Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE iMAC
Hello (Again)
Back to the Future
The first great design triumph to come from the Jobs-Ive collaboration was the iMac, a desktop 
computer aimed at the home consumer market that was introduced in May 1998. Jobs had certain 
specifications. It should be an all-in-one product, with keyboard and monitor and computer ready 
to use right out of the box. It should have a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it 
should sell for $1,200 or so. (Apple had no computer selling for less than $2,000 at the time.) “He 
told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” 
recalled Schiller. “That meant design and engineering had to work together.”
The initial plan was to build a “network computer,” a concept championed by Oracle’s Larry 
Ellison, which was an inexpensive terminal without a hard drive that would mainly be used to 
connect to the Internet and other networks. But Apple’s chief financial officer Fred Anderson led 
the push to make the product more robust by adding a disk drive so it could become a full-fledged 
desktop computer for the home. Jobs eventually agreed.
Jon Rubinstein, who was in charge of hardware, adapted the microprocessor and guts of the 
PowerMac G3, Apple’s high-end professional computer, for use in the proposed new machine. It 
would have a hard drive and a tray for compact disks, but in a rather bold move, Jobs and 
Rubinstein decided not to include the usual floppy disk drive. Jobs quoted the hockey star Wayne 
Gretzky’s maxim, “Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” He was a bit ahead of his 
time, but eventually most computers eliminated floppy disks.
Ive and his top deputy, Danny Coster, began to sketch out futuristic designs. Jobs brusquely 
rejected the dozen foam models they initially produced, but Ive knew how to guide him gently. Ive 
agreed that none of them was quite right, but he pointed out one that had promise. It was curved, 
playful looking, and did not seem like an unmovable slab rooted to the table. “It has a sense that 
it’s just arrived on your desktop or it’s just about to hop off and go somewhere,” he told Jobs.
By the next showing Ive had refined the playful model. This time Jobs, with his binary view of 
the world, raved that he loved it. He took the foam prototype and began carrying it around the 
headquarters with him, showing it in confidence to trusted lieutenants and board members. In its 

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ads Apple was celebrating the glories of being able to think different, yet until now nothing had 
been proposed that was much different from existing computers. Finally, Jobs had something new.
The plastic casing that Ive and Coster proposed was sea-green blue, later named bondi blue 
after the color of the water at a beach in Australia, and it was translucent so that you could see 
through to the inside of the machine. “We were trying to convey a sense of the computer being 
changeable based on your needs, to be like a chameleon,” said Ive. “That’s why we liked the 
translucency. You could have color but it felt so unstatic. And it came across as cheeky.”
Both metaphorically and in reality, the translucency connected the inner engineering of the 
computer to the outer design. Jobs had always insisted that the rows of chips on the circuit boards 
look neat, even though they would never be seen. Now they would be seen. The casing would 
make visible the care that had gone into making all components of the computer and fitting them 
together. The playful design would convey simplicity while also revealing the depths that true 
simplicity entails.
Even the simplicity of the plastic shell itself involved great complexity. Ive and his team 
worked with Apple’s Korean manufacturers to perfect the process of making the cases, and they 
even went to a jelly bean factory to study how to make translucent colors look enticing. The cost 
of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other 
companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the 
translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such 
analysis.
Topping off the design was the handle nestled into the iMac. It was more playful and semiotic 
than it was functional. This was a desktop computer; not many people were really going to carry it 
around. But as Ive later explained:
Back then, people weren’t comfortable with technology. If you’re scared of something, then you won’t 
touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there’s this handle on it, it makes 
a relationship possible. It’s approachable. It’s intuitive. It gives you permission to touch. It gives a sense 
of its deference to you. Unfortunately, manufacturing a recessed handle costs a lot of money. At the old 
Apple, I would have lost the argument. What was really great about Steve is that he saw it and said, 
“That’s cool!” I didn’t explain all the thinking, but he intuitively got it. He just knew that it was part of 
the iMac’s friendliness and playfulness.
Jobs had to fend off the objections of the manufacturing engineers, supported by Rubinstein, 
who tended to raise practical cost considerations when faced with Ive’s aesthetic desires and 
various design whims. “When we took it to the engineers,” Jobs said, “they came up with thirty-
eight reasons they couldn’t do it. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, 
why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of 
grudgingly did it.”
Jobs asked Lee Clow and Ken Segall and others from the TBWA\Chiat\Day ad team to fly up 
to see what he had in the works. He brought them into the guarded design studio and dramatically 
unveiled Ive’s translucent teardrop-shaped design, which looked like something from