Many people don't know this, but I was fortunate enough to work at Apple. During that time I learned many things I still apply today.
But if something truly left a mark on me, it was those years when thinking different was part of the company's DNA.
1985
Steve Jobs is expelled from Apple. The company he founded. The board kicks him out because he's "difficult," because his ideas are "too radical."
Eleven years later, in 1997, Apple is 90 days from bankruptcy and they ask him to come back.
Jobs returns to an unrecognizable company: a billion dollars in losses, a product line so confusing even employees don't understand it, customers who have stopped buying.
He does what everyone remembers: draws a 2×2 grid. Four products. Eliminates 70% of what Apple was doing.
But there's another decision almost no one mentions.
The ignored designer
A 31-year-old British designer has spent five years watching his ideas get ignored. He's about to quit. His name is Jonathan Ive.
Jobs rescues him and names him head of industrial design.
The first day they meet, Jobs asks him to create a computer with internet connection "literally in days."
Ive's response: "It's impossible."
May 1998
Ive presents the iMac.
The industry had been doing the same thing for years: beige boxes, separate towers, cables everywhere. The computer as a hostile object. Ive destroys it all.
Eliminates the floppy drive. Eliminates serial ports. Eliminates the tower. Eliminates fear.
Creates a translucent object, in a single vibrant color, with a handle on top.
Someone asks why the handle. It has no practical use. It weighs more. It makes the product more expensive.
Ive responded:
"People weren't comfortable with technology. If you're scared of something, you won't touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there's this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It's approachable. It's intuitive. It gives you permission to touch."
Jobs approves it immediately.
The result
The iMac was the best-selling computer of Christmas 1998.
Apple went from losing 1.04 billion to earning 309 million in one year.
What saved Apple wasn't just reducing products. It was eliminating everything that stood between a person and what they wanted to do.
OpenBCN isn't Apple, of course. But we do share that obsession with thinking different.
In 2022 the studio reopened after more than a year away.
New space, new philosophy.
There was an industry full of dogmas and beliefs. And we started eliminating them.
We eliminated extra charges. We eliminated hidden costs.
We included electrical consumption. We included cyclorama use. We included the monitor ready to connect and review with clients.
We included the camera cart. Everything ready to produce from minute one.
2026
You can always go one step further. We eliminated the continuous lighting rate. One single rate for everything, whether you work with flash or continuous light.
Without having to decide beforehand. Without adding costs afterward. One less decision. More mental space for your project.
And now what? Are we done?
At a photography studio in Barcelona like OpenBCN, the answer is: not yet.
If there's something that defines OpenBCN as a photography studio, it's the obsession with simplifying. Thinking different isn't a slogan.
Because a photography studio shouldn't be one more complication to carry out your project.
Cheers,
Marc
who also writes l'Atelier d'Idées by openbcn studios
