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it's made from, and the form

that's connected to those materials. So for example

with the first iMac that we made,

the primary component of that was the cathode ray

tube, which was spherical. We would have an

entirely different approach to designing something

like that, than the current iMac, which is a very thin

flat-panel display.

Other issues would be, just physically how do you

connect to the product, so for example

with something like the iPhone, everything defers to

the display.

A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like

that is getting design out of the way.

And I think when forms develop with that sort of

reason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes,

it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost

un-designed. It feels almost like,

well of course it's that way, why wouldn't it be any

other way.

This is the bezel for the iMac. When we remove the

aluminum for the display in the center,

we actually take that material and then we can

make two keyboard frames from it.

These are literally just a couple of the stages of how

you make the MacBook Air.

Rough cutting... this is for the keyboard well. And

there is just a remarkable efficiency and beauty

to how much a single part can do, and one of things

we push and push ourselves on is trying to

figure out, can we do the job of those six parts with

just one.

This part actually starts off as this extrusion, this is

an aluminum extrusion that goes through

multiple operations, most of them CNC machined

operations, to end up...

to end up with this part. And you can see, just a

dramatic transformation

between this raw blank and the final part.

But what we end up with,

is a part that's got all of the mounting features, all of

the bosses... this is just one part,

but this one part is providing so much functionality.

And this one part really does enable this product.

So much of the effort behind a product like the

MacBook Air was experimenting

with different processes. There's a... it's completely

non-obvious,

but the way that you hold... to get from this part, to

this part...

there's an incredibly complex series of fixtures to

hold this part in the different machine stages.

And we end up spending a lot of time designing

fixtures.

The design of this, in many ways wasn't the design

of a physical thing,

it was figuring out process.

It's really important in a product to have a sense of

a hierarchy of what's important

and what's not important, by removing those things

that are all vying for your attention.

An indicator has a value when it's indicating

something.

But if it's not indicating something, it shouldn't be

there.

It's one of those funny things, you spend so much

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