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Jony Ive

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2021-05-03

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2021-05-03

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1. “All I've ever wanted to do is design and make. It's what I love doing. It's great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing, but then to be able to practice that and be preoccupied with it is another.”

   2021-05-03 · Founders · #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “So at this time, a lot of companies are producing netbooks, which are small and expensive, low-powered laptops, right? So it says netbooks accounted for 20% of the laptop market, but Apple never seriously considered making one. Netbooks aren't better than anything Steve Jobs said at the time. They're just cheap laptops. Johnny proposed that the tablets in his lab, meaning the iPad, could be Apple's answer to the netbook. In 2011, shipments of iPads rapidly overtook those of netbooks sixty three million versus fewer than thirty million. So let's go back to that quote. Apple never seriously considered making one. Netbooks aren't better than anything. They're just cheap laptops. and I'll close on some North Star advice and from Johnny IV.”

   2021-05-03 · Founders · #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Book goes into greater detail about the development of the iPhone. Really, I just want to read one sentence to you because, again, you have these alternate histories, the alternate futures may be the better way to describe it. They almost quit. He says, this is Joni, or Joni, said it again. This is Johnny. We nearly shelved the phone because we thought there were fundamental problems that we couldn't solve. Okay, so I'm moving ahead. This throwaway comment is actually a great prompt for thinking. What is your product better then? Are you just making a cheap laptop? Do you want to spend your time making a cheap laptop or would you rather make an iPad?”

   2021-05-03 · Founders · #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “But that was a premise that Jobs had repeatedly shown he didn't accept. This is the advice. I'm going to finish this here, but before I read this to you, this is good advice in life for more than just iPhone glass. So he said could not overcome engineering challenges, a premise that jobs repeatedly shows he didn't accept. He stared at Weeks unblinking. Yes, you can do it, he said. Get your mind around it. That's the piece of advice. Get your mind around it. You can do it. As Weeks retold the story, he shook his head in astonishment. We did it in under six months. We produced a glass that had never been made. And I just like reducing that down to a maxim that we can carry with us. Get your mind around it. You can do it. Get your mind around it. It's really interesting language to me.”

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5. “The iPod sold only modestly at first and didn't take off until two years later, when it was made fully compatible with Windows. Still, the seeds of the iPod's success were soon with the first device, and Johnny was confident in the new product. Looking back on the process, Jobs believed the creation of the iPod was quintessential Apple. So this is the section about whatever referenced earlier, knowing why your company exists. If there was ever a product that catalyzed Apple's reason for being It's this, he said, because it combines apple's incredible technology base with Apple's legendary ease of use with Apple's awesome design. Those two things came together in this. And it's like that's what we do. So if anybody was wondering why apples on the earth, I would hold this up as a good example.”

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6. “Told Steve Jobs that he knew how to build Apple's MP3 player. All he needed was a $10 million check. Jobs told him to go for it, but here was a catch. He wanted the new device delivered by Christmas that year. Ruby had six months to come up with Apple's first MP3 player. So there's a great, I always talk about, I spend most of my time studying entrepreneurs of the past. There are a few that are still operating today that I try to listen to and like I read the books they recommend. I want to listen to them talk. One of them is the founder Stripe, Patrick Collison. He has a fantastic personal website, patrickrickollison.com, one of the on that, you can also go to patricklison.com forward slash fast. And he collects, again, one of all the best founders are historians, right? He collects examples of people doing ambitious things quickly in the past. It says some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. He concludes the iPod on this. I want to read it to you. I'm looking for it right now. I know it's on here. Okay.”

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7. “And that's something he mentioned in that interview, I think it was in 2014, that interview I mentioned I was watching earlier. It's like, listen, our design team's not big. Just a small people, constantly collaborating, making demos and communicating and using our best tastes to decide the direction of the product. This is another example of Steve Jobs' Relentless March to make Apple a company of A players. I already mentioned this earlier, but the note talks about he was inspired by Pixar and by Jay.”

   2021-05-03 · Founders · #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Comes down to do you have professional pride or not? In the rush to build it, there was a color mismatch between the doors on the front and the rest of the case. Jobs didn't like it. Satsker pushed back, saying there wasn't time to fix it. Steve said simply, Don't you think you owe it to yourself and to me to do better? I said yes, and we went back and did it again. And it was better. It was always better. So what Steve is just saying is like, do you have professional pride or not? Do you give a shit about what you're working on? Joni on no focus groups, which again is something that Jobs talks about at length. We don't do focus groups. That's the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunity of tomorrow from the context of today to design.”

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9. “IMAX, so he says the IMAX was also And this is him. I love Johnny has a lot of smart things that he says in this book. There's an example of that. In a company that was born to innovate, the risk is in not innovating, Johnny said. The real risk is to think it's safe to play it safe. Steve has a clear vision of what it's going to take to get back to the company's roots, what it would get back to the essence of Apple, what it takes to structure the company, to be something that can design and make new things. Let's go back to the importance of speed. Now they're redesigning and adding to and constantly improving the AMAC. Johnny was amazed at the speed with which jobs gave him approval to the new colors. In most places, that decision would have taken months, Johnny said. Steve did it in a half hour. Now talks about what they're getting so powerful. It says Intel, what made Intel so powerful when it was led by Gordon Moore?”

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10. “I really do hope that story and stories like this do motivate, encourage you in the future. Critics up and down, not going to work, not going to work, not going to work. Edward and Edward Lansey, it's always easier to sell directly to a private consumer than an entrenched professional. He was trying to sell his inventions to the auto industry. And he's on an individual basis, these were smart men in a group. They were idiots. He says something like that. And he's like, from then on, he learned, he's like, I'm just going to go direct to the consumer. And that's when he invents instant photography. He doesn't go and try to sell it to large businesses. He goes right, he does a product demonstration for reporters so the consumers can see it. And once they saw it, they're like, okay, yep, I want it. And again, there's $300,000 that bought it in the first six weeks, the 800,000 people that bought it in the first year, they didn't care what the critics said. They saw the design. It's like, this is wonderful. This is the best computer I've ever seen. Johnny was the one that led the design for the”

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11. “In aerospace, automotive and the fledgling computer animation industry, how did they figure this out? Pixar. Steve's other company, Pixar, had used it from special effects in Toy Story. Apple was producing designs, and this is a result of using something. So he takes an idea from Pixar, applies it to Apple, I guess is my point here. And this is the result Apple was producing designs much more complicated than any of our rivals. We're not doing the bare minimum here. The surfaces on the iMac were more akin to the aerospace and automotive industries than the computer industry. We were pushing the envelope with this new workflow arrangement, Johnny consolidated the model shop into the design shop so they were separate, right? Now remember in the, I gotta tie this to the liftoff before I turn the page.”

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12. “So now they're gonna go into, okay, we're of like minds on design. The company's running out of money. We got to move fast. We can't take four years to launch a product. The iMac had to be on the market in a matter of months or Apple would go to business. So they started realizing, hey, not only we have to make better products, we have to redesign the actual process used to make better products. This is going to remind you a few weeks ago when I did that book on the early days of SpaceX. Read that book. It's fantastic. It's called Liftoff because what Jobs is doing here, Elon did similarly I'll explain how you can connect it to in a minute. When jobs return to Apple, he and Johnny turned the design process, the product development process on his head. They found the answer, so it talks about how can you, they're obsessed with making demos and models because they want to see it, like, how can you make that process go faster and then get that into production as soon as possible? They found the answer in alias wavefront, a 3D graphics package used that...”

    2021-05-03 · Founders · #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Attributes he's talking about the human being behind it. But to me, that is why I bought an Apple computer in the first place. That is why I came to work for Apple. It's because I've always sensed that Apple had a desire to do more than the bare minimum. Go back to, I'm going to interrupt his quote again. Steve Jobs saying, yeah, you know what the bare minimum is when I came back to Apple? A $500 computer running Microsoft Windows. I'm not doing that. I'm not interested in the bare minimum. I'm not going to spend one-third of my life working on the bare minimum. Going back to this quote, it wasn't just going to do what was functionally and empirically necessary in the early stuff, meaning early stuff of Apple. I got a sense that care was taken even on the details hard and soft that people may never discover.”

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14. “Johnny nails it Later Johnny explained his thinking. The computer industry is an industry that has become incredibly conservative from a design perspective. It's an industry where there's an obsession about how product attributes about product attributes that you can measure empirically. How fast is it? How big is a hard drive? How fast is a CD? That is a very comfortable space to compete in because you can say eight is better than six. But Johnny offered a key insight. It is also very inhuman and very cold because of the industry's obsession with absolutes there has been a tendency to ignore product attributes that are difficult to measure or talk about human scorn the abstract he's hitting right on this. This is all this is a quote from him. In that sense, the industry has missed out on the more emotive, less tangible progress.”

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15. “But he'd also come to see what we were working on. In time, jobs became a fixture there. So now they go into development of all these different products, the iMac, everything else. I want to focus on iMac because”

    2021-05-03 · Founders · #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “$500 computer. There's a million people doing that. I am building the best computer. And if I build the best computer, there's always a market for more. Again, let me go back. This is going to be weird. That's not even weird. Let me take that back. It's not weird. Because I constantly reread over the highlights because I want to remember the stuff that we're learning here, right? And I was one of the most influential people on my personal thinking. And I just love his attitude that he brings to his writing and his interviews. Yvonne Schnard, the founder of Patagonia. It's like, listen, if I'm going to be in business, I have to do it my way. I'm not wasting my life. It's got to be fun. I got to do it the way I think it should be built. And, you know, his way, he has a book that gives his ideas. It's called Let My People Go Surfing. And it works. He privately owns, I don't know, I think now his family.”

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17. “Steve dies in 2011. Look at all the products they made. They fit multiple careers in a short amount of time. So now we're going to talk about how they were able to do that, some of the ideas they had. You got to buy this book. I'm telling you, it's fantastic. You're not going to regret it. The thing, so at the beginning of all these chapters, there's a lot of quotes from Johnny and from other people, but this one's from Johnny. I really liked. He says, the thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. All right, so this is fantastic. I have a ton of highlights in this section. So, this is where Steve comes back, and he's given a talk to the company, right? And Johnny's sitting in the audience. And this is one of the most important experiences he has because he realizes, wait, maybe I don't want to quit”

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18. “Just a poor solution to a fundamental problem where I'm reading the section tiers because I found it really fascinating what Johnny did. Where did he start on the solution? To get a grip on the project, he began with its design story. That is by asking himself, what is the story of this product? Scully, the CEO at the time, called it a PDA, but for Johnny, that definition was too slippery. The problem with the first Newton was that it didn't relate to people's everyday lives, Johnny said. So I want to go back to the idea of even the simple idea of, well, what do people do with pens? Yes, they write, but what else are they doing? They're fidgeting with it. They're touching it. They're pressing it up and down. They're twirling it between their fingers. So this idea is like how does this product actually use in their everyday lives? It didn't offer a metaphor that users could”

    2021-05-03 · Founders · #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “There's a fork in the road, and you have to figure out what you're going to do. Like, what is the alternate history of Johnny's life if he says no, and he never goes to Apple? This book is never written. We most likely never know his name. Even though I had done a lot of interesting work up to that time, the issues I encountered at Apple were unlike anything I'd ever dealt with before. The principal challenge to give personality and meaning to a technology that was still being treated as though it were anonymous interested me a lot. Also important was the fact that Apple offers a supportive environment. It's the kind of place where a designer can focus less on day to day business and more on design as a craft. As he remembered through some quote from him, through some sort of reckless sense of faith he got to yes. That is a great description because this is, again, a key.”

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20. “The problem was that they wanted to productionalize it, and in doing so, meaning the product, tore out its heart and soul. So this is where he's coming to the realization, man, what I want to do in life and how I'm spending my time is not matching up. I need to fix this. Johnny didn't enjoy the fact that part of his job improved selling the firm. We were spending up to 90% of our time selling our services. Johnny wanted to devote all of his time to designing great stuff. Johnny gradually realized that he wasn't cut out for this. He loved to design but found the concessions necessary to build the business difficult. Importantly, this is now, Johnny speaking, importantly, I worked out what I was good at and what I was bad at. It became pretty clear what I wanted to do. I was really only interested in design. I was neither interested nor good at building a business.”

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21. “So he starts to have a turning point in his life. He starts to have some bad experiences with clients. And he's just realizing I'm spending a lot more time doing non-design stuff. All I want to do is design. This is going to eventually lead him to jumping the Apple. But I just, sitting here about to read this section to you, I was like, wait, he just, I didn't make the connection earlier. So what's happening is he's working for a client that actually doesn't care at all. They're just about how fast can we get this done, how much money can we make. So I'm going to go back a few pages where he talked about what he loved about Apple, the last sentence. He says, Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn't just about making money. Okay, so now he has a client years later that is just about that. So it says he drove back to London dispirited. He was dejected and depressed. He had poured himself into working for people who didn't really care. Even though the dejected Johnny would continue the development of the design, the process felt wronged him.”

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22. “Humanized technology start with the optimal experience for the customer and think from first principles, rather than by reasoning by analogy. Another way to learn is by seeing something done the wrong way. Johnny took an independent view. He was constantly questioning how things should be. He's doing now, let's see, he's mid-20s. This is exactly what him and his father engaged in when he was a child, right? Just looking at made objects and asking, could this be done better? Could it be done differently? He was constantly questioning how things should be. He hated ugly black and tacky electronics. He hated computers having names like ZX75 and numbers of megabytes. He hated technology as it was in the 1990s. Johnny looked to find his own way.”

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23. “Is going to be a description of Johnny this time, but it hits on all, not all, but a lot of the main themes that Johnny repeats over and over again is important to his work. He was completely interested in humanizing technology. What something should be was always the starting point of his design. He had the ability to remove or ignore how any product currently is or how an engineer might say it must be.”

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24. “He was convinced that he was technically inept. He felt frustrated because computers were clearly becoming useful tools in many aspects of life, a trend that seemed likely to gain momentum. Then towards the end of his time at college, Johnny met the Mac. Johnny was astounded at how much easier to use the Mac was than anything else he had previously tried. The care, there's that word again, the care the machines designers took to shape the whole user experience struck him. He felt an immediate connection to the machine and more important to the soul of the enterprise. It was, this is the might be the most important sentence of this entire paragraph, a few paragraphs. It was the first time he felt the humanity of a product. It was such a dramatic moment that I remember it so clearly, he said. There was a real sense of the people who made it. I started to learn more about Apple, how it had been founded, its values and its structure, Johnny later said.”

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25. “It encourages you to play with it. And that's something that Johnny talks about all the time. That a product, to make a product more inviting, a physical object, to make it more inviting, you have to invite humans to touch it. And that's why in his early days when he's designing computers at Apple, a lot of them have handles on them because the previous generation of computers at the time, they were just like, you know, beige or black boxes. They look more like industrial furniture than something you'd put in your house. He's like, well, no, people are scared of computers at this time. But if you put a handle on something and you make rounded corners maybe, or if you make it in bright colors, it becomes much more friendly. People are more receptive to it.”

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26. “Another main theme from the life and career of Johnny was that he just loved designing and did not like administrative work. He just wanted to design. So it says he's still in design school at this point. When designing, he was clearly in love with what he was doing. He became so fixated on all of his tasks. He had another main theme is not only should you try to work in a position where you can actually love what you're doing, but then you get to focus on that. And so there's constant references in the book about his focus that he was fixated, that he spent a lot more time and effort on the tiny, tiny details that most people just ignored. And you can't do that if you're not focused. So why he's in school? He is interning at design firm called RWG and something unique happens is one of his designs. They're so good. They actually go into production. That actually becomes an actual product that is sold. The Noy left myself on this page was surprising, but made perfect.”

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27. “Furniture. He made silverware, and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself. Here's another quote from Johnny. I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product. He's a lot more when you read his words and his thoughts on design and making products very similar to Steve Jobs, obviously. Steve Jobs says the closest things he has to like a spiritual twin at Apple was Johnny, but Johnny's a lot more diplomatic in the words he uses. So he says, you know, what I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product, Steve Jobs would just say, hey, this is shit. So they're both expressing the same idea in vastly different ways. Even though they share the same sense of design, they have completely different personalities. So now going back to Mike's influence.”

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28. “Father continued to be a source of inspiration. My father was a very good craftsman, so this is another term. You're going to see Johnny talks about the same, he has a few ideas that he repeats over and over again about the importance of taking your work seriously, about his love of design, his passion of design, how he only wants to design. He's not interested in running, he runs a business, realizes he hates running a business, he just wants to design things all the time, talks about the importance of when you're using a product that it's apparent that there's an actual human being behind the product, which is really fascinating. That's actually what drew him to Apple. So this is just, again, I'm going to repeat a lot of these ideas because I think he's really eliminated. He has a few powerful ideas, and I think just focusing on that over and over again is really good. So he says my father was a very good craftsman. He talks constantly about the importance of craftsmanship, how much work it takes to go from idea to actual finished product. Jonny remembered as an adult.”

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