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When Jony Ive designed the first iMac, he put a handle on it.
Not so people could carry it, it was a desktop computer. Nobody was going to carry it anywhere.
Steve Jobs insisted on it anyway.
Manufacturing a recessed handle cost a fortune. Every engineer at the old Apple would have killed it.
Ive explained why it mattered: "Back then, people weren't comfortable with technology. If you're scared of something, you won't touch it. If there's a handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It gives you permission to touch."
A handle changed how people felt about approaching a computer.
Elon thinks the same way.
Early Tesla engineers would describe him stopping meetings over a panel gap, a surface ratio, a curve that didn't feel right... Things that had nothing to do with range or performance.
He'd just say it's not beautiful enough and refuse to move on.
Most people assume Jobs and Musk are opposites, one sold dreams, the other sells engineering.
The overlap is that both understood something most builders never figure out: "The way a product makes you feel when you look at it is part of how it works."
Not so people could carry it, it was a desktop computer. Nobody was going to carry it anywhere.
Steve Jobs insisted on it anyway.
Manufacturing a recessed handle cost a fortune. Every engineer at the old Apple would have killed it.
Ive explained why it mattered: "Back then, people weren't comfortable with technology. If you're scared of something, you won't touch it. If there's a handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It gives you permission to touch."
A handle changed how people felt about approaching a computer.
Elon thinks the same way.
Early Tesla engineers would describe him stopping meetings over a panel gap, a surface ratio, a curve that didn't feel right... Things that had nothing to do with range or performance.
He'd just say it's not beautiful enough and refuse to move on.
Most people assume Jobs and Musk are opposites, one sold dreams, the other sells engineering.
The overlap is that both understood something most builders never figure out: "The way a product makes you feel when you look at it is part of how it works."
.@EricJorgenson on why Steve Jobs and @elonmusk are more similar than people realize:
"I think Elon is underrated in his design sense. There's a lot of times when you hear Elon quotes that sound exactly like Steve Jobs would've said.
He thinks about it like an algorithm. There's certain things, ratios that have to exist between the product, or it needs to feel bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside — that he just absolutely insists on.
There's stories, especially from early Tesla, of him being unreasonable about design decisions that he just puts a finger on, and is like, 'It has to be this way or it's not good enough, it's not beautiful enough, it's not aesthetic enough.'
In the same way that Steve Jobs was very much like, 'No, put a handle on that computer, because it changes the relationship that somebody has with this kind of new, foreign machine.'"View quoted post on X
