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Like a Porsche
Jef Raskin’s vision for the Macintosh was that it would be like a boxy carry-on suitcase, which
would be closed by flipping up the keyboard over the front screen. When Jobs took over the
project, he decided to sacrifice portability for a distinctive design that wouldn’t take up much
space on a desk. He plopped down a phone book and declared, to the horror of the engineers, that
it shouldn’t have a footprint larger than that. So his design team of Jerry Manock and Terry
Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen above the computer box, with a keyboard that
was detachable.
One day in March 1981, Andy Hertzfeld came back to the office from dinner to find Jobs
hovering over their one Mac prototype in intense discussion with the creative services director,
James Ferris. “We need it to have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the Volkswagen
Beetle,” Jobs said. From his father he had developed an appreciation for the contours of classic
cars.
“No, that’s not right,” Ferris replied. “The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.”
“Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs countered. “It should be more like a Porsche!” Jobs
owned a Porsche 928 at the time. When Bill Atkinson was over one weekend, Jobs brought him
outside to admire the car. “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes,” he told Atkinson.
He also admired the design of the Mercedes. “Over the years, they’ve made the lines softer but the
details starker,” he said one day as he walked around the parking lot. “That’s what we have to do
with the Macintosh.”
Oyama drafted a preliminary design and had a plaster model made. The Mac team gathered
around for the unveiling and expressed their thoughts. Hertzfeld called it “cute.” Others also
seemed satisfied. Then Jobs let loose a blistering burst of criticism. “It’s way too boxy, it’s got to
be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of
the bevel.” With his new fluency in industrial design lingo, Jobs was referring to the angular or
curved edge connecting the sides of the computer. But then he gave a resounding compliment. “It’
s a start,” he said.
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs’s previous
criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts
would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design’s evolution, but it
prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored. “By the fourth model,
I could barely distinguish it from the third one,” said Hertzfeld, “but Steve was always critical and
decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that I could barely perceive.”
One weekend Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto and again spent time studying appliances,
especially the Cuisinart. He came bounding into the Mac office that Monday, asked the design
team to go buy one, and made a raft of new suggestions based on its lines, curves, and bevels.
Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look friendly. As a result, it evolved to resemble a
human face. With the disk drive built in below the screen, the unit was taller and narrower than
most computers, suggesting a head. The recess near the base evoked a gentle chin, and Jobs
narrowed the strip of plastic at the top so that it avoided the Neanderthal forehead that made the
Lisa subtly unattractive. The patent for the design of the Apple case was issued in the name of
Steve Jobs as well as Manock and Oyama. “Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the lines, his
ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” Oyama later said. “To be honest, we didn’t know
what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”
Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what would appear on the screen. One day
Bill Atkinson burst into Texaco Towers all excited. He had just come up with a brilliant algorithm
that could draw circles and ovals onscreen quickly. The math for making circles usually required
calculating square roots, which the 68000
microprocessor didn’t support. But Atkinson did a workaround based on the fact that the sum of
a sequence of odd numbers produces a sequence of perfect squares (for example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3
+ 5 = 9, etc.). Hertzfeld recalled that when Atkinson fired up his demo, everyone was impressed
except Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good,” he said, “but how about drawing rectangles with
rounded corners?”
“I don’t think we really need it,” said Atkinson, who explained that it would be almost
impossible to do. “I wanted to keep the graphics routines lean and limit them to the primitives that
truly needed to be done,” he recalled.
“Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!” Jobs said, jumping up and getting more
intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out the whiteboard and the tabletop and other
objects that were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look outside, there’s even more,
practically everywhere you look!” He dragged Atkinson out for a walk, pointing out car windows
and billboards and street signs. “Within three blocks, we found seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I
started pointing them out everywhere until he was completely convinced.”
“When he finally got to a No Parking sign, I said, ‘Okay, you’re right, I give up. We need to
have a rounded-corner rectangle as a primitive!’” Hertzfeld recalled, “Bill returned to Texaco
Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing
rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast.” The dialogue boxes and windows on
the Lisa and the Mac, and almost every other subsequent computer, ended up being rendered with
rounded corners.
At the calligraphy class he had audited at Reed, Jobs learned to love typefaces, with all of their
serif and sans serif variations, proportional spacing, and leading. “When we were designing the
first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me,” he later said of that class. Because the Mac was
bitmapped, it was possible to devise an endless array of fonts, ranging from the elegant to the
wacky, and render them pixel by pixel on the screen.
To design these fonts, Hertzfeld recruited a high school friend from suburban Philadelphia,
Susan Kare. They named the fonts after the stops on Philadelphia’s Main Line commuter train:
Overbrook,
Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. Jobs found the process fascinating. Late one afternoon he
stopped by and started brooding about the font names. They were “little cities that nobody’s ever
heard of,” he complained. “They ought to be
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