought him shoddy work that was like the equivalent of a shoulder shrug, Steve, we've got five things. We don't really know which one we think we like. That was a way to...”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “So he thought that it was sort of tapping into the little sort of whimsical aspect that went all the way back to sort of like the happy Mac on the original Macintosh, right? That it was this whimsical little animation that showed that the system has this playful character to it. And that was an aspect that he really loved. And so And it also just goes to show that there could be disputes even up at the highest level. Scott knew that I was very excited about this feature and wanted to show Steve, so he let me. And Steve was the one who had the final vote and he sided with me and then that instance.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Okay, so I got the chance to demo this to Steve too, and I remember that Steve, what he did was he had the iPad in his lap. So he was sitting like this and doing the gestures, trying them side to side and whatever. And when he just discovered by himself this rubbery animation, end-of-list animation, he did it, he did it again, and he didn't look up. He said, This is Apple”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “That's right. And it's an interesting aspect to what happens as you evolve a product. They would then for the subsequent version, but we would be shipping a version that added a new feature multitasking gestures, and it would have to work with all the apps that were already in the world. Of course, there was a huge ecosystem by that point. So this was Scott's argument, is that the designers, you've done something to the designers that they couldn't really have accounted for in the design of their apps.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “End of list. And so what I came up with was this sort of morphing, stretching, rubbery distortion of the app to show you that you were at the end of the list. And it would kind of do this bloop, bloop, bloop sort of animation when you let your fingers up off the screen. And Scott Forstahl hated it. He hated it. And his argument went like this. He said, you know, that's not fair to the designers of the apps because they really didn't design for what their apps would look like when you stretched them”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “There was then this other interaction where you would swipe side to side to just go between one app directly to some other app, right? So you launch mail and then you launch Safari. Well, then I can just swipe to go from Safari back to mail, right? So the system would keep track of the history of apps that you launched. So now here's the part that Scott didn't like. So let's say you start up your iPad from nothing, right? You take it out of the box and you bring it home. And yeah, you launch mail and you launch Safari. So you've only ever launched two apps. So you swipe to go from Safari back to mail. Well, what happens if you continue swiping in that direction? There's no other apps.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah, and so this was for iOS 5. So this was maybe the second version, second or third version of iPad software. And we wanted to come up with multitasking gestures is what we called them so that you would have some way of interacting with your whole hand on the screen. Well, obviously from the beginning, even though multi-touch was something that shipped even in the first Apple product, there was no way that you could have sophisticated gestures, multi-finger gestures on a screen that size. But with the iPad, we thought that you could. And so you have this idea of, well, what if you've got the home button that way? You still maybe want some gestures to interact with the device to control going between app to app. So I came up with this idea of using this five finger gesture. Like you take a sheet of paper and crumple it up and throw it away to go from an app back to the home screen.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “And so, you know, I don't want anybody, I don't want the engineer, the engineers aren't going to be there to be whispering in the ear of the person in the Apple store. Sure, they can maybe get the help of one of the nice people working in the Apple store. But gosh, wouldn't it be better if I can figure this thing out for myself and decide for myself and see the evidence of the care that the engineers and designers had put into the work that I can decide for myself? Yeah, this is the thing I want to take home with me.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that if he had done so, he would have been in no uncertain terms. He said, let me look at the thing. Because now it's like what was he doing? He was, in my view, I don't know what's going on inside his head, but just having seen him do that, having at least enough experience with him and his approach to evaluating work is that he was putting himself in the position of a customer. He was envisioning himself that being in an Apple store as a customer walking up to a table, seeing this new iPad thing for the first time, what's going to be my impression of it? So he pictured himself as customer number one.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Demo over. And the interesting thing is that then that's the keyboard that chipped on the product with the dislight modification of taking away the Zoom button, which was now no longer needed. And so Steve had this amazing ability to simplify and to rely on his people to have a good enough idea about what they were doing and to be involved enough in the work that even when you get asked difficult questions about it, that you've been thinking about it. You have this background of just context of having been thinking about the problem for weeks and weeks, that that experience was then something he was interested in tapping into to provide a way forward for the product.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “See, but, you know, and I had no idea that this is what he was going to ask. But in that moment, I came up with an answer because I thought about my experience with these two keyboards. And I thought that, you know, the one with the bigger key is I found more comfortable. I was getting to be that maybe with four or five fingers that I could touch type. And auto correction was helping. So that's why I said to Steve, I said, well, I like the bigger one. The auto correction is kind of helping. And I'm starting to get a feel for touch typing. And he says Okay, we'll go with that one.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I'm on the hot seat. I guess so. And then he says, I mean, this is, again, the interesting part. He asks me, which one do you think we should use? He asks me. He doesn't ask, you know, Scott Forstahl, who he knows much better. He doesn't ask any of the other people in the room. He asks me, the individual contributor. He's coming in, but I'm the DRI. You see, that's the thing. He wanted the answer from me. Now, the thing was, I had to give an answer. You know, if I didn't give a good answer, maybe I would never be invited back again.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “And then he studied a little bit more and tapped Zoom button again to see that it's like, okay, there are just two states that were going here between, right? We've got two keyboards. I see the animation go between one, then the other, back to the first one. He satisfies himself that he's seen what there is to see. And so then he turns to me and he says we only need one of these things, right?”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “It seems like one of those things where it was probably maybe 20 or 30 seconds that felt like 20 minutes, right? But he took a long time to study and then eventually he goes out and touches the zoom button. And this zoom button to change between the two keyboards, in this case shrinking the keys down to be the more laptop-like keyboard layout, the animation that Boss Ording had designed was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I mean, it really looked like they were like the keys were just morphing. It was absolutely beautiful. But Steve just was like, no reaction. He does the Zoom and then he does the study again. He's like, look at all the keys, looking at how the screen changed. Then he does the zoom again, and it goes back to the state that it was in the beginning.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “That's it. That was the intro. And so then Steve goes, he slides his office chair over. And he starts like looking at the iPad screen. And what was up was one of the two keyboards. Let's say it was the big key keyboard, the one that was more like suitable for touch typing. And he's looking at it. He took a long time to look at it. It's like he even did this little thing where he was turning his head to see what it looked like in his peripheral vision. It's like it's just incredible to see what does Steve do when he evaluates product. Okay, so this is what Dan, that's what he did. And so he hadn't even touched it yet. He's just looking at it.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “And so it's very, very interesting then how the demos go from that point in that he didn't want a lot of words. He didn't want a lot of used car salesmen pitches, right? All he really wanted to know was what was next. And so what happened is he hung up the phone. He turns towards me. And then Scott Forstahl was the one who then stepped up. He goes and the iPad was already in the room. And so he goes and wakes it out and brings my demo up and says, Steve, we're going to be looking at iPad keyboard options. Now, Ken, he did work on the iPhone keyboard, and now he's got ideas for the iPad keyboard. So Ken? And so I said, yes, Steve, go and look at the demo. It's on the screen now. Try the zoom button.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Excuse me, right? And so he's like, yeah, Bob, yeah, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, yeah, I'll call you next week. Yeah, great talking to you. Right. So then he hangs up. And so then he does this thing. He takes his iPhone, he puts his phone back to his pocket. And then he does this.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “That's right. And so he sends me a text, go stand outside the door, and then, you know, and then the door is going to open. I'm going to get invited in. So I get the text. I go stand outside the door. And now I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting. And it just seemed like, well, he just texted me. Why did he text me? And so then the door opens. I get invited and I figure I'm on. Gonna go do this iPad keyboard demo. And I come around the corner and turn into the room. And Steve is over there and he's like this. He's like, he's on the phone. He's on the phone staring at the ceiling like, you know, going back and forth in his office chair. And I'm like, gulp. I was like, what do I do? Like, Eve now, I'm eavesdropping on Steve on his phone call. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, it's pretty uncomfortable. And I think I actually do think that he was talking to Bob Eiger.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Half a dozen people in the room. And so then what would happen is that the people like me who had individual demos. And so it's like there were circles inside of circles. So I was in the circle of people who could demo to Steve. But then there was this circle inside of that who would stay for all the demos. And so my role would be that, or how I would figure is that I would go in, give my demo, and then leave. And so think of that beforehand is that, you know, I'm sitting there with my iPhone down the hallway waiting for Henri to text me.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “And so the way that this worked is that there was a very small team that was like the chief demo review team, the small group of people that Steve wanted around him as he was reviewing demos. And this was Scott Forestal, Greg Christie, Henri, people that I've mentioned. So the chief managers for iOS. And then a couple of HI designers like Boss Ording, the fellow that I called.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “That would take you from this keyboard that had the small keys that would zoom up to the larger keys and then back down to the smaller keys as a kind of a complement to the globe key that changes the keyboard language. So we would have this other key, this kind of complementary key that would change the keyboard layout. We thought this was a great idea. And again, the idea of what are we going to do with this larger screen real estate for the iPad? Software is give the user choice. Give the user choice. Give the user a choice, use these new pixels that are available on this new platform, this new form factor, and have that, the pitch that we make to people. And so before, of course, you can make the pitch to people. You need to make the pitch to Steve. To the man. That's right. And so I got to demo this for Steve.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “of these ideas and so he gave me a demo where he went through he showed me you know 10 20 different ideas but one of them really made really struck me which was he had a design that showed pretty much just a shrunk down laptop keyboard to fit in this space and so what what what that meant is that i had two ideas is that maybe i could use this larger screen real estate to make a version of the keyboard that had big keys that was almost the same size as a laptop keyboard but then one that also gave you like the number row and all of the punctuation keys exactly where you would expect to find them on on a laptop keyboard and so i figured well you know and i you know started talking with boss and and uh we came up with this demo where we would um have a special key we called the zoom”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “So now what are we going to do to make great use of these additional pixels that we have? And one thing that I also noticed was if you turn the iPad to landscape, that screen distance is actually just about the same as the distance between the Q key and the P key on a laptop keyboard. So I was thinking, hey, like, wait a minute, we could maybe fit a full size something that is a full-size keyboard on a landscape iPad. Now, it turns out that right around at the same time, one of the HI designers, one of my favorite HI designers that I really loved working with and who I had also collaborated with on the iPhone keyboard, Boss Ording, he was starting to think about iPad keyboards as well. And so he had come up with this demo where he had all of these variations.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Okay, so skipping ahead a couple of years after the original iPhone, when we were then doing the original iPad. So this is now 2009, as I recall. So a couple years later. And so this is actually an original iPad right here, and it's actually a really good one, which is actually autographed by Steve Jobs. So this was the iPad that I got at the end of the iPad development process. But back at the beginning of the iPad process, I would have a prototype that looked pretty much like this.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “This pristine room like an air, you know, air filter. The air is clean or the scent of redwoods or something like that piped in. No, no, it was this shabby little room with this mangy old couch and just standard issue office furniture. And that's what there was. I don't know why he didn't want better. But the only reason that I can say is that again, it was a matter of focus. He was focused on looking at the software and not worried about the decor.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “The person who, when they lose sleep, they are losing sleep over that thing that they're going to be demoing to me. So that's what he wanted to do. And these demos were very, very small affairs. Now, interestingly, the demo room for Steve, the software demo room, was this really just shabby little room.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “It was pretty scary. Steve could be intimidating. There is absolutely no doubt about it. But to get back to this point I mentioned before of the top down and the bottom up, as I mentioned, except for this very brief interlude where I was a manager, throughout my whole Apple career, over 15 years, almost 16 years, I was an individual contributor. And yet I got the opportunity to demo to Steve some of the latest work that I did at various points in my career because he wanted to see from the person who did the work. And because when he would ask questions, well, go and ask the expert, right? And go ask a person who is the DRI, right? The directly responsible individual, the person who is, at least according to plan.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “The touch screen iPod, it's the greatest iPod that we've ever shipped. It's got all these great features. It's a phone. You've got web browsing that you can take anywhere with you now. And there's no copy-paste. Well, who cares? We'll get to it, right? I mean, in the meantime, you've got this, you know, most of the most amazing product that we've ever made. And so that was, and Steve just was in his mind was believed that the things that we did do were good enough to counterbalance for the things that we couldn't do.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “That's right. That's right. I mean, you start to have problems like this. And so we just decided that, well, you know, like a Steve Way of maybe communicating this was, look, this is the greatest product ever.”

    2019-04-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source