Jonathan Ive and his design team succeeded in turning the computer into virtually a sheet of handheld glass. But what makes it like a Porsche 911?

Last month’s passing of Ferdinand A. Porsche, the legendary designer of the Porsche 911 sports car, prompted accolades and information from the news media on the man, his life, and his contributions to automotive and industrial design.  The iconic design of the 911 single handedly elevated Porsche to the top of the automotive world, and the company has remained there ever since.

Only a few weeks prior to the renowned German designer’s death, the New iPad (iPad3) had come out with great fanfare and, for a few brief days last month the new tablet along with Ferdinand A. Porsche and the car he designed shared the media lens.  With that, plus a die-cast 1/24th-scale Porsche 911 GT3 and a New iPad sitting on the desk, it was easy to be struck by the close parallels between the iconic automobile and the new tablet — in concept, design, and execution. The affinity between the two now seems so apparent now.

Tablet Design News: Is The iPad the Porsche 911 of Tablets?

To fellow enthusiasts of other tablet brands and operating systems, please do not be offended or feel slighted by this analogy. Who’s not to say, for example, that Google’s New Tablet coming out  summer 2012 won’t be the ”Ford Mustang GT500 of Tablets” (a shout out to the memory of legendary car designer Carroll Shelby, who passed away last week) – or that the HP’s New Win 8 Tab coming out this fall won’t become known as “The Mercedes-Benz SL of Tablets?” We already know the HP TouchPad is the DeLorean of the form. The DeLorean was a damn good sports car, but it didn’t succeed for a number of reasons (inability to roll down its windows had been only a minor one). Also, might the Kindle Fire gen1 today be considered the “Ford Focus of Tablets”?

To seriously consider the parallels between the New Apple iPad and the Porsche 911, one must look to FA Porsche and Jonathan Ive, the individuals behind these two iconic designs.

Ferdinand A. Porsche: “No Gimmicks”

Ferdinand A. Porsche, born in 1935 in Stuttgart, Germany, grew up surrounded by cars. His grandfather, also named Ferdinand, designed the original VW Beetle.
F A Porsche – “Butzi” to family and business associates, spent his childhood in his grandfather’s development workshops and joined the company in 1958 as an apprentice.

In 1963, he finished a complete design model for a revolutionary new sports car. Today, after nearly 50 years, not a single surface has remained unaltered on the Porsche 911, yet every sports car enthusiast on the planet knows it at a glance. Regardless of the model year, for example, its fenders are higher than the hood and, viewed in profile, its roofline falls away to the rear. The teardrop side window line is unmistakable. While driving it, there is a distinct connection with the vehicle, and the road.

Jonathan Ive: “Get it Simple, Get it Right”

Jonathan Ive was born in 1967 in Chingford, Essex, and studied industrial design at Northumbria University. After graduating, Ive, “Jony” to his friends, co-founded the London design agency Tangerine, which Apple commissioned in 1992 to serve as consultant.

Ive soon left his own agency to join Apple fulltime. He gained his current position as Vice President of Industrial Design following Steve Jobs’ return to Apple in 1997. With Ive running design at Apple and Jobs finally back at the helm, Jobs could again make product design a primary focus at Apple. Results? The iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Three revolutionary/evolutionary products. Then came the iPad.

“Down To Simplicity”
Jonathan Ive and his design team succeeded in turning the computer into virtually a sheet of handheld glass. But what makes it like a Porsche 911?

This fascinating read by Dr. Ian Watson begins in Victorian times, with Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" and the writings on machine intelligence by Lady Ada Lovelace. It then leads us through Alan Turing's pioneering 1930s and 40s work on the theory of computation before we're off to Silicon Valley with Wozniak and Jobs, Gates and the rest. The Universal Maching finally takes us to the advent of ubiquitous computing and the impact artificial intelligence will have in the future, and the promise of quantum and molecular computing.

“I think the similarity is down to simplicity,” says Ian Watson, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland. Watson’s latest book, The Universal Machine – From the Dawn of Computing to Digital Consciousness, comes out this month (see sidebar). “The iPad and the 911 are both relatively minimal designs, free of unnecessary flourishes,” Watson says. “Of course, Steve Jobs was a big fan of European modernist design as exemplified by the Bauhaus and Porsche.”

Jony Ive is known to drive an Aston Martin coupe and a Bentley, which seems right, he being a young, smart Englishman. And wealthy.

Breaking Through Constraints
Cars and tablets are two different things, of course. Plus, the automobile had been around for more than seven decades by the time the Porsche 911 was introduced. When the new iPad came out in 2010, it represented essentially an entirely new form factor. Witnessing the attempts at building a tablet computer prior to the iPad was like watching those old grainy B&W films of guys testing their flying machines. We salute them, but their designs didn’t ultimately succeed.

The original Porsche 911 and the iPad gen 1 both seem to have broken through the technical and aesthetic constraints each faced at the time of their design. Rather than the designers overreaching, they seemed to have reached to take away.

Focusing On The Essentials
“Both the 911 and the iPad focus the user on the essentials of what each machine is designed for – one on driving and the other using a tablet,” Watson says. “You can’t carry furniture in a 911 and you wouldn’t build a website on an iPad.”

The third generation Porsche 911 came out almost a decade after the original model (it’s currently in its 7th generation). Its basic form has remained essentially the same after nearly half a century. Preserved is the essence of earlier 911s, but the engineering and design bar is continuously being raised. The iPad, now in its third generation, is only 25-months-old – but that probably calculates to about a decade in “Mobile Device Years.” Also with its third generation, Apple elected to just call it “The New iPad.”

The New iPad design is essentially the same as the original. Yes, with each generation certain features seem to be purposely throttled back simply for commercial reasons (such as Siri, with the latest generation tablet). Aside from those, however, might it be, as with the Porsche 911, Apple/Ive is allowing the original design to simply evolve organically?

“I think that follows from focusing on the essentials of what each machine is for,” Watson says. “If you strip away functionality to the core essentials, then at each new iteration you only add what is needed to significantly improve the user experience.”

Here’s another similarity. Porsche performance has never come cheaply, and neither has Apple’s.

On Spirituality and a License Plate

Steve Jobs had told Walter Isaacson for his authorized biography that: “If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony.” In turn, Ive told Isaacson:

Still on the subject of cars, there is the widely reported story of Steve Jobs refusing to put license plates on his automobile. Numerous theories have floated around as to why. Some have theorized it was for security reasons. Others have said it was arrogance.

Maybe Jobs simply knew that slapping license plates on a Mercedes-Benz SL55 would have detracted from the purity of form originally designed.

Joe Hopkins, editor & publisher, New Tablets News

Additional sources: London Daily Mail;  London Evening Standard;  LA Times

Question: Do you think the new iPad is like the Porsche 911?  Yes?  No?  Kinda?