Apple takes a bold new byte at iMac

It's based on a sunflower, looks like a lamp and it aims to lure the world away from Windows. THE INDEPENDENT talks to the designer of Apple's new iMac.

Jonathan Ive can hardly believe it.

He has been working on this product under complete secrecy for two years - including a year when he headed down the wrong design path - and in the space of a few hours it has gone from being Apple Computer's equivalent of the Manhattan Project to being plastered all over San Francisco.

"It's funny, it having been so, so secret," says Mr Ive. "Now it's everywhere, and there are huge posters. I can't get used to it."

Mr Ive is talking about the new iMac, the replacement for his ship-like design which first appeared in May 1998.

He says this one is modelled on a sunflower, though others say it looks more like a desk lamp.

It has a white dome about the size of a chopped melon for its base, topped by a stainless-steel "neck" that attaches to a flat screen which you can move up and down and swivel through 180 degrees.

User reaction to that subtle confluence of design, price and internals is never easy to forecast.

After Apple chief executive Steve Jobs launched it at the Macworld exhibition, saying "It's the best thing we've ever done", Mr Ive anonymously "aced the show floor, watching people's reactions".

His conclusion: "I think they like it. Yeah, yeah, people are ... pretty enthusiastic."

Mr Ive had been worried that they wouldn't be. But it was the same with the original iMac.

Back then, Mr Jobs praised it by saying, "it looks like it's from another planet, a planet with better designers ... The back of this thing looks better than the front of other guys' systems."

Six million iMacs later, it's easy to think success was foretold. Not so, says Mr Ive.

"I remember walking back to the car and hearing people wondering what world we [designers] were living in to produce this."

Mr Jobs and Mr Ive knew two years ago that they needed a redesigned iMac. They knew, too, it would have a flat screen, because component prices were falling fast.

But that was all they were certain of.

Initially, Mr Ive and his hand-picked team tried simply sticking the guts of the computer into the space behind the flat screen.

But hard discs, CD-Roms and DVD-Roms run slower when vertical than when horizontal. The processor-heat output demanded a fan, which would be noisy and, in a "flat PC", perhaps just centimetres from "our face".

And the screen would lose its mobility: no tilt and swivel for that one-piece.

In late 2000, after a year's work, Mr Ive took a preliminary "flat" design to Mr Jobs. His boss' response was to head home and summon Mr Ive to join him.

Most people would worry for their job in this situation. But Mr Jobs took Mr Ive for a walk in his wife's vegetable patch and told him to think again about the pieces he was trying to fit together.

"Each should be true to itself," he said.

That meant the disc drives being horizontal, and the flat screen retaining its mobility.

The designers "had to liberate the display, explode it, disconnect it from the CPU".

The new shape emerged shortly afterwards: a dome is the only shape that lets the screen swivel without having "preferred" positions, maximises stability and offers lots of horizontal space.

After that, it was the fine detail - of which there is a huge amount.

British-born Mr Ive is 35 next month and has been chief of design at Apple for four years. He has worked for Apple since 1992, when he left his job at the London-based agency Tangerine, where he designed (among other things) washbasins.

In the flesh he's quiet, restrained. He says he doesn't have any great sources of inspiration - "it's more about how you look at the world" - though he does admire people who work on satellites, where every cubic centimetre and gram costs thousands of dollars to launch into space.

"When you look at how a satellite is made - the formal solution that has to answer a bunch of imperatives, what goes in, what doesn't, how you fit it together, there's so much stuff that people don't think is consciously designed."

Mr Ive often struggles for words, sounding like a man trying to describe God to a world without religion.

Because his designs aren't intended simply to attract, pictures consistently don't do them justice.

It is only first-hand that you notice the tiny things: the magnetically operated latch on the notebook computers; the light which, when the machine is "asleep" rather than off, "breathes" brighter and dimmer; the drop-hinge on the iBook, which puts the screen further away than usual on a notebook.

Even so, you might wonder whether design truly matters in computers.

After all, aren't the screen and the keyboard the only important elements the user sees, and the processor and hard drive the only important invisible ones? Surely no one will care if it's a panel or a flap?

Not so, says Mr Ive.

"One of the things that's really frustrating about this [PC] industry is that it's so often about things that you can measure with numbers. The hard drive holds X gigabytes. The chip is this fast.

"It's much harder to market the value of a display like this [he gestures towards the screen], which stays just where you put it, but can be moved anywhere. You can't put a value on that."

But you can try.

In terms of size, Apple's closest rival in the PC world is Gateway Computer, the sixth-largest PC maker. But Gateway is struggling because in the Windows world, where the software is the same, hardware competition creates murderous pressure on margins. Bigger companies push down prices, squeezing rivals.

Last year, that forced Gateway to shut all its operations in Europe and fire more than 3000 people, a quarter of its staff. It lost $US1 billion ($NZ2.36 billion) on sales of $7.39 billion and this month its bonds were downgraded by Moody's, the big credit group, to "junk" status.

Apple had a tough year, too, losing $US242 million on sales of $US5.36 billion, principally because of a dreadful first quarter at the end of 2000.

But Mr Jobs eschewed big layoffs and even pushed the company into new areas.

It remodelled its laptops - making one out of titanium - and pushed into the consumer electronics area with the iPod, an MP3 music player the size of a cigarette packet with a tiny hard drive able to hold 1000 songs. So far, more than 150,000 have been sold.

But design alone won't guarantee success.

Eighteen months ago the critics swooned over an earlier design, the Cube (one is now in the New York Museum of Modern Art), but the public disliked its high price tag.

Apple killed it early last year.

The new iMac is subtle and restrained, much like Mr Ive.

"With the first iMac the goal wasn't to look different, but to build the best integrated consumer computer we could.

"If as a consequence the shape is different, then that's how it is. The thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. That's what we have tried to do with the new iMac."

- INDEPENDENT

* The Herald's IT writers will give their assessment of the new iMac at its unveiling in New Zealand in the next few weeks.