Page 237 - The Apple Experience

At the elegant, five-level Apple Store in Tokyo’s Ginza district, most
visitors will tell you that they remember the cool glass elevator that allows

them to see each floor. Ask to describe the handrails, and nobody will have

noticed. Steve Jobs did. When he visited the Ginza store—a high-profile

store because it was the first to open outside the United States—he ordered

the stainless steel handrail to be changed because he wanted the mill lines of

the steel to wrap around the tube instead of along its length. It was

aesthetically more pleasing. Jobs wanted the first Macintosh to have the
curves of a Porsche, not a Ferrari. Details mattered. Jobs wanted pop-up

dialog boxes on the Mac screen to have rounded corners instead of straight

rectangles. Details mattered. Jobs criticized the initial design of the first Mac

because the “radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like

the size of the bevel.” Details mattered to Jobs.
2
Two important men shaped Jobs’s design aesthetic—his father and the

German designer Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus movement.
From his dad, Jobs learned the importance of maintaining a commitment to

quality and excellence, even when no one else paid attention. “When you’re a

carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece

of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever

see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood

on the back,” said Jobs.
3
Jobs’s commitment to design excellence would often drive engineers

crazy. When the Macintosh was first being developed in the early 1980s, Jobs

disliked the first designs of the printed circuit boards that would hold the
chips and other components inside the computer. He thought they were

“ugly” because the lines were too close. When engineers countered with the

argument that the design did not impact the performance of the PC and that