Steve Jobs combined his visions with art and technology in order to bring products to the market that have changed the lives of millions of people. He founded Apple and the computer industry, was fired, and twelve years later saved the company from bankruptcy. Afterwards, he pushed through a series of innovations that were really enough for seven lives. After his early death, not only his fans are wondering how Apple will deal with Steve Jobs’ legacy.
By Christoph Dernbach
Steve Jobs’ highschool photo
Steve Jobs must already have been charismatic as a twelve year old school boy. Or was it just cockiness with which he would later take his business partners by surprise time and again? As an eighth grade student, he wanted to build a frequency counter for his school project and needed some parts. He contacted non other than Bill Hewlett, who was the legendary co-founder of computer group Hewlett-Packard (HP).
In the 60s, the Silicon-Valley pioneer’s contact information could still be found in the phone book. The lanky boy did not just coax the needed parts free of charge from the group boss. “He answered and chatted with me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters,” Jobs told book author Walter Isaacson for his biography.
Steve Jobs worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. obs worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. “My dad would drive me in the morning and pick me up in the evening.” He found himself at the right place at the right time. Still, Steve Jobs’ fate as the most successful entrepreneur of America was not handed to him at birth.
“He was a boy who had no money,” recalls his friend and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. “He had nothing except his intellect. But he brought us things that became a challenge for all of us.” Paul Otellini, CEO of chip giant Intel, said: “True genius is measured by the ability to touch every person on the planet. Steve did that, not just once, but many, many times over his amazing life.” In contrast to industry titans like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs came not from a wealthy home, but from a lower-class background.
Steve Jobs with his father Paul Jobs (1958)
His biological parents, the Syrian student Abdulfattah John Jandali and his American girlfriend Joanne Simpson, gave him up for adoption after his birth. In 1955, the still unmarried couple, both 23, was studying at the University of Wisconsin and found themselves unable to care for the child without a proper income. Actually, his parents insisted on giving him away to an academic family, which could guarantee that he could one day attend university. But the desired family got cold feet and cancelled the adoption in the last minute.
Finally, the child ended up in the house of Paul and Clara Jobs. Steve’s adoptive parents were simple people. His father worked as a car mechanic and his mother as an office employee. When Steve was five years old, his parents moved with him from San Francisco to Mountain View, in the middle of booming Silicon Valley. Author Walter Isaacson relates in his biography of Steve Jobs that in the new neighborhood Jobs told a girl that he was an adopted child. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand. We specifically picked you out.” This key scene described the tension between the terms “abandoned”, “chosen”, and “special” at a very early age for Steve Jobs.
Steve gets it
Who knows where Steve Jobs’ journey through life would have brought him if he had not met electronics enthusiast Steve Wozniak, who was four classes above him in school. Despite the age difference, the two Steves got along very well. “It seemed as if we had a lot in common,” recalled Woz later in his autobiography. “Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff worked on, but Steve got it right away. And I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.”
Steve Jobs (circled) at Homestead High School Electronics Club (1969)
Jobs, like Wozniak before him, attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, a solidly middle-class school in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. Homestead was progressive, with an innovative electronics program that shaped Wozniak’s life. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for some time. They met in 1971 when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced then 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. After hours, the two Steves would often meet at Hewlett-Packard lectures in Palo Alto.
Read next episode: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hack the phone system
As a teenager, Steve Jobs and his older friend Steve “Woz” Wozniak cavorted in the “phone-phreaking” scene. Hackers such as “Captain Crunch” found out how one could manipulate the systems of telecommunications giant AT&T in order to make free calls with the help of a plastic whistle from a cornflakes package. Both Steves were electrified.
Wozniak and Jobs Blue Box (1972)
Woz constructed a crammed box from inexpensive electronic parts and a small speaker, which enabled them to produce tone sequences in a more precise and delicate way than with the toy whistle. “There used to be a way to fool the entire telephone system – they were thinking you were a telephone-computer,” recalled Steve Jobs later. “You could call anyone in the world for free. In matter of fact, you could call from a pay phone, go to White Plains, New York, take a satellite to Europe, take a cable to Turkey, come back to Los Angeles. You could go around the world – three, four times and call the pay phone next door. If you shouted into the phone, about 30 seconds later it came out the other end of the other phone.”
The manipulation of the telephone system was of course illegal. That did not stop Woz and Jobs from building and selling blue boxes within their circle of friends. “It was the magic of the fact, that two teenagers could build this box for a hundred dollars worth of parts and control hundred of billions of dollars of infrastructure in the entire telephone network of the whole world from Los Altos and Cupertino, California. That was magical,” said Jobs.
His friend “Woz” had even mor fun:
So we’re sitting in the payphone trying to make a blue box call. And the operator comes back on the line. And we’re all scared and we’d try it again. … And she comes back on the line; we’re all scared so we put in money. And then a cop car pulls up. And Steve was shaking, you know, and he got the blue box back into my pocket. I got it– he got it to me because the cop turned to look in the bushes for drugs or something, you know? So I put the box in my pocket. The cop pats me down and says, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s an electronic music synthesizer.” Wasn’t too musical. Second cop says, “What’s the orange button for?” “It’s for calibration,” says Steve. — Steve Wozniak, lecture at Computer History Museum, 2002
“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas, the power of understanding that you could build this box, you could control hundreds of millions dollars worth of telephone infrastructure around the world. This is a powerful thing,” Jobs told many years later to Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.
If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into production.
In 1972 Jobs wanted to study at Reed College in the neighboring state of Oregon, although it was clear that his parents could not afford the university fees. “All savings of my working-class parents went for my college fees,” recalled Steve Jobs in June 2005 during his legendary commencement address at Stanford University.” After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”
Search for the meaning of life
Jobs broke off his studies and made his way as a person making the best of things. Now and then he would get a hot meal at the local Hare Krishna temple. He sneaked into the calligraphy course, which was offered at Reed College. ” I learned about serif and I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.” This episode as well would later influence computer history:
Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.
Steve Jobs was looking for the meaning of life. He experimented with mind-expanding drugs. At the time when he worked for Atari in 1975, he profited from a business trip to Europe to go to India on his own. At that time, Jobs was studying extensively the teachings of the Harvard professor Richard Alpert, who had converted to Hinduism and taught in India as Guru Ram Dass (“servant of God”). In India, however, Jobs found no enlightenment but ended up with a scammer who was just playing the role of a guru. Disillusioned, he returned to California.
The Homebrew Computer Club newsletter
Meanwhile, his friend Steve Wozniak tried to impress a “strange, geeky group of people” who called themselves “Homebrew Computer Club.” “This was a group fascinated with technology and the things it could do. Most of these people were young, a few were old, we all looked like engineers; no on was actually good looking. Ha. Well, we’re talking about engineers, remember?”, Wozniak wrote in his book “iWoz”. Steve Wozniak developed a kit for the geeks from the club that would later be known as the Apple I. At that time, Steve Jobs was forging much bigger plans, as he had observed that very few people from Homebrew had the time or skills to build computers on their own. “Why don’t we build and then sell the printed circuit boards to them?”, he asked Woz. (iWoz, Page 172)
With a sense of humor, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer on “April Fools Day”, the 1st of April, 1976. For the necessary initial investment of $1,000 Wozniak sold his programmable HP 65 calculator for $500. “The guy who bought it only paid the half, though, and never paid the rest”, wrote Steve Woziak in his book “iWoz”. “I didn’t feel to bad because I knew HP’s next-generation calculator, the HP 67, was coming out in a month and would cost me only $370 with the employee discount. And Steve sold his VW van for another few hundred dollars. He figured he could ride around on his bicycle if he had to. That was it. We were in business.”
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak using Apple 1 computer system, ca. 1976
The third founder, Ron Wayne, who was an adult with experience, was to provide a proper accounting. He received a 10 percent share of the company, while the two Steves had their shares of 45 percent each. But Wayne dropped out after a few weeks because the family man was not comfortable with the unclear liability risk as he had much more to lose than the two Steves.
Later on, the millionaire Mike Markkula took over the role of the adult supervisor. He invested a quarter-million dollars in the start-up to finance the production and marketing of the Apple II.
Steve and I get a lot of credit, but Mike Markkula was probably more responsible for our early success, and you never hear about him.
— Steve Wozniak, Failure Magazine, July 2000
Breakthrough with Apple II
Steve Wozniak was the hardware genius. The driving force of the marketing was Woz’s dynamic companion, Steve Jobs. He was fascinated by Woz’s technical skills, partly because he would never have been able to construct a computer like the Apple II himself. But he viewed his friend also with a critical eye: “Woz is very bright in some areas, but he’s almost like a savant since he was so stunted when it came to dealing with people he didn’t know,” said Jobs and conceded in his biographer Isaacson’s account: “We were a good pair.” Wozniak was however impressed with the business sense of his friend: “I never wanted to deal with people and step on toes, but Steve could call up people he didn’t know and make them do things,” said Wozniak. “He could be rough on people he didn’t think we’re smart, but he never treated me rudely, even in later years when maybe I couldn’t answer a question as well as he wanted.”
Woz would have been happy to market the Apple II as a kit. But Jobs demanded a complete product in a smooth bright plastic body, similar to a Cuisinart food processor. Jobs also asked for an expensive switching power supply, which made a fan unnecessary, He bothered Wozinak by demanding that the lines on the board of the Apple II should run straight. The huge effort paid off: The Apple II developed by Woz was the first personal computer, which found a mass audience.
The sales success has been driven by VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software for a microcomputer. “From 1,000 units a month we went to 10,000 a month,” remembers Woz. “Good god, it happened so. Through 1978 and 1979, we just got more and more successful. In 1980, we were the first company to sell one million computers.” (iWoz, page 220)
A screenshot of Visicalc
On 12 December 1980, Apple Computer Inc. went public. With Apple going public, Steve Jobs became a multi-millionaire as the company was now valued at $1.8 billion. Forgotten were the difficult times in which Jobs had taken advantage of his friend Woz and denied him the fair share of the royalties for a programming job for Atari.
Jobs now had 7.5 million Apple shares worth 217 million dollars. Woz could also forget all economic problems as he received four million shares (116 million dollars). Markkula’s cut of seven million shares were worth $203 million. “I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five,” Jobs said in an interview in 1995. “It wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”
Steve Jobs celebrating Apple’s IPO (1980)
Going public had bitter consequences as well for Steve Jobs. Unlike Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the co-founder of Apple was no longer the leading decision-maker in “his” company. On the one hand, he had an enormous amount of money, but on the other hand he no longer held the majority of company shares. Now Apple was lead by a management defined by investors. At that time, the main character of the top management of Apple was the “angel investor” Mike Markkula, who took over the job of managing director from Mike Scott in the summer of 1981. However, Markkula and Jobs agreed, that the new Apple management director should be a charismatic figure who was familiar with the methods of modern marketing in the field of consumer goods and could apply it to Apple. Jobs and Markkula’s search paid off. On the east coast of the United States, they found someone at the management level of Coca-Cola’s rival PepsiCo.
Read next page: “Dynamic Duo”: Steve Jobs and John Sculley
“Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” With this famous sentence, Steve Jobs convinced the Pepsi manager John Sculley in 1983 to enter the computer industry and move to California. But the “Dynamic Duo” did not last long. It quickly became obvious that the Apple co-founder Jobs and the new manager Sculley did not come to an agreement in key issues such as the marketing strategy for the Macintosh. It began in the time before Apple went public: In 1979, Markkula and Scott had hired the talented engineer Jef Raskin to construct a “people’s computer.”
The new model should reduce the company’s dependence on mega-seller Apple II. However, the project progressed very slowly, partly because Steve Wozniak did not play an active role in its development anymore. After a plane crash with his Beechcraft Bonanza in February 1981, Woz had largely withdrawn from Apple. Therefore, it was Steve Jobs who at this stage provided strategic directions in Apple’s technology. He was neither an inventor nor an engineer or programmer. But Jobs was able to estimate the implications of new technology concepts much better than anyone else.
The Enlightenment in Xerox PARC
Steve Jobs’ masterpiece in technology scouting took off during the event of Xerox PARC. As early as 1979 he had visited with a small team of Apple developers the legendary California research center in nearby Palo Alto. He had the chance to look into the future. “They showed me really three things,” Jobs said in 1995 in a TV interview. “But I was so blinded by the first one I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system…they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life, ” Jobs said in a TV interview in 1995.
At Xerox PARC Steve Jobs had seen the light. Now, he also wanted to build an Apple computer that was easy to operate. Apple had bought admission to the Xerox Research Center PARC through a stock deal that appeared to be very lucrative to the narrow-minded Xerox managers on the East Coast. Xerox was allowed to buy 100,000 shares of the Apple start-up company stock before the public offering for a million dollars. In the short term, this deal was worth it: By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares were already worth $17.6 million. But in the long term, Xerox lost the chance to become an industry giant like Microsoft or IBM because the work of their researchers in California had been ignored internally.
Pirates of Macintosh
Steve Jobs was quick to distance himself from the failure of the Apple Lisa, since in 1980 the then managing director Mike Scott denied him the management of the Lisa team. In an internal competition with the Lisa team, Jobs subsequently acquired the fledgling Macintosh project from Jef Raskin and bet $5,000 that he would bring the Mac to the market before Lisa. Initially, Jobs hounded Raskin out of the group. Then he positioned his team within Apple as a rebel troop. They wanted to prove the Lisa team, which enjoyed the confidence of the management, that they could do it.
The pirate flog on building Bandley III
Above the building of the Mac developers “Bandley III”, a skull and crossbones flag fluttered. “It is better to be a pirate than to go to the Navy,” Jobs said to his developers. Apple investor Arthur Rock became really agitated by this action, “Flying that flag was really stupid. It was telling the rest of the company they were no good.” But Jobs loved it, and he made sure it waved proudly all the way through to the completion of the Mac project. “We were the renegades, and we wanted people to know it,” he recalled. (Isaacson, page 186)
Jobs had assembled a dream team of genius programmers and engineers, whom he urged like a cult leader with flattery and verbal attacks to continually new heights. But the ever-changing demands of Jobs delayed the Mac project so that the Apple co-founder finally lost his bet against the Lisa team. It was not until the 24th of January 1984, that the Mac was finally ready.
At the public presentation of the new computer model, Jobs recited the song “The Times They Are A-Changin” by Bob Dylan:
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
In their most famous television commercials of all time, director Ridley Scott evoked this vision of enslaved IBM users who would be released through the Mac. The Mac would make clear in the clip, why Big Brother IBM would not dominate the world; why “1984 would not be 1984”. Jobs was visibly proud of the achievements they made, and attributes this to his broadly talented employees. “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world,” Jobs said in a 1995 documentary on the U.S. television network PBS.Difficult start for the Mac
With the Macintosh, Steve Jobs had set a new milestone in computer development. But Apple had to first overcome a long dry spell in order to make a commercial breakthrough. This was also due to the fact that the first Mac model was only equipped with 128 kilobytes of main memory which was far too little. At that time, Apple Fellow Alan Kay described the Mac as a “Honda with a one-gallon gas tank.”
Furthermore, applications such as Aldus Pagemaker or peripheral devices such as laser printers, which could use the advantages of Mac GUI in desktop publishing, did not exist yet.
“The original 128K Mac had too many problems to list,” wrote Jack Schofield from the Guardian 20 years later in an article about the 20th anniversary of the apple Macintosh. “It had too little software, you couldn’t expand it (no hard drive, no SCSI port, no ADB port, no expansion slots), it was horribly underpowered and absurdly overpriced. The way MacWrite and MacPaint worked together was brilliant, but producing anything more than a short essay was a huge struggle. Just copying a floppy was a nightmare.”
In a two-day marathon meeting, Sculley demanded that Jobs should give up his position as Apple vice president and general manager of the Macintosh team. Sculley wanted Steve Jobs to become Apple’s new chairman and represent the company on the outside, without having influence on the core business. When Jobs got wind of Sculley’s plan to disempower him, he attempted to organize a coup in the Apple board. Sculley defended himself and told the board: “I said look, it’s Steve’s company, I was brought in here to help you know, if you want him to run it that’s fine with me but you know we’ve at least got to decide what we’re going to do and everyone has got to get behind it.” The majority of the board stood behind the former Pepsi manager and turned away from Steve Jobs.
Jonathan Paul “Jony” Ive is a legendary designer who was responsible for the design of many of Apple’s most iconic products, including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Jony Ive has played a critical role in the company’s product design strategy, helping to establish its reputation for sleek and innovative design.
Jony Ive was born on 27 February 1967 in Chingford, a town in east London in England. His father, Michael John Ive, was a silversmith, and his mother, Pamela Mary Ive, was a psychotherapist. Jony Ive attended Chingford Foundation School just outside London, later to be the alma mater of David Beckham. While in school, Ive was diagnosed with dyslexia, but it never seriously affected his education.
Jony Ive at his High School
Ive was curious about the inner workings of things throughout his childhood and was fascinated by how objects were put together. He would carefully dismantle radios and cassette recorders, exploring how they were assembled and how the pieces fit. Although when he tried to put the equipment back together again, he didn’t always succeed.
In a 2003 interview conducted at London’s Design Museum he said, “I remember always being interested in made objects. The fact they had been designed was not obvious or even interesting to me initially. As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on. Later, this developed into more of an interest in how they were made, how they worked, their form and material.”
By the age of thirteen or fourteen he was pretty certain that he wanted to draw and make stuff. “I knew that I wanted to design but I had no idea what I’d design as I was interested in everything: cars, products, furniture, jewellery, boats. After visiting a few design consultancies I eventually decided that product design would be a pretty good foundation as it seemed the most general.”
He studied art and design at school and went on to Newcastle Polytechnic. “I figured out some basic stuff — that form and colour defines your perception of the nature of an object, whether or not it is intended to. I learnt the fundamentals of how you make things and I started to understand the historical and cultural context of an object’s design. I wish my drawing skills had improved, but while that bothered me then, it doesn’t now.”
It was during his college years when Ive further developed his signature design style based on German Bauhaus tradition. This design philosophy embraced a minimalist approach, where designers should only design what is needed. And these were the same principles followed by former Braun designer Dieter Rams, and later you can see similarities in the products each of them Ive had created.
How Jony Ive joined Apple
After graduating 1989, Ive joined London-based design startup Tangerine, bringing bathroom manufacturer Ideal Standard along as a major client. But Ive’s designs for sinks were never turned into a product because they would have been too expensive to manufacture. In the fall of 1991, then-Apple design chief Bob Brunner appeared at Tangerine and commissioned four design studies.
Under Ive’s guidance, Tangerine’s Juggernaut project included the never-built “Macintosh Folio” tablet computer – which was to be operated with a stylus and was still five times as thick as the first iPad 18 years later. Ive recalls his experience there: “I was pretty naïve. I hadn’t been out of college for long but I learnt lots by designing a range of different objects: from hair combs and ceramics, to power tools and televisions. 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.
It was not inevitable in Ive’s career that he would one day shape the design of a major computer company like Apple. Quite the opposite. The young Brit initially had problems finding his way in the world of personal computers. “I went through college having a real problem with computers“, Ive recalls in the interview with the Design Museum. “I was convinced that I was technically inept, which was frustrating as I wanted to use computers to help me with various aspects of my design.” Right at the end of his time at college Ive discovered the Mac. “I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use. I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers.”
Ive started to learn more about the company, how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more he learnt about this cheeky, almost rebellious company the more it appealed to him, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. “Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.”
In the early 1990s, Ive was living in London again and working with a number of clients in Japan, the US and Europe at Tangerine. Apple did a search to find a new design consultant and decided to work with him. Ive: “I still remember Apple describing this fantastic opportunity and being so nervous that I would mess it all up. While I had never thought that I could work successfully as part of a corporation — always assuming that I would work independently — at the end of a big program of work for Apple, I decided to accept a full-time position there and to move to California.” In September 1992, at age twenty-seven, Ive accepted a full-time position at Apple, and his first assignment was to redesign the Newton MessagePad.
At the time, Apple was being run by John Sculley since Steve Jobs had been forced out six years prior. The desktop publishing revolution was putting Macs in businesses all over the world and Apple had just celebrated its first quarter earning two billion in revenue. With all this cash, Apple was expanding it product lines and Sculley was investing heavily in R&D to speed up development of new products like the Apple Newton.
Failure and success with the Apple Newton
The first version of the Apple Newton was a failure, but Apple was hoping to change that with its second iteration. Ive worked tirelessly on the project and involved himself in every last detail. He even traveled to Taiwan to fix manufacturing problems. But no amount of effort from Ive was enough to save the Newton. Apple had made marketing and engineering mistakes that plagued the Newton until it was finally discontinued.
The Apple Newton proved to be a business failure and strategic setback, but Jonathan Ive’s Newton was a design success. It earned him four of the top awards in the industry and the honor of being featured in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
However, Apple CEO John Sculley not only had a poor sense of direction when it came to developing new product categories, but also had to contend with major difficulties in the core business. In 1995, the crisis became obvious. Windows 95 was released, and cheap PCs began to fly off the shelves, undercutting the Mac. In the first quarter of 1996, Apple reported 69 million dollar loss and laid off 1300 employees.
This caused Apple’s focus to shift from developing high-quality, well-designed Macs to pushing out the cheapest machines they could possibly make. This was truly a period of no innovation at Apple, and it destroyed Jonathan Ive’s moral. He said: “All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit.”
Rediscovered by Steve Jobs and John Rubenstein
But before Jony Ive could resign, Jon Rubinstein, his new boss, talked him out of it. Rubinstein gave him a raise and told him that eventually the company would turn around and they’d have the opportunity to make history. And with Jobs return to Apple in 1997, Rubinstein was exactly right. Jobs brought focus to not only the company but also Ive’s design group. In the interview with the Design Museum Ive recalls: “When I joined Apple the company was in decline. It seemed to have lost what had once been a very clear sense of identity and purpose. Apple had started trying to compete to an agenda set by an industry that had never shared its goals. While as a designer I was certainly closer to where the decisions were being made, but I was only marginally more effective or influential than I had been as a consultant. This only changed when Steve Jobs returned to the company. By re-establishing the core values he had established at the beginning, Apple again pursued a direction which was clear and different from any other company. Design and innovation formed an important part of this new direction.”
Jobs refocused the design team and got them working together on a new project called the Mac NC, which would later become the iMac. The team only had nine months to get it from design to production. To meet this deadline, Ive implemented a radical, integrated design process that transformed the way Apple developed its products. The workflow was so successful that it became permanent, and it’s essentially the same system the design group uses today. So the iMac was released nine months later and ended up being the best-selling Mac in Apple’s history up to that point.
Ive and his team became famous for its fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked, like cables and power adaptors. Ive recalls: “Take the iMac — our attempts to make it less exclusive and more accessible occurred at a number of different levels. A detail example is the handle. While its primary function is obviously associated with making the product easy to move, a compelling part of its function is the immediate connection it makes with the user by unambiguously referencing the hand. That reference represents, at some level, an understanding beyond the iMac’s core function. Seeing an object with a handle, you instantly understand aspects of its physical nature — I can touch it, move it, it’s not too precious.”
Jonathan Ive had finally found a company that gave him the freedom to practice his craft effectively without limitations. In fact, part of Jobs reorganization of Apple included giving the design team power over any other group, including engineering. And because Ive was head of design, he had a tremendous amount of operational power at Apple, second only to Steve Jobs. Jonathan “He’s not just a designer,” Mr. Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “He has more operational power than anyone at Apple, except me.”
Starting in 2002, Jobs and Ive set about turning the vision of an iPod smartphone into reality. In a few detours and with the help of a team that was supposed to develop a tablet computer, the iPhone was born and presented to the astonished public in January 2007.
Inspired by Dieter Rams and Braun Design
The iPhone also meant a tribute by Ive to Dieter Rams, the legendary chief designer of Braun. Users should understand products intuitively, without an instruction manual, was Rams’ motto. The minimalism and simplicity of the iPhone proved such a resounding success that competitors like Samsung quickly and shamelessly copied the concept.
Jony Ive and Braun Design
In one respect, however, Ive was unfaithful to the model from Germany: for Rams, the maxim that form must follow function still applies today. Ive, on the other hand, gave the engineers such strict guidelines that certain functions fell by the wayside. For example, the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 was sacrificed to save space and make the case a bit slimmer. The same reasoning was used to justify the MacBook’s lack of multiple input and output interfaces – forcing users to buy cumbersome adapters to be able to read photos from an SD card, for example. Critics also blame Ive’s efforts to produce thinner and thinner devices for the latest fiasco and the butterfly keyboards in the MacBooks.
Sir Jonathan Ive at The Goodwood Festival of Speed Cartier Style et Luxe party Photo: Marcus Dawes, Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19277958
Alongside Steve Jobs, Jony Ive has always appeared in the past to be the gentle type who strives for balance. But this thesis is not correct: Ive repeatedly engaged in heated controversies with other Apple managers about the technical and financial effort required to implement design ideas. When designing the first Mac mini, for example, Ive and his team designed the case so that it was just two millimeters too narrow to use a conventional 3.5-inch hard drive. So they had to use a much more expensive 2.5-inch drive, which was usually only used in laptops. Under Steve Jobs’ umbrella, Jony Ive and design took precedence over cost considerations.
Ive clashed primarily with his old mentor Jon Rubinstein, who was actually his supervisor. But when in doubt, Steve Jobs always decided against Rubinstein and other pragmatists in Cupertino. When the Apple boss also promoted his protégé Ive to senior vice president in 2005, it was time for Rubinstein to leave Apple. His successor, Tony Fadell, was also constantly at odds with Ive. When Fadell left Apple in October 2008 with a golden handshake, the controversy was still kept under wraps. It wasn’t until the publication of Leander Kahney’s Ive biography that the conflict became known in full detail.
The most prominent loser in a power struggle with Ive in 2013 was Scott Forstall, who three years earlier had been considered a possible successor to Steve Jobs, who had fallen ill. Ive disliked the software design (“skeuomorphism”) preferred by Forstall: Until the iPhone operating system iOS 6, it used the shapes of familiar objects that actually had no function, such as the virtual leather cover on the calendar application. Ive enforced “flat design,” a much more abstract design language, on iOS 7. After this defeat, Forstall left the company. Ive then also took over responsibility for “human interface” design. However, some Appleians in Cupertino still mourn Forstall’s passing.
During Steve Jobs’ lifetime, Jony Ive was clearly in second place in Apple’s internal hierarchy. But when the company’s co-founder died of cancer in October, it was clear that Tim Cook would be his successor, not Ive. Jony Ive stood for the soul of the company, but had little interest in the business figures.
After the death Steve Jobs Ive in a moving eulogy convince the assembled staff that Apple will not lose sight of its great vision even without the charismatic leader Steve Jobs.
Jony Ive’s tribute to Steve Jobs
But the death from cancer of his friend apparently hit Ive much harder than most Apple employees. The Brit missed the almost daily exchange of views with Jobs over lunch and the regular visits by the company boss to the otherwise almost hermetically sealed design studio.
At the same time, public and shareholder pressure was growing at the time for Apple to launch a new smash hit after the iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010). Some stock market analysts doubted whether Apple would even be able to innovate after Jobs’ death.
At this stage, Ive pushed to build a smartwatch. For the first model of the Apple Watch in 2015, Ive pursued his idea of making the smartwatch primarily a fashion accessory. The watch was sold in fashion stores and, for a jet-setting audience, was also offered in a sinfully expensive high-end variant with an 18-carat gold case.
Jony Ive presents the first Apple Watch (2014)
But it quickly became apparent that the mass of buyers did not want to follow Ive. Many of the gold models went unsold. Users weren’t looking for a luxury watch, but a practical gadget that would allow them to keep track of their fitness activities and see notifications without constantly pulling their iPhone out of their pocket. After this setback, Ive asked Apple Group CEO Tim Cook to be relieved of his day-to-day management duties, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Cook, however, was all about keeping Ive on board at all costs during this critical phase. It didn’t matter that Cook, in contrast to his predecessor Steve Jobs, showed up much less often at Apple’s design studios. He appointed Ive as “Chief Design Officer”, who would not only be responsible for the hardware and packaging of the devices, but also for the software design as well as the design of the Apple Stores and the new company campus Apple Park.
Paradoxically, after his promotion to “Chief Design Officer” in May 2015, Ive had hardly any influence on the design of concrete Apple products. Only the Apple Watch was an exception. Ive was now primarily concerned with the design of the company’s new Apple Park site. For two years, he was more likely to be seen in rubber boots on the construction site than in his team’s design studio. It wasn’t until the end of 2017 that the Apple Park chapter was largely closed for Ive.
Tim Cook and Jony Ive at WWDC 2019
Afterwards, the members of the design team had hoped that Ive would now be available more often in Cupertino for detailed decisions. But these expectations were not fulfilled. Ive now frequently worked in his personal design studio in San Francisco near his home, saving the annoying stop-and-go trips on the dust-laden highway to Cupertino. Communication with the design team suffered as a result.
Apple announced on 27 June 2019 that Ive would depart the company. The decisive factor for Apple’s exit was probably Ive’s pronounced desire to no longer take responsibility for things that he could only influence to a limited extent. This includes topics such as the development of iPhone sales or the company’s share price. In a February 2015 Ive portrait in The New Yorker magazine, the designer is quoted as saying he is “deeply, deeply tired” and “always anxious.” And Laurence Powell Jobs, Steven Jobs’ widow, chimes in with this assessment: “Jony is an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.”
Apple stated that Ive would start an independent firm named LoveFrom, along with fellow Apple industrial designer Marc Newson, that would work with Apple as its primary client. LoveFrom is known to keep a low profile, and does not disclose information about its employees. LoveFrom unveiled its minimalistic official website in October 2021.
The Final Severing of Ties and LoveFrom’s Diversification
In July 2022, the decades-long professional relationship between Jony Ive and Apple officially concluded when both parties agreed not to renew their $100 million consulting contract. This formal split allowed Ive’s creative collective, LoveFrom, to shed its restrictive “non-compete” clauses and expand into diverse luxury and industrial sectors. Since then, LoveFrom has established itself as a multidisciplinary powerhouse, designing the coronation emblem for King Charles III, a modular high-fashion collection for Moncler, and an interior overhaul for Ferrari’s first electric vehicle. These projects emphasize Ive’s move toward “gentle, human-centric design” across varied physical mediums, ranging from custom typefaces for historic San Francisco bookstores to high-end audio hardware like the Linn Sondek LP12.
The OpenAI Venture and the “Post-Smartphone” Frontier
The most significant chapter of Ive’s post-Apple career began in 2023 through a quiet collaboration with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, which culminated in the May 2025 announcement that OpenAI had acquired Ive’s hardware startup, io, for approximately $6.5 billion. Now leading a dedicated hardware division within OpenAI while maintaining LoveFrom’s independence, Ive is developing a “screen-less” AI companion designed to move users beyond the smartphone era. Internally code-named “Sweetpea,” the device—rumored to be a voice-centric, multimodal wearable—is built on the philosophy of “ambient computing,” where technology recedes into the background. As of early 2026, working prototypes are in active testing, with a mainstream consumer launch targeted for late 2026, potentially marking the most significant hardware revolution since the original iPhone.
Susan Kare is an artist and designer and pioneer of pixel art; she created many of the graphical interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh in the 1980s as a key member of the Mac software design team, and continued to work as Creative Director at NeXT for Steve Jobs.
She was born on February 5, 1954 in n Ithaca, New York. Her father was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research facility for the senses of taste and smell. Her mother taught her counted-thread embroidery as she immersed herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts. She graduated from Harriton High School (Rosemont, Pennsylvania) in 1971. In her high school years, she met Andy Hertzfeld, who would later become one of the key software engineers at Apple in the development of the Macintosh.
She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Art from Mount Holyoke College, a private liberal arts women’s college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1975, with an undergraduate honors thesis on sculpture. She received a M.A. and a Ph.D. in fine arts from New York University in 1978 with a doctoral dissertation on “the use of caricature in selected sculptures of Honoré Daumier and Claes Oldenburg”. Her goal was “to be either a fine artist or teacher”.
Susan Kare’s career has always focused on fine art. For several summers during high school she interned at the Franklin Institute for designer Harry Loucks, who introduced her to typography and graphic design while she did phototypesetting with “strips of type for labels in a dark room on a PhotoTypositor”. Because she did not attend an artist training school, she built her experience and portfolio by taking many pro-bono graphics jobs such as posters and brochure design in college, holiday cards, and invitations. After her Ph.D., she moved to San Francisco to work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), as sculptor and occasional curator.
In 1982, Kare was welding a life-sized razorback hog sculpture commissioned by an Arkansas museum when she received a phone call from high school friend Andy Hertzfeld. In exchange for an Apple II computer, he solicited her to hand-draw a few icons and font elements to inspire the upcoming Macintosh computer. However, she had no experience in computer graphics and “didn’t know the first thing about designing a typeface” or pixel art so she drew heavily upon her fine art experience in mosaics, needlepoint, and pointillism.
Hertzfeld suggested that she get a US$2.50 grid notebook of the smallest graph paper she could find at the University Art store in Palo Alto and mock up several 32 × 32 pixel representations of his software commands and applications. This includes an icon of scissors for the “cut” command, a finger for “paste”, and a paintbrush for MacPaint.
Compelled to actually join the team for a fixed-length part-time job,she interviewed “totally green” but undaunted, bringing a variety of typography books from the Palo Alto public library to show her interest alongside her well-prepared notebook. “The interview lasted five minutes”, Kare recalled in 2014. “It was, when can you start? And I found myself the next week in the Mac Software Group.” She was officially hired in January 1983 with Badge #3978. Her business cards read “HI Macintosh Artist”.
Kare was working on-site in Cupertino. “I definitely learned on the job”, she said in an interview conducted by Alex Pang on 8 September 2000. “As when I went to Macintosh, there wasn’t really an icon editor, but there was a way to turn pixels on and off. I did some work on paper, but obviously, it was much better to see it on the screen, so there was a rudimentary icon editor. First, they showed me how I could take the art and figure out the hex equivalent so it could be keyboarded in. Then Andy made a much better icon editor that automatically generated the hex under the icons. That was how I did the first ones. I think I did the fonts that way, going letter by letter before we had a font editor.”
Susan Kare was looking at a screen like this:
“You can see some of the little rounded wrecks. They have words like trash and disk drive and printer. So those were the things that I needed to make icons for. And on the right, you see the kind of verb of those buttons. “Do it” became “Okay” because “Do it” is maybe more clear but people read it as “Dolt” (a stupid person).
Among her first Macintosh designs were the Elefont, Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont typefaces, which, however, were named after Chicago, London, New York, and other world cities after objections from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Susan Kare then took on “icons” to operate the computer, drawing on art historical antecedents such as mosaics.
“The first thing I did in a seven pixels wide, nine pixels high typeface Chicago, that I tried to make bold and not have jagged edges. The typeface Chicago ended up in the title bars. And it ended up having a bit of another life in the first iPod.
The typeface Chicago ended up in the title bars. And it ended up having a bit of another life in the first iPod.
Kare: “So, when I got there, the goals were explained to me that it (the Macintosh) was a computer for people who were not computer literate so your mom could use it. Not too politically correct. And that it should be discoverable like our cade games, you shouldn’t have to have to use the manual to be able to do it and that it should be friendly. So, I started out making these icons in 32 by 32. This was an icon, I designed. They just said there should be something on the screen. 32 by 32 dots that sits there while the computer boots So I know that I reached back to my junior high favorite symbol to do that (the smiley).”
Kare was also asked to design an icon for a system crash. “I designed this image as a bomb because I was told they would never be seen by anyone. So I thought I could be a little irreverent. But unfortunately, that was not the case. But the programmers truly thought at the time, they would be deeply hidden.”
Icon for system crash
At the EG conference in May 2014, Kare shared an amusing anecdote about the bomb icon: “Right after the Mac had shipped, we were in our software area and a call came in – fielded through apple, and it was a woman who was using MacWrite. It had crashed and she was afraid her computer was going to blow up. So I felt kind of bad.
There weren’t any tools on the Mac to make icons. “So I did it on paper. And then Andy Hertzfeld wrote this icon editor that allowed you. (to make icons) I mean, it seemed so fantastic. What you could do is turn one pixel off or on.”
Macintosh Icon Editor (1983) by Andy Hertzfeld
“You could draw a line or circle or anything and then you could see it magnified and edit the size that you’d see it on the screen. And it generated the code, you needed for the programmers to get it into the software.”
The smiling Mac, the bomb with the fuse, the clock, the floppy disk, and the wastebasket are legendary.
But she found the loop square for the Apple command key in a symbol dictionary; it originated in ancient Scandinavia and later served as a marker for landmarks.
Borgholm Castle
She created a plethora of “dingbats” for her writings, including a cute animal symbol that combines features of a dog and a cow. As Clarus the Dog Cow, it now has its own fan base.
Susan Kare. Clarus, the Dogcow
Sometimes for fun, Susan Kare did pictures of her colleagues in icon format. Her digital portrait of Steve Jobs became quite famous.
Portrait of Steve Jobs by Susan Kare in icon format.
Susan Kare worked only three years at Apple. But this experience put her on the leading edge of a whole new field of graphic design. Working with only a grid of pixels, she began to master a peculiar sort of minimal pointillism. She spent her days turning tiny dots on and off to craft instantly understandable visual metaphors for computer commands.
Initially, her job was to shape individual letters and numbers to bring a semblance of print’s elegance to the grainy domain of computer screens. But Kare’s most memorable legacy is the playful quality of some of her icons. She’s quick to point out that Xerox PARC had already created a garbage can for disposing of files, but Kare’s can is so viewer- riendly that one half-expects Oscar the Grouch to pop out.
Susan Kare: Life after Apple
In 1986, Kare followed Steve Jobs in leaving Apple to launch NeXT, Inc. as its Creative Director and 10th employee. She introduced Jobs to her design hero Paul Rand and hired him to design NeXT’s logo and brand identity, admiring his table-pounding exactitude and confidence. She created and re-created slideshows to Jobs’s exacting last-minute requirements.
She realized that she wanted “to be back doing bitmaps” so she left NeXT to become an independent designer with a client base including graphical computing giants Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, Motorola, General Magic, and Intel. Her projects for Microsoft include the card deck for Windows 3.0’s solitaire game, which taught early computer users to use a mouse to drag and drop objects on a screen.
Windows Solitaire
In 1987, she designed a “baroque” wallpaper, numerous other icons, and design elements for Windows 3.0, using isometric 3D and 16 dithered colors. Many of her icons, such as those for Notepad and various Control Panels, remained essentially unchanged by Microsoft until Windows XP.
Magic Cap OS
For IBM, she produced pinstriped isometric bitmap icons and design elements for OS/2. For General Magic, she made Magic Cap’s “impish” cartoon of dad’s office desktop. For Eazel, she rejoined Andy Hertzfeld and many from the former Macintosh team and contributed iconography to the Nautilus file manager which the company permanently donated to the public for free use.
Between 2006 and 2010, Susan Kare produced hundreds of 64 × 64 pixels icons for the virtual gifts feature of Facebook. For these items, Facebook was charging $1 each. Initially, profits from gift sales were donated to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation until Valentine’s Day 2007.The most popular gift icon, titled “Big Kiss” is featured in some versions of Mac OS X as a user account picture.
Susan Kare: Big Kiss
In 2007, she designed the identity, icons, and website for Chumby Industries, Inc., as well as the interface for its Internet-enabled alarm clock.
Since 2008, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) store in New York City has carried stationery and notebooks featuring her designs.
Susan Kare at MoMa: Graphic icon sketch1 (982–1983)
In 2015 MoMA acquired her notebooks of sketches that had led to the early Mac GUI.
Susan Kare at Moma: Apple Macintosh OS icon sketchbook (1982) MoMa – Susan Kare. “Mac OS Icon sketchbook.” Bound sketchbook, ink and felt-tipped pen on paper. Gift of the designer.
This is an excellent example of the often “invisible” design that goes behind the graphic user interfaces that we use on a day-to-day basis, an intangible piece of design that we all carry in our pockets. Kare’s humble icons were all based on a 16×16 pixel grid; a grid that has expanded ad infinitum into the screens of our desktops, our laptops, our cell phones.”
MoMa Curatorial Assistant Evangelos Kotsioris
In 2015, Kare was hired by Pinterest as a product design lead as her first corporate employment in three decades. Working with design manager Bob Baxley, the former design manager of the original Apple Online Store, she compared the diverse and design-driven corporate cultures of Pinterest and early 1980s Apple. In February 2021, Kare became Design Architect at Niantic Labs. As of 2022, she concurrently heads a digital design practice in San Francisco and sells limited-edition, signed fine-art prints.
Software developer Andy Hertzfeld is one of the most important heroes of Macintosh development, but he has rarely been in the spotlight. He was the technical lead for the Macintosh system software and was the second programmer to join the project, after Bud Tribble. Hertzfeld was responsible for the overall architecture of the system and wrote a substantial portion of the system code himself, while helping the other programmers to integrate their parts.
He was born on April 6, 1953, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the eastern United States.
He had his first exposure to computers in high school, although there was no computer at all in high school itself. “Back in the late ’60s and ’70s, high schools couldn’t afford computers, but there was a teleprinter-connected GE timesharing computer about 10 miles away. I was lucky enough to use a program in 11th grade. And I talked to it like a fish to water,” Andy told in an interview.
Back then, you couldn’t use the computer in real time; you had to write your program in advance, print it out on a punch tape, and then read it with a special reader to transmit the program to the computer. “It was a little cumbersome, but I loved it anyway.”
After high school, which he attended with Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld moved to California and studied at UC Berkeley. But after buying an Apple II, he found computing much more interesting than college. “I started spending all my time on it and dropped out of college to go to work for Apple in August of ’79.”
He was hired by Apple Computer as a systems programmer in 1979 and developed the Apple Silentype printer firmware and wrote the firmware for the Sup’R’Terminal, the first 80-column card for the Apple II. In the early 1980s, he invited his high school friend, artist Susan Kare, to join Apple in order to help design what would become standard Macintosh icons.
Apple Silentype Thermodrucker Foto: Von StromBer – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14972849
The story of how Andy Hertzfeld was recruited for the Macintosh project is legendary: “Steve came by my cubicle. This was on a Thursday afternoon, late on a Thursday afternoon.,” Hertzfeld recalls in the Land of Giants podcast, talking with Peter Kafka. “I said ‘Okay, I’ll start Monday. Just give me half a day to document the work I’ve been doing so someone else can pick it up’. And he goes: ‘No, the Macintosh is the future of Apple. You’re going to start on it now.’ And he grabbed my Apple Two off my desk and started walking away with it. What could I do but follow my computer?”
Steve Wozniak and Andy Hertzfeld (right) at a Apple Computer Users Group Meeting (1985). Photo: Tony Wills – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18512032
That’s how Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team. There he wrote much of the original system software for the Mac, including the User Interface Toolbox, Windows Manager, Menu Manager, Control Manager. Steve Jobs constantly gave the impression that there was a much bigger goal at stake: „We weren’t just designing a computer. We were saving mankind. We were enhancing the future of humanity. And so some of that you roll your eyes a little bit, but enthusiasm is contagious.“
With the legendary “1984” commercial, Jobs then also told the whole world that he was going to unveil something world-changing. But there was still one problem. At the time, he hadn’t completed this world-changing device. He needed Hertzfeld and a small team working around the clock, driven by the idea that they would create something great.
“It was a monumental effort to finish the Macintosh system software. All of the software engineers, about a dozen of us were up like 48 hours with no sleep”, Andy Hertzfeld recalls. “We barely succeeded. We were exhausted, lying around on the floor the next day in a happy haze. Hey, we did it. We’re finally done. When Steve walks into the software area saying, ‘Get up off the floor. You’re not done. I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to announce itself.”
Jobs verlangte also, dass Hertzfeld und sein erschöpftes Team dem Mac das Sprechen beibringen soll. Das war ein technischer Vorstoß, der das Team bis zur letzten Minute an die Grenzen der Belastungsfähigkeit getrieben hat. Und als Jobs dann auf der Apple-Aktionärsversammlung 1984 die Bühne betrat, zog er den Mac aus der Tasche, von dem Hertzfeld nicht wirklich überzeugt war, dass er funktionieren würde.
Jobs had gambled high and won. It worked. The Macintosh could talk, more or less at least. And it looked almost cuddly like it was smiling. And it was sealed so you couldn’t open it. Unlike other computers, which were designed so you could poke around and modify the guts of the machine, the Mac was designed for people who didn’t know or care about the difference between RAM and ROM or other computer terms. Turn it on and go, says Apple expert Peter Kafka.
Andy Hertzfeld: “The Mac had this great intro. People saw it as the revolution that it was. We started selling them to the colleges by tens of thousands. But by the fall of 1984, the sales started falling off. By Christmas 1984, the sales were very disappointing. They were maybe a 10th of what Apple had predicted.”
Andy Hertzfeld left Apple in April 1984, fairly soon after the Mac was introduced. When asked why he turned his back on Apple, Hertzfeld replied on “NerdTV”:
“Bob Cringley: Why did you choose to leave Apple? Andy: I had a bad manager, a manager who wanted me to salute to him. I didn’t salute crisply enough. Bob: Literally salute? Andy: That’s metaphor. I call the story in my book “to big for my britches.” He took me for a walk to give me a verbal review. For the period of time I’d written most of the Macintosh system software he gave me a bad review because I was insubordinate to him. That disillusioned me. That took place in February 1983. I would have left then except I was too committed to the Mac. I had to stay to see it through. But as soon as it January 1984 left. I was still able to do system software. Did Switcher, the first multitasking environment for the Macintosh just as an outsider – I was able to sell it back to Apple. I wasn’t going to work there because I loved the spirit of the Mac group but this guy came in – his name is Bob Belleville – the bad manager who made me quit, and wasn’t able to compromise enough to stay there. Bob: Why didn’t Steve protect you? Andy: Steve had promised to. When Bud Tribble, the former manager, had left, Burrell and I both almost quit. We were afraid we’d get a bad manager and Steve promised to protect me but at the time we had already essentially developed the Mac. The technical work was done and what Steve needed at that point were managers to take over the rest of Apple. The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn’t as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people. Bob: So at that moment he needed Bob Belleville more than he needed you? Andy: That was what I thought. A little later on I think he thought he needed me more, but during that time, yeah. And of course it all kind of backfired on him. He (Steve) got kicked out of Apple just shortly afterwards… much o the ill fate of Apple. I almost killed Apple.”
Andy Hertzfeld left Apple in April of 1984, pretty soon after the introduction of the Mac. He helped his friend Burrell Smith who did the digital hardware for the Mac start a company called Radius in 1986 that made peripherals for the Mac. “I did a lot of stuff as a third-party developer, sold system software back to Apple. In 1990, along with Bill Atkinson, who was sort of my mentor on the Mac project, we started a company called General Magic that made some of the first handheld computers.”
Magic Cap Introduction Demo 1/6/94 with Andy Hertzfeld
Andy Hertzfeld: “Apple was our benefactor at starting General Magic, but about a year later decided they would rather BE General Magic and tried to make us blink out of existence… which we eventually did, but it took a few years. I left General Magic in 1996 to become an Internet hobbyist – got a T-1 line to my house. At one point I had all four food banks of the Bay Area hosted from this house here.”
But it was much too early for a real retirement. Andy got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement. “I was despairing of the structural problems in the software industry and suddenly, after reading Eric Raymond’s book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, I realized that free software could be the path to an open and fair software industry.”
Hertzfeld decided to work for change in the traditional software industry. In August 1999, he founded a company called Eazel that would make free software easier to use. Eazel failed to secure its second round of funding, however, and he was forced to close the company in May 2001.
He then began working with Mitch Kapor. This is the man who developed the legendary spreadsheet program “Lotus 1-2-3.” Hertzfeld helped Kapor launch the Open Source Applications Foundation. Together they developed an innovative personal information manager called Chandler. He then launched a project to preserve for posterity the memories of the makers of the first Apple Macintosh.
To do this, Hertzfeld even developed his own software to publish these memories on the Web: the Folklore Project. “I established a website called folklore.org devoted to what I call “collective historical storytelling” — allowing a group of people to cooperate telling their shared stories. I published on the web about 60 anecdotes about the development of the Mac in time for the Mac’s 20th birthday in 2004.” This then became the book “Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made.”
Hertzfeld then spent the last years of his active professional career at Google.
From August 2005 to July 2013, Hertzfeld worked for Google, where he was primarily responsible for the Google+ user interface.
Hertzfeld is now mainly retired and describes himself as a retired hacker, but he still sometimes appears as an investor, most recently in the start-up Spatial.
Sources:
Interview Christoph Dernbach with Andy Hetzfeld on August 25, 2011 at WWDC 2011.
The Apple Macintosh revolutionized the entire computer industry by the year of 1984. Steve Jobs and his ingenious Macintosh team arranged for the computer to be used by the normal “person in the street” – and not only by experts.
“Insanely great” – Steve Jobs could hardly put into words his enthusiasm by the launch of the Macintosh. On the legendary annual general meeting of January 24th, 1984, in the Flint Center not far from the Apple Campus in Cupertino, the Apple co-founder initially quoted Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in order to then polemicize against an imminent predominance of the young computer industry by IBM.
Steve Jobs’ introduction of the Apple Macintosh:
“The early 1980s. 1981 – Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer, and Apple has grown to a 300 million dollar corporation, becoming the fastest growing company in American business history. With over fifty companies vying for a share, IBM enters the personal computer market in November of 1981, with the IBM PC.
1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, with each selling approximately one billion dollars worth of personal computers in 1983. The shakeout is in full swing. The first major personal computer firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for 1983 overshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM.
It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future and are turning back to Apple as the only force who can ensure their future freedom.
IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?“
The crowd, among them the complete Macintosh developer’s team, shouted back: “Nooooo!”
The introduction of the first Mac on January 24th, 1984; taken from the “Lost 1984 Videos”
There had been only two milestone products so far: the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981, Jobs continued. “Today (…) we are introducing the third industry milestone product, the Macintosh. Many of us have been working on Macintosh for over two years now and it has turned out insanely great.”
Steve Jobs
Taking a look at the history of the personal computer today, Steve Jobs was on the right track with his historical comparison. However, it would not be IBM that became the great dominator of the computer industry over the years, but rather, the alliance of Microsoft and Intel.
Previous to the Macintosh developer team, others had already tried to design a computer with a mouse and a graphical user interface – one year before Apple did, with its own business computer Lisa, which retailed for 10,000 dollars.
