“Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs countered. “It should be more like a Porsche!” Jobs owned a Porsche 928 at the time. When Bill Atkinson was over one weekend, Jobs brought him outside to admire the car. “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes,” he told Atkinson. He also admired the design of the Mercedes. “Over the years, they’ve made the lines softer but the details starker,” he said one day as he walked around the parking lot. “That’s what we have to do with the Macintosh.”

“法拉利也不对，”乔布斯反驳，“应该更像保时捷！”这么说并不奇怪，乔布斯当时就拥有一辆保时捷928。（费里斯后来离开了苹果公司，到保时捷担任广告经理。）一个周末，比尔·阿特金森来了，乔布斯把他带到外面去欣赏那辆保时捷。他告诉阿特金森：“伟大的艺术品不必追随潮流，它们自身就可以引领潮流。”他还十分欣赏奔驰汽车的设计。“多年来，他们把汽车的线条做得更加柔和，但细节之处的用心依然清晰可见，”一次他在停车场周围散步时说，“这正是我们要在麦金塔电脑上实现的目标。”

Oyama drafted a preliminary design and had a plaster model made. The Mac team gathered around for the unveiling and expressed their thoughts. Hertzfeld called it “cute.” Others also seemed satisfied. Then Jobs let loose a blistering burst of criticism. “It’s way too boxy, it’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bevel.” With his new fluency in industrial design lingo, Jobs was referring to the angular or curved edge connecting the sides of the computer. But then he gave a resounding compliment. “It’s a start,” he said.

大山特里拟出了一个初步设计方案，并制作了一个石膏模型。Mac团队的成员们聚集到一起观看展示然后发表自己的看法。赫茨菲尔德大赞“可爱”，其他人似乎也很满意。但乔布斯却给出了猛烈的批评：“这造型太方正了，必须再多一些曲线美的感觉。第一个倒角的半径要再大一点儿，斜角的尺寸我也不大喜欢。”他把刚刚熟练掌握的工业设计术语用上了，其实指的就是电脑相邻两个面之间的弯曲过渡。但紧接着，乔布斯还是给出了一句响亮的称赞。他说：“这是一个开始。”

Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs’s previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design’s evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored. “By the fourth model, I could barely distinguish it from the third one,” said Hertzfeld, “but Steve was always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that I could barely perceive.”

每一个月左右，马诺克和大山都会将这样的流程重复一次，当然是根据乔布斯前一次的枇评进行了改进。每次最新的模型都会像变戏法一样现出庐山真面目，而前几次的模型则在它旁边一字排开。这不仅有助于大家对改进之处给予评价，也能防止乔布斯坚称自己的某条建议或意见被忽视了。“到第四个模型的时候，我已经很难看出它跟上一个之间的不同了。”赫茨菲尔德说，“但史蒂夫总是很挑剔也很肯定地说，他喜欢或者讨厌某个细节，而他说的东西是我几乎无法觉察到的。”

One weekend Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto and again spent time studying appliances, especially the Cuisinart. He came bounding into the Mac office that Monday, asked the design team to go buy one, and made a raft of new suggestions based on its lines, curves, and bevels.

一个周末，乔布斯去了帕洛奥图的梅西百货，又开始研究各种电器，特别是厨艺公司的产品。周一，他冲进办公室，让设计团队去买了一台厨艺公司的电器，然后根据它的轮廓、曲线和斜角提出了一系列新的建议。于是大山尝试了一种新的设计，但看上去就像是一台厨房电器，乔布斯觉得行不通。这让整个进程停顿了一个星期，最终，乔布斯还是批准了Mac的机箱设计。

Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look friendly. As a result, it evolved to resemble a human face. With the disk drive built in below the screen, the unit was taller and narrower than most computers, suggesting a head. The recess near the base evoked a gentle chin, and Jobs narrowed the strip of plastic at the top so that it avoided the Neanderthal forehead that made the Lisa subtly unattractive. The patent for the design of the Apple case was issued in the name of Steve Jobs as well as Manock and Oyama. “Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” Oyama later said. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”

乔布斯一直坚持电脑的外形必须友好。所以，它不断地改进，看上去就像一张人脸。磁盘驱动器安装在屏幕的下方，使得整台机器比大多数电脑都要狭长，使人联想到一张脸。靠近底座有一块凹进去的地方，就像是下巴；乔布斯还把顶端的塑料边框变得更细，这样麦金塔就不会像丽萨那样有个克鲁马努人（Cro-Magnon）般的额头，外形更加好看。这款苹果机箱的设计专利属于史蒂夫·乔布斯、杰里·马诺克和大山特里。“虽然这个设计不是史蒂夫亲手画出来的，但正是他的思想和灵感成就了这个设计。”大山后来说，“老实说，在史蒂夫告诉我们之前，我们根本不知道电脑的‘友好’指的是什么。”

Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what would appear on the screen. One day Bill Atkinson burst into Texaco Towers all excited. He had just come up with a brilliant algorithm that could draw circles and ovals onscreen quickly. The math for making circles usually required calculating square roots, which the 68000 microprocessor didn’t support. But Atkinson did a workaround based on the fact that the sum of a sequence of odd numbers produces a sequence of perfect squares (for example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3 + 5 = 9, etc.). Hertzfeld recalled that when Atkinson fired up his demo, everyone was impressed except Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good,” he said, “but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners?”

乔布斯对于屏幕上显示的内容也同样痴迷。有一天，比尔·阿特金森兴奋地冲进德士古塔。他刚刚想出了一个绝妙的算法，可以在屏幕上快速画出和椭圆。要在屏幕上画圆，通常需要计算平方根，而68000微处理器并不支持这个功能。但阿特金森想出了一个变通的方法，因为他发现，一组奇数序列相加，可以得到一组完全平方数序列（例如，1+3=4，1+3+5=9,等等）。赫茨菲尔德回忆说，在阿特金森演示的时候，所有人都震惊了，除了乔布斯。“圆和椭圆挺好的，”他说，“不过，要是能画出带圆角的矩形，你觉得怎么样？”

“I don’t think we really need it,” said Atkinson, who explained that it would be almost impossible to do. “I wanted to keep the graphics routines lean and limit them to the primitives that truly needed to be done,” he recalled.

“我认为我们用不着这个。”阿特金森说道，他解释说那几乎是不可能做到的。“我想把图形程序做得精简一点，能满足基本的需要就可以了。”他回忆道。

“Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!” Jobs said, jumping up and getting more intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out the whiteboard and the tabletop and other objects that were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!” He dragged Atkinson out for a walk, pointing out car windows and billboards and street signs. “Within three blocks, we found seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I started pointing them out everywhere until he was completely convinced.”

“圆角矩形到处都有啊！”乔布斯说着就跳了起来，显得更加激动，“你就看看这个房间里！”他指出白板、桌面和其他一些东西都是带圆角的矩形。“你再看看外面，更多，基本上哪儿都有！”他把阿特金森拖出去转了一圈，指着车窗、广告牌和街道指示牌给他看。“走了3条街，我们发现了17处这样的例子，”乔布斯说，“走到哪里我都能指出来，后来他完全信服了。”