There is a famous Steve Jobs anecdote, used equally to praise him and deride him depending on who tells it, where he supposedly dropped an iPod prototype into a fishtank to prove a point to his engineers. Jobs wanted the iPod to be smaller, and the engineers had just told him that it was as small as it was going to get. So Jobs dropped the iPod into the fish tank and watched several bubbles escape and rise to the surface, then turned to his engineers and told than that if there was air inside, then the device could be made smaller. There is, of course, no proof that this ever actually happened, but it doesn’t contradict the extreme levels of perfection that he very publicly expected out of his employees.
One of the reasons for Apple’s continued success is the culture of perfectionism that Jobs carefully developed at the company, which continues on. Apple notoriously will spend months and even years longer than their competitors to get their products just right, and they tend to be extremely secretive about their product development cycle. For years the tech world has been filled with rumors about what was in the Apple test lab, and how the testing process works. Rumors that would never be acknowledged much less addressed by the company. And the press was rarely given details about the testing process, much less let inside of the actual testing lab and allowed to look around.
But it seems that Apple’s current CEO Tim Cook may be loosening up that tight grip on their development process a little bit, at least when it comes to their testing lab. They recently allowed Backchannel access to the top secret Input Design Lab where all of their new keyboard, trackpad, and mouse prototypes are tested and perfected. What they saw inside was a collection of precision machinery that any makespace would kill to have access to. Among the variety of sensors, robots designed to click and tap hardware and customized testing machinery they also found a bank of 3D printers that it turns out play an important role in the entire process.
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[Source/Images: Backchannel]