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Who wrote the iBook? The project employed hundreds but had three primary authors: Jonathan Ive, the brilliant, soft-spoken V.P. of industrial design; senior V.P. of hardware engineering Jon Rubinstein; and, of course, Jobs himself, official purveyor of the vision thing, who delivered his basic concept in one pithy sentence: "The iBook is something you'd throw in your backpack."
From that single idea--a machine for the backpack, not the briefcase--a thousand developmental insights were launched. In this second Jobs era, says Ive, Apple products are designed "holistically," each aspect of development altering every other as the project evolves, the design group producing first sketches, then computer work-ups and finally physical prototypes in a perpetual rondelet with the software guys, Rubinstein's hardware jocks and Jobs, who was a continual presence during the iBook's 18-month gestation.
Take, for instance, these three givens: the iBook is wireless, it needs a full-size keyboard, and it must make sense for schools. From here the design implications topple like dominos. Both the wireless idea and the education focus demand long battery life, because what's the point of lugging a wireless into class if the machine is always asking to be plugged in? But being able to run for six hours (the length of a school day) demanded a large battery, which the full keyboard forced down to the machine's bottom lip. The design guys, meanwhile, had decided that the perfect latch was no latch at all, just a clamshell top that clicked securely shut, like a cell phone. The engineers by this point realized that the heavy battery made the bottom dense enough to handle the latchless top.
And so on. At their best (which, until the iMac, hasn't been all that often), Apple products dazzle by giving us what we didn't know we wanted but suddenly can't live without. This fall we'll learn whether America's been yearning for a blueberry laptop built of bulletproof polycarbonate plastic (to make it, Ive explains, "rugged, robust, structural") and co-molded rubber (to make it "compliant, yielding, human"). And a little foldout handle. And a sleep light that throbs like a heartbeat. And a sleek, round charger whose cord rolls up like a yo-yo...
To be sure, iBook's look hasn't garnered universal praise. Silicon Valley insiders, reports a wag, "can't decide whether it looks like a toilet seat or a Hello Kitty bag." But even its detractors would have to agree that it's a striking departure for the home-computer market--and quite possibly a landmark in the quest Jobs began when he founded Apple two decades ago. "I remember when he pulled the white sheet off the first Mac in '84," says Tim Bajarin, a longtime Apple watcher. "Even then, he was going to create the 'computer for Everyman.'"
But he didn't, not really, though Apple products from the Lisa to the LaserWriter have certainly pointed the way. Back when the first Macs were rolling out in the early '80s, the mass market Jobs was aiming for didn't yet exist--at least not at the prices he was charging. Since then, the operating-system wars--and years of bumbling management--have taken their toll on the company. By the time Microsoft's Windows captured the OS flag, the software community had largely stopped writing programs for the Mac--a leading indicator of Apple's long, slow and very painful decline.