The Work Behind Simplicity
To build the first iMac, Apple's design team went to a jelly bean factory.
They were trying to make see-through plastic look appealing in an industry where every computer case was beige. The only people who had genuinely solved see-through color made candy. So the team studied how it was done, then worked with manufacturers in Korea to put it into a computer housing that cost 3x what a normal one did.
Jony Ive said simple products demand this kind of depth: "To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. You have to deeply understand the essence."
That is why the iMac came out with an almost effortless-looking design. Apple got to “effortless” by paying for work nobody would ever see: they studied a candy factory, coordinated with manufacturers in Korea, and paid for a case that cost 3x what a normal one did purely for the aesthetic.
Plenty of companies copied the see-through plastic afterward. Most skipped the factory visits and the extra cost that made it happen, and their versions looked cheap. The teams who got it right did the unglamorous, boring, on-the-ground work first.
