By Allen Han
First in a series of articles that examine at Apple’s innovation puzzle. Why innovation puzzle? Apple’s innovations are in multiple areas, by examining each pieces individually and from 100,000′ holistic view, we hope to come to understanding of Apple innovations and how to attack it. “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”, Sun Tzu
With recent release of new MacBook Pro aka “Brick” and iMac, someone cited Brick as a design innovation and asked me about what I think of Brick’s design. IMHO the design of Brick is a great design, but not an innovation itself. The design of Brick is inline with the current Apple design language of simplicity and celebration of details and aluminum. Some of the elements on Brick like CNC chassis, integrated battery and SSD were around for awhile in different products of different market segment. Integration of these into one product is an innovation. However for this article we are going to look at one particular over looked area of apple innovation puzzle.
Often overlooked piece of Apple innovation puzzle is Design Execution this is what makes Apple hardware products comes alive. As demonstrated in the ability to leverage of cost-prohibitive manufacturing process in mass-market product. Apple to their credit has always pushed the boundary of manufacturing processes, and delivered great sales numbers to back it up. As the result of this, manufactures are more welling to experiment with Apple. With economy of scale on their side and ‘Apple Economic‘ (we will cover this in a future post), Apple is able to leverage expensive manufacturing process like CNC for their products. For example, the stainless steel frame on iPhone 3G/3Gs is a sub US $10 part at 1million units per year. The same part done in Liquidmetal plus post-op to simulate polish stainless steel would be US$7. If made with reinforced plastic with plating, the part would be sub US$2. Reality is Apple is not paying anywhere close to $10 for the stainless steel frame due to ‘Apple Economics‘ . As long as Apple is delivering on the volume, vendors are welling to bend backwards to make Apple designer’s fantasy come true.
It is cost prohibitive for competition to match Apple in Apple’s design execution. Note how we said Apple’s design execution, not design execution. Right there is the mistake competitors make, they try to out Apple, Apple, when Apple is the one with the playbook. The way to compete in design execution is to define and create your own signature execution style. Maximize one particular manufacturing process on the first generation product. Do something creative that have never been done before or have not been popularized. This exactly what we did for RealNetworks Joey Media Player project in 2004/05. When we were developing Joey, this was when iPod gen3 started to dominating the market, all the MP3 players on the market had a metal back. We knew that was not the way we wanted to go, we instead chose double-shot injection molded back., but we did something totally different and still pioneering to this day. We added 3-dimensionality to the double-shot part so the depth and richness of double-shot is farther enhanced. This defined RealNetworks’ hardware signature and brand identify.
Design Execution is one piece of innovation puzzle. It takes engineering, software, service, manufacturing, marketing and channel to deliver a great product innovation like iPhone. Yes, industrial designers at Apple deserves the accolades. But the ones that really make Apple product come alive are the engineers, manufacture vendors and Apple’s hardware operations teams.
