In his investigative nonfiction, Patrick McGee tells the story of Apple's manufacturing woes and how the decades-long search for solutions led to the tech giant's global success. He recounts attempts to manufacture in the USA, followed by a split between Ireland and Singapore, an unsuccessful stint in Japan, and hard-earned success in China.
The book's core thesis is that Apple, with its thousands of engineers and millions of person-hours in the country, was a decisive though almost unintentional actor in China's electronics manufacturing success. What makes this one of my favourite books though, is not the end result of this decade-long journey, but rather the culture that drove one of the world's most successful companies to embark on it in the first place.
"Make it lickable," Jobs had told Jony Ive. And Ive had delivered.
McGee returns repeatedly to how the relentless obsession of Jony Ive and the Industrial Design (ID) team to achieve perfection and innovation, fuelled a search for only the best manufacturing partners. He says "ID would conceive how a product would look and feel, with an exactitude that drove fear into the rest of the organization."1 This culture of excellence was hard-earned. It required radically rethinking the organization's ways of working following a realization that their lack of focus had led them to the brink of failure.
During a meeting in July of 1997, Jobs said: "The outside world thinks that Apple runs slower than the rest of the world. In reality, Apple runs fast on projects that don't matter."2 To address this "the number of Apple products in development was cut from forty to four."3 When speaking of the Power Mac G3's cornucopia of features, McGee refers to a proverb that sticks with me to this day:
"a horse designed by committee will be a camel."
To put it simply, the lack of decisiveness had turned the G3 into an unwieldy monstrosity.
Frustrated with the state of the prototypes in Apple's to-be roster, Jobs went to see Ive who at the time had been considering quitting for weeks. As Jobs came to learn, most of Ive's designs never actually made it to production. They had been reshaped by the engineers who controlled Apple at the time, who saw the design division as a nuisance. Ive's elegant designs masked the incredible complexity of the tech products they were building, which engineers saw as too difficult to produce.
It was in this moment that Jobs saw the future of the company, and what it would take to get there. No longer would products be bastardized to appease executives and limited by the constraints of manufacturing. He "made it crystal clear that ID's zero tolerance for defect was integral to a new culture that would cascade across product development and then throughout the organization."4
This lofty goal would be no easy feat. The reality is that these products, while not out of the realm of possibility, really were extremely difficult to manufacture. China had yet to become the centre of tech and electronics that it is today, so Apple's Operations and Manufacturing Design teams had to scour the world for suppliers who showed an unwavering devotion to a level of manufacturing excellence that could match that of Apple.
Foxconn's skillset at the time had a long way to go, but it was immediately clear that founder Terry Gou would stop at nothing to deliver Apple's designs to spec, happily taking losses on contracts to perfect their craft. Gou knew that the what he would learn from working closely with Apple engineers would be far more valuable than the short term profits, and the bet paid off.
What I love about this story, as a product designer, is the practical proof of just how important it is to have a strong vision. In one anecdote, McGee says "one engineer recalls Ive asking if he could make the computer such and such a size. The engineer said he could. Ive narrowed the dimensions and asked if he could build that. The engineer said he could. So Ive minimized the dimensions again. This time the engineer said 'No, no, that would be really difficult'. And Ive said, 'Great, those are the dimensions.'"5
What resonated with me most about this story, is how it connects to design engineering, something that is more relevant today than ever before. The perfectionism that Jobs expected and Ive delivered, put incredible strain on the team. Countless people left the company in the process of manufacturing the iMac, due to a combination of Jobs' infamous cruelty, and Ive's extreme expectations. By the end of this process, Ive went as far as to apologize to his teammates in Manufacturing Design.
This turmoil of building the iMac taught Ive the importance of understanding the materials, tooling, and engineering involved in manufacturing his vision. In the world of software, this draws parallels to my everlasting belief that the best designers understand code: the materials, tooling, and engineering involved in building the software that powers the products they design.
There's something incredibly inspiring and a little bit scary about a group of people so passionate about excellence, that they will seek the very boundaries of what's possible, and push just past them, time and time again. To seek absolute excellence not only in their own work, but in the work of those who surround them. To experiment and innovate along an entire supply chain in the pursuit of something few will truly appreciate, but that many will, at least subconsciously, love and admire.