Frog design’s founder Harmut Esslinger talks about the developmental process and history of Apple in the new book Design Forward: Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change.
Here are a few of the designs that never came to fruition…
Apple Snow White 3, “Macbook,” 1984
The Apple Snow White 2, “Americana,” 1982.
Apple Snow White 3: the prescient “Macphone,” 1984, featuring a tablet screen
Now let us return to the tale of C1. Or should I say, MacMan. The agency team was heartbroken to learn that Steve had fallen in love with such a disappointing name as “MacMan.” Unlike C1 itself, for which our feelings had evolved from shock to love, there could be no love for “MacMan.” Ever. It had so many things wrong with it, we didn’t know where to start. Phil Schiller, Apple’s worldwide marketing manager, was in the room, and Steve revealed that “MacMan” was Phil’s contribution.
“I think it’s sort of reminiscent of Sony,” said Steve, referring of course to Sony’s legendary Walkman line of personal music players. “But I have to tell you, I don’t mind a little rub-off from Sony. They’re a famous consumer company, and if MacMan seems like a Sony kind of consumer product, that might be a good thing.” It was hard to know where to start picking at that argument. It seemed that Apple, more than any company in the world, stood for originality. Having a name that so blatantly echoed another company’s style couldn’t be the right way to go. We were also disturbed by the “man” part of “Mac-Man,” with its obvious gender bias. And then there was the fact that the name just gave us hives, but we’d need to be a bit more tactful on that one.
According to J. Crew CEO and Apple board member Mickey Drexler, Jobs even envisioned rethinking the automotive industry. Speaking at Fast Company’s recent Innovation Uncensored conference, Drexler clued the audience in on some insider Apple knowledge.
“Look at the car industry; it’s a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars?” Drexler said. “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.”
My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies.
They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did.
That’s the chemistry [at Pixar] between Ed [Catmull] and John [Lasseter] and myself. It’s worked pretty doggone well. We talk about things a lot, and sometimes one of us will want to do something that’s really stupid, or maybe not stupid but … oh, I don’t know … maybe not the wisest thing in the long run for the studio. And, you know, at least one of the other two will say, ‘Hey, you know, I think there’s a better way to do that.’ So we’ll all slow down and think it through, and we usually come up with a much better way.
“I had covered Jobs for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal since 1985, but I didn’t come to fully appreciate the importance of these “lost” years until after his death last fall. Rummaging through the storage shed, I discovered some three dozen tapes holding recordings of extended interviews—some lasting as long as three hours—that I’d conducted with him periodically over the past 25 years. (Snippets are scattered throughout this story.) Many I had never replayed—a couple hadn’t even been transcribed before now. Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him. Listening to them again with the benefit of hindsight, the ones that took place during that interregnum jump out as especially enlightening.”
“The myth is that charisma is not innate. What scientists have actually discovered—like many other myths they busted this one—is it’s actually a social skill, which like many others is learned. But this happens so early in life that by the time these charismatics get to adulthood, it all seems to be natural. And yet if, for example, you analyze the progression of Steve Jobs from 1984 to 2011 you’ll see he painstakingly learned it step by step.”
Ever since Steve Jobs died October 5, we’ve seen countless homages—some classier than others—but Genis Carreras’s blows them all away: It’s a portrait of Jobs built from the parts of a disassembled Apple laptop.
Apple has confirmed that Steve Jobs died today. His death came exactly six weeks after he resigned as CEO of Apple. Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. He took a medical leave beginning in 2007. In August, he announced he was stepping down altogether. Jobs was 56.
