Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky

might make an annual salary of $200,000 with bonuses in good years amounting to 50 percent of the base. Talking about money is frowned upon at Apple. “I think working at a company like that, and actually being passionate about making cool things, is cool,” said Johnson, summarizing the ethos. “Sitting in a bar and seeing that 90 percent of the people there are using devices that your company made… there is something cool about that, and you can’t put a dollar value on it.”
    Steve Jobs—who was famously uninterested in discussing money—took a nuanced view of the subject of happiness and enjoyment at Apple. “I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t say it’s the most fulfilling experience in their lives,” he said. “People love it, which is different than saying they have fun. Fun comes and goes.”

Focus Obsessively

    T ucked away in a walled-off section of the creative studio of Apple’s main marketing building is a room devoted to packaging. Compared with weighty and complex tasks such as software design or hardware manufacturing, packaging would be a pedestrian concern at many companies, almost an afterthought. Not at Apple, which devotes tremendous energy and resources to how it wraps its products. The packaging room is so secure that those with access to it need to badge in and out. To fully grasp how seriously Apple executives sweat the small stuff, consider this: For months, a packaging designer was holed up in this room performing the most mundane of tasks—opening boxes.
    Mundane, perhaps, but also critically important. Inside the covert lab were hundreds of iPod box prototypes. That’s right: hundreds of boxes whose sole function was to give the designersayp the ability to experience the momentwhen customers picked up and held their new toy for the first time. One after another, the designer created and tested an endless series of arrows, colors, and tapes for a tiny tab designed to show the consumer where to pull back the invisible, full-bleed sticker adhered to the top of the clear iPod box. Getting it just right was this particular designer’s obsession. What’s more, it wasn’t just about one box. The tabs were placed so that when Apple’s factory packed multiple boxes for shipping to retail stores, there was a natural negative space between the boxes that protected and preserved the tab.
    How a customer opens a box must be one of the last things a typical product designer would consider. Yet for Apple, the inexpensive box merits as much attention as the high-margin electronic device inside. As the last thing customers see before their greatly anticipated device, Apple’s packages are the capstone to a highly honed and exceedingly expensive process. It begins with prototype design, progresses to a collaboration between supply-chain experts who source the components and product managers who coordinate the assembly of hardware and software, and ends with a coordinated marketing, pricing, and retailing plan to get the devices in consumers’ hands.
    Anticipating how the customer will feel holding a simple white box is merely the culmination of many thousands of details Apple will have thought of along the way. “Attention to detail, to me, symbolizes that you really care about the user, all the way through,” said Deep Nishar, an early Google executive who leads user-interface design for the Web company LinkedIn. Nishar described the reverence some of the designers who work for him have forthe box that held their first iPhone. “Do you remember the packaging it came in?” he asked. “Some of them have kept it on their shelves. For the first time in history it was a spring-loaded box. It opened slowly. It continued to evoke that emotion and that feeling of anticipation, that you are about to see something beautiful, something great, something you had been reading about and hearing about, and had watched Steve talk about and demo. That’s the attention to detail, the feeling you want to