How Do Apple Designers Spend Their Time?

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Apple's designers spend 10% of their time on traditional industrial design and 90% of their time working with manufacturing to implement the ideas. Traditional design means coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, and brainstorming. The rest is figuring out how to build what they drew.

Jony Ive spends months away from his family in China to manufacture the designs. He wants no limitations and starts from the ideal product, then works backwards. He tells suppliers to imagine a bucket of money in his hand and to pull out as much as they want to make it happen.

In 2003, a SARS outbreak quarantined him at Foxconn. He lived in a dormitory there for three months. He and his team flew back and forth from Cupertino to China, sometimes gone for weeks and sometimes staying for months.