Could your replace "computer" with "car"?

Excerpt from "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products" by Leander Kahney

Chapter 5 - Jobs Returns to Apple

The Rising Tide

The iMac shifted the computer conversation entirely. Suddenly, thanks to the iMac, prosaic details like CPU speed became less important than good looks, ease of use or custom options.

Jony argued that it was the iMac that changed the equation. “The response to the iMac makes clear that there is a widespread conception that stuff is too complicated and divorced from human concerns,” said Jony. “All the attributes that are emotive have been ignored. It’s about time that changed.”

There were many who accused Apple of cynically designing the iMac to look different just to get attention. Bill Gates, for one, offered, “The one thing Apple’s providing now is leadership in colors. It won’t take long for us to catch up with that, I don’t think.”

Jony countered that the iMac wasn’t designed to look different, but the machine ended up being different as a natural consequence of the design process. “I think a lot of people see design primarily as a means to differentiate their product competitively,” he said. “I really detest that. That is just a corporate agenda, not a customer or people agenda. It is important to understand that our goal wasn’t just to differentiate our product, but to create products that people would love in the future. Differentiation was a consequence of our goal.”

Jobs had made the sudden independence of design possible at Apple. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs told Fortune shortly after retaking the reins at Apple. “But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.”