iCon excerpt

Wired News has published a lengthy the controversial and unauthorized biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. In the excerpt, authors Jeffrey Young and William Simon look at the creation of the iPod. "How many companies could tackle a project in a brand-new category, create a groundbreaking widget that looked great and worked better than anyone else's -- and do it all in under a year? It happened only because Steve Jobs cracked the whip in his usual roles of slave driver, taskmaster and ringmaster." The "creative genius" behind the look and feel of the iPod was Jonathan Ive, according to the book. "From early on, we wanted a product that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple, you almost wouldn't think of it as having been designed," Ive said. "Like everyone else on the project, I knocked myself out, not so much because it was a challenge -- which it was -- but because I wanted to have one," he said.

by MacNN Staff