When the Reese Witherspoon character in Legally Blonde stood in line wearing her pink bunny ears to buy a laptop and study for the LSATs, an iBook was the obvious choice.

adds. “All of the suppliers thought we were nuts—always. But for some reason they just saw—they believed in—the bigger vision. I think part of LG was always about like, ‘How do we become better?’ ” The LG factory was in an industrial center called Gumi, an inland city 140 miles southeast of Seoul. The engineers didn’t find it a pleasant place to vi

was worried about pushing too hard, creating even greater risks of

The stakes were enormous. Steve Jobs knew that Apple couldn’t compete with PCs on price and distribution, so instead he’d developed a hardware strategy to cultivate desire through breathtaking design.

“Make it lickable,” Jobs had told Jony Ive. And Ive had delivered.

What Jobs didn’t know was that the bulk of Ive’s designs had never made it to production. There’d been no real audience for his team’s work. Apple was controlled by engineers who considered the design studio an irritant.

In the post–Windows 95 world, Apple was facing an existential crisis. It was quickly losing its raison d’être, but Amelio didn’t get the urgency of the moment. Apple was in such free fall that between 1995 and 1998, revenues nearly halved, from $11.1 billion to $5.9 billion, meaning Apple needed to cut $1.7 billion of costs per year just to tread w

Apple needed, he says, was differentiation.

PCs could rely on a global industry of standardized, interchangeable parts, and they didn’t have to spend a dime on software R&D—that was handled by Microsoft.