After Steve

20 Jun 2025

This book is probably for the Apple enthusiasts, but I really enjoyed reading this one. The focus is mainly on Jony Ive and Tim Cook and how they influenced and changed Apple in different ways (and their lives to some degree). I don’t know why but I got really hooked into it. There are so many fun, upsetting, weird, messed-up and interesting stories and anecdotes. I saved a lot of quotes and many stories will stay with me.

Quotes

”As Ive sipped on a cappuccino, he stared down the stainless-steel bar and quietly said, “I can see every seam in this bar.” Forlenza followed Ive’s gaze down the bar. He saw nothing but thirty feet of smooth silver metal. He decided that Ive, who had a glum look on his face, must have X-ray vision. “Your life must be fucking miserable,” he said.”

”Ive solidified the studio’s position by carefully maintaining the environment where its members worked and controlling who came and went. He wanted the workplace to be quiet during meetings and focused on making the most aesthetically and functionally pure products possible. If staff from engineering or operations didn’t bring reverence to the discussion, if they talked too loudly, or even worse, if they brought up costs, they would later discover that their badge no longer accessed the studio; their admittance had been silently revoked. The unspoken judgments fueled a company adage: Don’t talk to Jony unless spoken to. […] When an operations staffer spoke about the manufacturing challenges of a proposed design, Ive would later pull his manager aside and say that the staffer’s comments had disturbed the design process. He wanted people in the studio to understand what the designers wanted and find ways to do it—not erect barriers by mentioning costs or production limitations. “I’m not going to let someone drive the bus just because their fucking legs are long enough to reach the pedals,” he would say.”

”Inside a company of nerdy engineers, they embodied art school cool. They dressed casually in T-shirts, hoodies, and designer jeans. They drove expensive cars, among the priciest being Ive’s Aston Martin DB9, which had cost about $250,000. They obsessed over their hobbies: De Iuliis perpetually searched for the world’s best coffee; Julian Hönig, an avid surfer, shaped his own boards; and Eugene Whang created a record label, Public Release, and DJ’d under his nickname, Eug, at clubs. They lived like rock stars. After product events, they loaded limousines with bottles of Bollinger champagne and went out for dinner and late-night drinks. They became regulars at the Redwood Room, a historic bar in downtown San Francisco that served artisanal cocktails, and sometimes traveled to Los Angeles for parties with Apple’s advertising agency. Drugs from quaaludes to cocaine, which a designer kept in a bullet-shaped snifter, could be available. It was all part of a work-hard, play-hard culture in a group of Renaissance men devoted to art and invention.”

”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.”

”As Jobs’s longtime collaborator, Ive felt pressure to silence the doubters. The idea of a smartwatch alleviated some of that stress, but when he raised it with Apple’s leadership team, he immediately faced skepticism. Software chief Scott Forstall, another of Jobs’s favorites, raised concerns. The engineer behind the iPhone’s operating system worried that strapping a miniature computer to people’s wrists would distract them from everyday life. He feared that it would amplify an unintended consequence of the iPhone, a device so engrossing that it consumed attention, disrupted conversation, and endangered drivers”

”Forstall’s doubt irritated Ive. The designer believed that ideas were fragile, tentative things that came at unexpected times from unknown places. Rising up out of the ether, they initially seem obvious and brilliant but can quickly be deemed impossible, squashed by the recognition of some insurmountable hurdle that could prevent them from becoming a reality. He and Jobs shared a belief that ideas should be nurtured, not crushed.”

”Only one major figure was absent: Tim Cook. After more than a decade of having product development led by its CEO, Apple was embarking on a mission without the participation of its top leader. Cook sent a message that he had no intention of even trying to step into the shoes of his predecessor. The successor whom Jobs said wasn’t a product person didn’t plan to become one. Instead, he would stay out of the experts’ way. Ive played master of ceremonies. He took a seat near the center of the table, not far from his team of designers. Before him sat a bottle of green juice, which was all he planned to consume that day. He was in the midst of a food cleanse, the latest in a series of diet adjustments after the stress and grief of Jobs’s death. The juice alarmed the engineers, who had spent weeks creating a deck of more than 150 slides full of industrial design renderings, details about the size of the device, analysis of what the display could be made of, and insights into how it could alert users to notifications by tapping a wrist. They expected the presentation to take six-plus hours and assumed that the group would have a barrage of questions that could make the meeting take all day. If the meeting was a dog-and-pony show for Ive, as they assumed, the last thing they wanted was for his cleanse to leave him hungry and irritable.”

”Ive ushered Cook to the table and held up the polished aluminum camera. He glowed as he explained the laser etching that dimpled its exterior like a citrus zester. He observed that the only notable color on the unit was the red of a Leica logo on the front and in a few small details such as the A for “Auto” on the exposure dial, allusions to the (RED) Auction. Cook nodded expressionlessly as he peered over Ive’s shoulder. To people watching from across the studio, Cook had the look of a semi-interested parent examining a child’s finished Lego project. Some would later joke that they had caught his eyes scanning the nearby tables that held the iPhones, iPads, and Macs that actually made the company money. Ive was still engrossed with the camera when Cook turned to leave. He had stayed only five minutes.”

”The camera design took more than nine months and required 561 different models before Ive was satisfied. Apple estimated that fifty-five engineers had spent a combined 2,100 hours on it.”

”The design team wanted to cut each crown with a computer-controlled machine, a CNC tool, that would have unrivaled precision resulting in a more beautiful and realistic crown. Yet, the operations staff proposed a low-priced laser-cutting process that would save millions of dollars. “That’s not Apple,” Zorkendorfer said. “That’s something Samsung would do,” Hönig added. The product designers, who were also at the table, tried to hide their alarm. They knew how unwelcome Ive would have found the remark. In his absence, a realization sank in: money changers had found a place in the temple of design.”

”For months, Apple’s retail team had been searching the world for samples of glass for Ive to review. Getting clear glass for an office building might not seem like a complicated task; corporate real estate developers don’t give it much bother, so long as it’s transparent. But Ive insisted on inspecting every one for sufficient clarity. Apple shipped glass samples from Europe and Asia to Cupertino, and Ive came over to inspect them. He wanted to find a piece of glass that was so transparent it would fill the company’s offices with natural light that he believed would increase employees’ happiness and boost their productivity.”

”But Ive and his team of outsiders fretted about where they would display the watches for media and special guests afterward. He proposed erecting a tent that would be all white, his preferred color, to double as a place where they could see the watches after the show. To pull it off, Apple would have to remove the trees outside the building, erect the tent, and then replant the trees afterward. It would be expensive. “How much?” Cook asked. “They want $25 million,” someone said. […] Some silently worried that it would look too much like a wedding tent. Others questioned the logistics of moving trees. Some simply tried to process how a company that had flirted with bankruptcy and adopted the mindset of a Depression-era grandmother had arrived at a place where it was considering spending so much money on a tent.”

”They eventually scheduled a meeting at the Carlyle Hotel on New York City’s Upper East Side. It was one of Ive’s favorites, known for luxurious touches such as monogramming guests’ initials onto pillowcases in gold.”

”Jobs had believed that accountants and lawyers should be largely kept out of decision making, treated more as implementers than as influencers.”

”Almost from the beginning, Ive was adamant that Apple make a gold watch, which he imagined as a bejeweled halo for the entire product line. He proposed making it in rose gold and traditional gold. The concept frightened Apple’s product design engineers, who were responsible for combining the materials, hardware components, and software into a manufacturable product. They knew that gold was a dense but soft metal that could easily be dinged and scratched, a prospect that filled their imagination with customers seeking costly refunds on lightly damaged $10,000 timepieces. To eliminate that risk, they embarked on an effort to design a sturdier, more durable gold.”

”He reserved a series of adjoining conference rooms at the hotel and put each bidding company into its own room. He then went from room to room, pressuring the bidders to lower their prices. He told the Germans, who were seeking upward of $500 a square foot, that the Chinese were asking a fraction of that. He told them they had ten minutes to lower their price. “If you don’t agree to this number, the guys next door said they would,” he said. Moments after issuing the ultimatum, he exited the room, leaving his astounded colleagues to process his bluffs.”

”Architects working on the project were astounded at how the lofty demands of a tech company had forced the construction industry to innovate. In the years that followed, they would marvel as other buildings, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, featured curved glass, which might have been impossible without Apple Park.”

”Steve Jobs had disdained consultants; he had thought they made recommendations and moved to their next project without working to determine whether their ideas succeeded or failed.”

”Beats’ headphone business was generating about $1.3 billion in sales a year and paying its manufacturers a 15 percent margin for production. By comparison, Apple paid its manufacturers 2 to 3 percent.”

”A skilled negotiator, Cook used the social media fiasco to demand an adjustment to the terms of the deal. In the days that followed, Apple shaved an estimated $200 million off its offering price. The reduction led staff at Beats to say that Apple had given Dre just enough of a haircut to make sure that he did not become a hip-hop billionaire.”

”The order in which Cook introduced the watch’s features betrayed its shortcomings. Though it had been inspired by Jobs’s interest in making a health device, the first-generation timepiece could do little more than read the wearer’s heart rate. It couldn’t track a walk or run with GPS. It couldn’t provide an EKG reading. It couldn’t be pitched as a health product. This was precisely the problem hardware engineer Jeff Dauber had tried to raise prior to the event: the watch had no compelling purpose. But his concern and desire for time to develop features was brushed aside because employees thought Cook was eager to release a new product that silenced critics and reassured investors. The CEO had favored speed over substance.”

”Ive jetted off to Paris Fashion Week, where the watch was scheduled to go on public display for the first time.”

”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.”

”Across the Pacific, outside Shanghai, Apple’s operations team was distressed to find that the manufacturer they had hired to assemble the watch didn’t have enough factory workers. It wasn’t just short; it was short more than a hundred thousand people. It was a staggering number that left many inside the operations team aghast, especially because they needed to find the workers in a matter of days.”

”The group agreed that fitness was in and fashion was out. Ive wasn’t there to object.”

”Ive could feel his creative spirit dimming. Behind the scenes, he had spent much of the past three years engaged in corporate conflict. He had tussled over whether to develop a watch with former software chief Scott Forstall. He had then battled over which of its features to promote with chief marketer Phil Schiller. Concurrently, he had confronted rising concerns about costs as he selected construction materials for Apple Park. And he had been sapped by the additional responsibility of managing dozens of software designers. He navigated it all without the support and collaboration of Jobs, the creative partner whom he hadn’t fully mourned. The entirety of it left him feeling exhausted and lonely.”

”By 2015, Ive was being chauffeured to Infinite Loop in the backseat of a Bentley Mulsanne, a $300,000 ultraluxury car with extra legroom and a cream leather interior. The cars were sold with Wi-Fi, enabling riders to work on the go, and handcrafted leather luggage designed specifically to fit into the trunk. He could stretch out in the back and stare out the window as his driver navigated traffic on Interstate 280.”

”The gold watch, in particular, created challenges. A machine cut it from a solid block of gold, creating a shimmering shower of gold flecks that Apple manufacturing engineers watched fall into the hair of Chinese factory workers being paid about $2 an hour. Many of the workers made less money in a month than the value of the gold flecks in their hair. Apple set up a surveillance system to watch for people wiping dust from their hair and walking out with it at the end of the day. The engineers watching marveled at the absurdity of the financial imprecision of Ive’s precise design.”

”Jobs had launched the iPhone project because he thought mobile phones sucked. He had pursued the iPad because he wanted something to read on the toilet.”

”In the United States, the Maxfield fashion boutique in West Hollywood was one of the nation’s only stores where people could enter and exit with one of the new timepieces on their wrist. Deneve had tapped it to sell the watch because it was one of the most influential stores in fashion. He hoped that availability there would create a ripple of interest that would swell into a wave of demand. Instead, the line outside the store reflected a culture clash where Apple fanboys in fanny packs brushed shoulders with fashionistas carrying Burberry bags. The divide between the customers in line mirrored the split playing out inside Apple as Ive’s push to focus on fashion collided with the company’s historic focus on technology”

”Each chair would cost $14,000, but like Jobs, Ive refused to put a dollar sign on good taste.”

”The government could also access Farook’s iCloud account, where he might have backed up the phone to Apple’s digital storage service. Though Apple wouldn’t unlock a phone, it would decrypt backups on iCloud and turn over messages and photos in response to a subpoena, a detail the company didn’t advertise to customers but promoted to law enforcement. The security loophole put access to the phone within reach.”

”But his absence from the day-to-day routine could create challenges, especially because he wanted to maintain control over product direction and insisted on having final approval for products. He got his wish to step back, but he struggled to actually let go. The design team and engineers would work all month and make decisions, then wait for him to show up for a few days every few months to approve them. The dysfunction created discord for the harmonious design team.”

”The claim roiled Apple’s leadership. Cook had never said anything about “big plants” to Trump, but when reporters called seeking comment, Apple’s spokespeople declined to contradict the president. Cook and his advisers feared that calling Trump a liar would ignite a “tweet war,” spark threats of tariffs on Apple products, or worse, inspire a call for a boycott of Apple, so the company remained silent.”

”Along with the frustration about Ive’s meetings at the Battery and the related delays, irritation grew across Apple’s top ranks that the company was paying him more to do seemingly less than everyone else. His salary had long been a source of resentment. Under Jobs and later Cook, Apple had paid the members of its ten-person executive team equally, about $25 million in total annual compensation apiece. Their pay was reported publicly in compliance with the SEC’s Section 16 law, which required companies to report compensation of officers who oversaw specific business units. But Ive had received a pay package that exceeded his peers’ and concealed it by being one of the only executives not listed as a Section 16 officer even as he worked part-time. Other examples of Ive’s abusing his position surfaced. Following a recent remodel of his Gulfstream V, he had found a flaw in the performance of the custom aluminum soap dispensers that had been installed. Apple’s computer engineers were asked to find a solution. Instead of working on future Macs, a member of the team had spent several weeks fixing Ive’s soap dispensers. Shareholders have no idea, his colleagues joked.”

”In a message exchange that included Apple designers, Zuckerman made a remark that some at Apple deemed offensive. The company monitors its employees’ phone records and text messages, and Zuckerman’s comment caught the company’s attention […] A similar financial review of another outside consultancy had been so stressful that the firm’s CEO had had a heart attack in the middle of the process, even as the audit had found no improprieties. […] At the conclusion of the review, Apple’s finance staff determined that it had overpaid Zuckerman for his services. They demanded that he repay as much as $20 million that he had billed over the years. It was an enormous sum that represented much of what Zuckerman had earned through his work on the book and other projects. Desperate to avoid financial disaster, Zuckerman begged Ive for help. “Sorry,” Ive said. He explained that Cook had been behind the audit. “There’s nothing I can do.” It was not the only time he had to apologize for the behavior of Apple’s finance department. Despite having more than $200 billion in cash, the company had rejected legitimate billings filed by its architecture firm, Foster + Partners, which had worked on Apple Park and Apple Stores. When one of the firm’s partners had told Ive, the designer had been furious and fought back. He couldn’t fathom why the company would stiff its vendors. But his energy for conflict had waned.”

”Shortly after moving in, an engineer on Apple’s Siri team walked into a glass door and broke his nose. Blood ran down his face. He wouldn’t be the building’s last victim. Over the next few weeks, Apple Park security called 911 to report a host of similar incidents. One employee cut his eyebrow. Another, possibly concussed, bled from the head. A third needed paramedics. The calls became so routine that security knew how to patch the dispatcher straight through to the injured employee. “Tell me exactly what happened,” a dispatcher said after one injury. “Um, I walked into a glass door on the first floor of Apple Park when I was trying to go outside, which was very silly,” the employee said. “You walked through a glass door?” the dispatcher asked. “I didn’t walk through a glass door,” the employee said. “I walked into a glass door.” “Okay, one second. Did you injure your head?” “I hit my head.” To avoid looking as though they had just stepped out of a boxing ring, staff began walking around the building with their arms held out like zombies, hoping their fingers would hit the glass before their faces did. Apple rushed to address the issue by ordering miles of black stickers to apply around the building. Senior executives and members of Apple’s business strategy team, among the first to move into the new building, assisted maintenance staff in what employees called “an emergency sticker job.” The black dots stood out as the only visible imperfections in space where indoors and outdoors blurred together, courtesy of the never-ending glass. Staff began calling the stickers “Jony’s tears.””

”The engineer who coordinated the staff exchanges voiced disappointment that colleagues with seeing-eye dogs had no dedicated place to take them to the bathroom. He enjoyed watching the Labradors being escorted out onto the sculpted hillsides to take a crap. “It was poetic justice,” he said”

”As the employees prepared to move, Cook decided to squeeze more of them into the building, boosting the total number of staff working there from the original plan of twelve thousand to fourteen thousand people. The decision to cram more staff into the same amount of space was a stroke of operational efficiency. In the three years since construction had begun, Apple had increased its workforce by a third, from 92,600 to 123,000 people. Putting a third more people into the same space meant that the open-floor plan contained more desks and engineers enjoyed less space. The cramped floor plan was a daily reminder of the high-tech cider press Apple had become.”

”Ive and Cook had said that Apple Park had been built to bring everyone together in one space, so that people from different divisions might serendipitously bump into each other and find ways to collaborate. But although its larger cafeteria and parkscape encouraged interaction, the interior discouraged it. The segments inside the building were carved into self-contained wedges of office space accessible only by badge. Staff complained that going to a meeting on the same floor in an adjacent wedge required walking down two flights of stairs and ascending a different stairwell to a room that was practically next door. It made the building feel like a city of one-way streets. They called the locked-down maze “Space Prison.”

”Noise was a greater nuisance. The building’s interior walkway ran alongside curved glass panels that ferried sounds across great distances like a science museum’s whispering wall. People’s chatter filtered into offices through the seams between the glass panels, leading some employees to fill the gaps with colored pieces of Styrofoam. Eventually, Apple installed white-noise machines to dampen the hallway racket.”

”For the Apple Park documentary work, Apple agreed to pay him $3.5 million a year. It was the type of sum that team members said Jobs would have ignored. His question would have been “Are the photographs and video any good?” Artistic skill would have trumped commercial considerations. But Jobs no longer controlled the purse strings.”

”Jobs had sparked the architectural bonanza in 2010 when he had Foster + Partners begin work on the closed loop that seemed like a physical manifestation of Apple’s culture of secrecy and control. Facebook had followed, with the architect Frank Gehry designing a campus of community coffee shops and offices lined with plywood, an informal homage to its hoodie-wearing CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Not to be outdone, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had tapped the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to imagine a soaring glass canopy over a public walkway, a nod to the accessibility of information its search engine made possible. The glitzy headquarters followed a long line of monuments to wealth and power that dated all the way back to Egypt’s pharaohs. Their arrival seemed fitting for businesses that had become the dominant forces of modern capitalism, with platforms as indispensable for bankers on Wall Street as for villagers in Bangladesh. There were no limits to their growth. Their tentacles could stretch from smartphones, search engines, or social media into seemingly unrelated industries such as finance and health. It was natural for them to indulge their growing self-importance with distinctive buildings, even if they knew that every shrine could also be a tombstone”

”To no one’s surprise, the designers had one of the best views on campus, a fourth-floor perch with a view across the park’s interior.”

”Some began to weep as he explained that part of the reason he was leaving was that he’d grown weary of Apple’s bureaucracy. Though they seldom acknowledged it to one another, they knew that the company’s startup culture had faded. Without Jobs, some thought, Apple had become a machine with a heart of stone. Cook had emboldened Apple’s finance team. He had given accountants and operations people more voice in decision making. Their influence had been visible in the 2015 iPad that had never been made, the audits of longtime partners such as the photographer Andrew Zuckerman, and the rejected billings of the architect Foster + Partners. Jobs had held fast to the idea that lawyers and accountants were there to execute the decisions made by the people at the company’s creative core. But over time, the company’s bureaucratic caboose had become its engine. […] Plus there were the meetings. Ive had taken to working from his studio in San Francisco partly to avoid having his calendar become clouds of blocked-off time. On campus, meetings had mushroomed in size, taking on the shape of the full conference room depicted in the film Yesterday. Decision making had slowed down, paralysis had set in, and Ive couldn’t stand it. “I don’t want to go to any more fucking meetings,” he told the team.”

”Late that afternoon, after the stock market closed, Apple issued a press release announcing Ive’s departure. The release outlined a new reporting structure. After fifteen years of reporting directly to the CEO, Ive’s old design team—the group of aesthetes once thought of as gods inside Apple—would report to Apple’s chief operating officer, Jeff Williams, a mechanical engineer with an MBA.”

”When Ive first broached the idea of leaving the company in 2015, Cook focused on determining a succession plan. In the eyes of those who worked with him, his interest was in protecting the company more than protecting the individual. It was right for shareholders, even as colleagues found it difficult to witness.”

”Ive’s departure became official two months later, when the company quietly removed his photograph and name from its leadership page. There was no fanfare, nor was there any commemoration of his contributions. In the most Apple way possible, he was there one day and gone the next.”

”In his absence, they say that the group has become friendlier and more democratic in its collaboration, especially with colleagues in engineering and operations. The designers acknowledge that they are subject to more cost pressures now than when Ive was there to deflect those concerns. However, they say it’s not so severe that they have been unable to do their work. And they insist that the work they’re doing is the best work they’ve done.”

”In reflecting on Jobs’s legacy, they would often observe that he had made products that had changed the world. When asked how his successor, Cook, would be remembered—and by extension their final decade at Apple—some smiled. “For making a fuck ton of money,” they said.”