After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

by Tripp Mickle

During a walk on a warm day in London, Ive and his college friend Steve Bailey stopped to sit on a bench overlooking a river that flowed into the Thames. The city he called home sprawled out before him. Leaving it behind was hard for him to process. He told Bailey that he wasn’t sure he was ready for his new role at Apple. Its design legacy was intimidating. Its Macintosh had reinvented how people interact with computers and looked more approachable than anything its competitors sold. Though Ive had accomplished so much in the eyes of his peers, he distrusted the accolades and still saw faults in much of his work. “He was genuinely nervous,” Bailey said. At Apple, Ive feared his shortcomings as a designer would be exposed. He worried about what lay ahead.

Jony Ive’s yellow Saab convertible could be seen in the mornings arching down I-280 toward Cupertino. It was 1992, and Ive had bought the car for the daily forty-five-mile commute to Apple’s headquarters. He loved to see the fog burning off the green hills above the Crystal Springs Reservoir. He put the top down on warmer weekends and drove around San Francisco, marveling at the abundance of sunshine.

As the attendees sipped champagne and nibbled on appetizers, Ive mingled with a smile. The room grew quiet when former prime minister Gordon Brown, who had supported Ive’s knighthood, proposed a toast. Ive, who craved attention but felt uncomfortable in the spotlight, put his left hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled sheepishly as Brown recalled visiting the Cupertino design studio and seeing the team at work. Ive’s father, Mike, looked on with a smile. Over the years, he had made countless things. He’d built hovercrafts and cabinetry, restored old cars and made wedding bands, fashioned school curriculums and forged teapots, but on display in the room that day was the product he admired the most. He told friends that he considered Ive to be his finest creation.

Within a few years, Apple built computers to order and held almost no inventory on its books. The operations team’s pursuit of that goal included painting a yellow line down the middle of factory floors. Components on one side of the yellow line remained on a supplier’s books until Apple moved them across the line to be assembled into a new computer. That reduced Apple’s costs because, under generally accepted accounting principles, the company wasn’t in possession of the inventory, even though it sat in its own warehouse, until the parts moved down an assembly line. The concept, which was groundbreaking at the time, became an industry standard.

The team pulled off a similar feat when Ive’s design team dreamed up a new way to manufacture laptops. The design called for the laptop’s case to be made with a machine that carved it out of a solid piece of aluminum. The technique, which was used by luxury car manufacturers and watchmakers, was unheard-of in computing, but the company expected it to reduce the thickness of the laptop by as much as 30 percent. The complex process would require thirteen unique machining steps, as well as laser drilling. It was ambitious and expensive. At most companies, the cost would prohibit such an elaborate undertaking, but Jobs ignored such a practical concern. He saw the potential to make a sleeker, lighter laptop. It fell on Cook to make his and Ive’s dream a reality. To guarantee that Apple could make enough laptops at a reasonable price, the operations team struck a deal with a Japanese manufacturer to buy all the machines it could produce for the next three years. The computer-controlled machines, known as CNC machines, cost as much as $1 million each. Apple’s purchase of ten thousand of them roiled the manufacturing industry, which was unaccustomed to such a large order from a single customer.

For Tim Cook, the numbers were hard to comprehend. Rising in California around 4:00 A.M. to review sales reports from around the world, the figures he perused each day astonished him. The introduction of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus had electrified demand for Apple’s most popular product, leading to long lines outside Apple Stores as customers waited hours to snap up the new devices. The company’s daily sales figures tracked the sale of 74 million iPhones over the holidays, a stunning 46 percent increase from a year earlier. On average, five hundred iPhones were sold each minute, twenty-four hours a day. Apple moved $600 iPhones at the same rate McDonald’s moved $5 Big Macs.

As Donald Trump took the presidential oath on the Capitol steps, Tim Cook was at work in Cupertino, watching closely for clues about the future. Cook’s office was a tidy testament to the values he carried. Robert F. Kennedy looked over his shoulder from a bronze bust atop the file cabinet behind his desk, and Martin Luther King, Jr., gazed at him from a photograph hung on the wall near the door. Cook considered the two men to be representatives of the best of America, both crusaders for justice in the 1960s. He had read their biographies, dissected their speeches, and included their quotes in emails to staff. He admired their idealism and resilience as they had directed a flawed America toward a brighter future. Nearly fifty years later, though, he found himself tracking the words of a reality show star who portrayed the country in a darker light.