The grinding work
behind single iPhone feature.
By Josh
Tyrangiel | September 9, 2015 | Illustrations by Chris Nosenzo
Apple has made many things over the years,
but its process has remained essentially the same: Find something ugly and
complicated and make it prettier and easier. Prettiness, in brushed aluminum,
is more or less a permanent state. Ease, however, is constantly evolving, which
is why a few days before the geek hootenanny known as Apple’s September Event,
Jony Ive’s focus isn’t on a new version of Apple TV or an iPad the size of a
doggy door, but on a feature. It’s called 3D Touch, and it makes using an iPhone
even easier. “Ultimately, this is our focus,” says Ive,
squeezing a new iPhone 6S. “This is what galvanizes our efforts right
across the company.” And 3D Touch, he adds with emphasis, “is something we’ve
been working on for a long time—multi, multi, multi years.”
The Apple design studio, like Stonehenge,
is more mystical in the imagination than in real life. It’s open plan, with
thirtysomethings of indiscriminate nationality, and very discriminate grooming,
working quietly in front of desktop iMacs. There are long wooden break tables
near a small kitchen with a gleaming espresso machine that appears more
worshiped than used. The floors are concrete. The music is indie, the lighting
crisp. The wall-length bookcase has the meticulously unarranged look of every
design bookstore you’ve ever lost an hour in.
The only hint that this is Apple’s magic
room is a curtain. Behind it, says Ive, is the industrial design studio, where
there are explorations in progress, milling machines, and a few remarkable
futuristic things that he cannot, alas, remark upon. 3D Touch came to life back
there.
Several years ago the designers and
engineers realized that phones contained so many functions—messaging, maps,
apps, links, photos, songs—that people were wasting a lot of time retreating to
the home button to bounce between them. This is the ne plus ultra of
First World problems, but Apple exists, unapologetically, to eradicate even the
tiniest bit of friction between its products and its users. “‘Inevitable’ is
the word we use a lot,” says Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of user interface
design. “We want the way you use our products to feel inevitable.”
In the near decade since its birth, the
iPhone has shed the baby fat of its first edition and grown into a sleek
adolescent (with a big brother, the 5.5-inch Plus version, introduced in 2014).
With the notable exceptions of Siri and Apple Maps, so many features have been
added so seamlessly that a meaningful critique is almost impossible. It’s like
reviewing infinity. But the appreciation of excellence fades when your
customers are conditioned to expect it. Refinement doesn’t get a standing O.
“The bar for functionality is higher with every generation,” says Phil
Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing. “You can’t just
say, ‘Here it is. It does the same thing 5 percent better than last year.’
Nobody cares.”
From the iPhone’s rounded edges to its
imperturbable Genius Bar employees, Apple would like its customers to think of
it as an effortless company, where transcendent technology emerges like freshly
baked bread from an oven. It’s just as much an illusion as Disney’s happiest
place on earth. “Engineering-wise, the hardware to build a display that does
what [3D Touch] does is unbelievably hard,” says Schiller. “And we’re
going to waste a whole year of engineering—really, two—at a tremendous amount
of cost and investment in manufacturing if it doesn’t do something that
[people] are going to use. If it’s just a demo feature and a month later nobody
is really using it, this is a huge waste of engineering talent.”
Schiller believes that 3D Touch is a
breakthrough, but the designers aren’t so sheltered that they’re oblivious to
his point. “I mean, it’s remarkable that within a corporation that has to deal
with so many absolutes … so many metrics …” Ive says,
trailing off. “You know, it’s so very hard to measure [what designers do]. We
can be working on something for a long time and still not know quite how it’s going to work
out.”
Apple design projects have no formal start
and no predetermined finish. Months of wrong turns and scenic routes are
common, and there are countless schemes going on simultaneously. Which is why
no one really remembers when the group rallied around adding 3D to the iPhone,
only that they kept asking: What if, instead of swiping through apps or routing
all of your browsing through the Grand Central station of the home screen, you
could press the glass in one function and reveal a shortcut to another? And
what if the phone understood this desire based entirely on changes in the
pressure you applied?
Everyone knows Apple is a design-first
company, but the degree to which this is true has, if anything, been
underappreciated. The relationship between the designers and the nondesign
executives is a little like the relationship between American Pharoah and his
trainer. One side is nominally in charge, but it’s conspicuously in service to
the other. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software
engineering, says that at most software companies the designers decide what
they want and the engineers respond with what’s easy to build. “Every single
feature becomes this unholy compromise,” says Federighi, who began his career
at Apple and spent a decade at Ariba, a maker of financial management software,
before returning in 2009. “With [3D Touch] it was only at the moment where we
finally got a design experience that’s like, ‘Yes! This is what we want!’ that
we [asked] how hard it’s going to be to make.”
The answer: really hard. But not as hard as
it would be for a competitor. Apple has such unprecedented resources (roughly
$200 billion in cash on hand) that it’s been able to collect many of the
world’s top specialists, across a variety of fields, and stash them for a rainy
day. A former executive not authorized to speak for this story suggested that
Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats last year had nothing to do with
headphones; it was about buying Beats Chief Executive Officer Jimmy Iovine’s savant-like
knowledge of the music business. “If you need to solve a particular problem,
usually the best person in the world already works here,” says Dye.
Still, working backward from a design idea
to create a real-world, fail-safe, supply chain-able product for hundreds of
millions of people can’t be done with resources alone. Apple isn’t in the habit
of explaining how it makes things work, because the people at Samsung can read,
and hold a patent on a similar technology. But in lieu of the usual polite
deflection, Federighi picked up an iPhone 6S and explained one of 3D Touch’s
simpler challenges: “It starts with the idea that, on a device this thin, you
want to detect force. I mean, you think you want to detect force, but really
what you’re trying to do is sense intent. You’re trying to read minds. And yet
you have a user who might be using his thumb, his finger, might be emotional at
the moment, might be walking, might be laying on the couch. These things don’t
affect intent, but they do affect what a sensor [inside the phone] sees. So
there are a huge number of technical hurdles. We have to do sensor fusion with
accelerometers to cancel out gravity—but when you turn [the device] a different
way, we have to subtract out gravity. … Your thumb can read differently to the touch sensor than your finger would.
That difference is important to understanding how to interpret the force. And
so we’re fusing both what the force sensor is giving us with what the touch
sensor is giving us about the nature of your interaction. So down at even just
the lowest level of hardware and algorithms—I mean, this is just one basic
thing. And if you don’t get it right, none of it works.”
“I’m scared to
death that at some point I’m going to get found out. You know, Tim [Cook] is
going to realize the truth about me, which is I’m terrible.”
For a technology company, there’s a
surprising amount of pencil-and-paper sketching as people begin their work.
Designers are spared a lot of meetings and obligations (“We love our bubble,”
says Dye), but they mix so intensely with materials specialists and engineers
that they’ve essentially become one amorphous, cross-functional team. Turnover
is unheard of, and new staff is brought in only after a courtship that makes
selecting a spouse look careless by comparison. “One joke with the design
team,” says Dye, “is that we don’t hire people until we’ve been on family
vacations together.”
When the group lands on something
promising—and “something” is the right word, because they’re often working with
ideas that don’t have terms to express them yet—they program it into a rough
prototype. Software prototypes (usually just printouts of proposed
interactivity) go on a magnetized wall. Hardware prototypes are often comically
bigger than an actual device and are set on a table for everyone to gather
around and critique. The core members have been together for so long that
feedback “is often sort of preverbal,” says Ive of the exchanges of grunts and
nods. At the same time, “we’re not characterized by being reticent with our
opinions.”
Dye, who had lead design roles at Kate
Spade and Ogilvy & Mather before coming to Apple in 2006, says that most of
the designers feel constant low-level anxiety. “I’m scared to death that at
some point I’m going to get found out. You know, Tim [Cook] is going to realize
the truth about me, which is I’m terrible.”
The only thing that keeps the anxiety from
turning to guilt is performance. “If you look at all the interactions we
engineered into this phone, none of them ended up where we started,” says
Federighi. Working with Corning, Apple created pliable iPhone cover glass.
Swipe it, and the phone works the way it always has. But press it, and 96
sensors embedded in the backlight of the retina display measure microscopic
changes in the distance between themselves and the glass. Those measurements
then get combined with signals from the touch sensor to make the motion of your
finger sync with the image on screen.
Some of this technology was first revealed
in the Apple Watch, which has a feature called Force Touch. But 3D Touch is to
Force Touch as ocean swimming is to a foot bath. Screen size makes a
difference, but the software on the iPhone 6S has a liquid ease. Apply a tiny
bit of pressure anywhere you want to explore something—a restaurant link inside
a text, an 11 a.m. meeting invite buried in an e-mail—and a peek at the
restaurant’s Web page or a window into your calendar hovers expectantly in the
middle of the screen while everything else blurs into temporary opacity. Press
a little harder, and what you’ve been peeking at pops fully into frame. Release
your finger, and you’re right back where you started. Presto chango, no home
button required.
Of course, this is the exact opposite of
how things work in the physical world. When you press a real object it’s
obscured, and it’s the things surrounding it that come into sharper focus. The
designers concede they were far down a rabbit hole until they remembered, as
Federighi says, that while the hardware was measuring force, the software
needed to measure intent. To make what is counterintuitive feel normal, each
on-screen “peek” and “pop” is accompanied by a 10-millisecond or 15-millisecond
haptic tap, little vibrations that say “good job” to your fingers
when an action is complete. (The precise timing of those taps is a cosmology
all its own.) For the years of effort, 3D Touch will be judged a success only
when its existence fades completely into a user’s subconscious. It takes about
four minutes.
Apple is feeling confident enough that it’s
integrated 3D Touch into everything on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus—the phone, the
weather app, iTunes, messaging, and the Web. Facebook and Instagram plan on
incorporating it into their iOS apps shortly after the phones arrive in stores
on Sept. 25 (at the same price as last year’s models), and a slew of other
developers are waiting for a chance to open up the software. “This is probably
the biggest innovation since the phone first came out,” says Andy Wafer, CEO of
Pixel Toys, which created the acclaimed zombie shooter game Gunfinger. Because
the screen senses force, and responds with taps, we may be on the verge of
great leaps forward in the destruction of virtual flesh. “Of course, everything
is shooting things,” says CEO Tim Cook with a wry smile during a brief stop in
the design studio.
Apple starts planning its keynote events
four months in advance, and as September approaches Phil Schiller is sweating
over just how long this one might go. “We’re trying hard to keep it under two
hours,” he says. “I think we’re going to be over.” This, too, can be pinned on
the designers. “We’ve never released a feature to make a date,” says Ive. They
also don’t hold features back. Things are ready when they’re ready, and this
season is swollen with new ideas.
Sure enough, by the time OneRepublic
finished singing, the show had clocked in at 2 hours and 20 minutes. Aside
from 3D Touch, there’s a new Apple TV($149 for a 32GB version) that app-ifies
video, has a remote for gameplay, and gets close to a universal search function
that finally brings order to the chaos of streaming services and broadcast
options. There’s also a 12.9-inch iPad Pro(starting at $799, and available in
November) with a sleek stylus called Apple Pencil ($99). More stage time was
devoted to new Apple Watch bands, iPhone camera upgrades, iPhone hardware
upgrades, enhanced iPhone video and video editing, the A9 microchip
(70 percent faster than its predecessor), and the introduction of Live
Photo, which is neither picture nor video but something in between, like a
living memory. Each presentation was discretely impressive and cumulatively
exhausting.
“The biggest worry for me is, are we
getting too locked in a formula?” asks Schiller. He recalls the 2002 Worldwide
Developers Conference, at which Steve Jobs delivered a eulogy for Mac OS9,
complete with cheesy organ music, a smoke machine, and a casket rising through
the middle of the stage. “We haven’t done anything quite that outlandish in a
long time. It may be part of being a bigger company, not this small upstart. We
feel a little uncomfortable being too strange and getting too far away from
ourselves.”
When Ive’s promotion to chief design officer
was announced in May and his deputies were given more day-to-day authority, the
cottage industry of Apple gossip sites surmised this was the beginning of a
slow fade. Ive was said to be too impatient for a company of massively
integrated product lines. There’s no evidence this is true, and the
relationship between Ive and Cook is close and mutually admiring. But Ive is
vigilant in guarding against the creative dangers of Apple’s enormity. “There’s
a tax that comes with interoperability and what can be seen as complexity,
which is it can actually be an impediment to innovation.”
He regularly asks himself, “Are we
developing stuff to make things easy for ourselves, or are we developing
products to move this forward? I have no interest, and I don’t think anybody
here has interest, in just designing something that will fit into a family and
behave itself.”
“There’s a tax that
comes with interoperability and what can be seen as complexity, which is it can
actually be an impediment to innovation.”
Ive is proud of 3D Touch because it
improves the experience of owning an iPhone, but he’s also proud of what it
says about Apple. He can’t think of another company that would have put so many
resources into such a seemingly subtle, yet potentially profound, change.
“Why would we spend this many years working
on 3D Touch when you can do some of these things with a button? Well it’s, it’s
just such a fluid connection with your content,” says Ive, a little dreamily.
“And not everything is binary, is it?”
Apple’s faith in design helped make it the
first company to reach a market cap of more than $750 billion. It also
means that every few years it has to bet its future on the instincts of a few
people with strong opinions about how things should work. Ive would rather be
sentenced to life with a flip phone than subject his designs to focus groups,
so when the company makes a change like 3D Touch, its business plan, basically,
is to trust that he and his team are right.
For all that’s changed at Apple, that faith
is what links it most strongly to its roots. In January 2007, when the first
iPhone was announced but not yet on shelves, Jobs escorted the device on a
voyage through America’s media outlets. In the middle of a drab conference room
on a high floor of a New York City office tower, he placed the device into the
hands of journalists who would, presumably, write that it was as world-changing
as he claimed. Jobs dropped the phone to prove that the glass wouldn’t shatter.
He activated the speaker to demonstrate call clarity. It seems obvious now, but
the minimalist Jobs had even pared away the physical keyboard, and that had to
be sold, too. He asked a volunteer to tap on the virtual keyboard that had
replaced it on screen. He was in full seduction mode, and about to reach his
crescend—
“It doesn’t work.”
Jobs paused and tilted his head, not
unkindly, in the direction of the disturbance.
“I keep getting typos,” the volunteer said.
“The keyboard’s too small for my thumbs.”
Jobs smiled and replied: “Your thumbs will
learn.” B
source:- http://www.bloomberg.com/