Apple’s marketing, and no doubt, even Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, may lead you to believe that the iPad was made by two guys mulling over a CNC machine in a secret lab. But in reality, today’s complex products can’t be built by solitary Thomas Edisonian personalities (and indeed, even Edison had a sizable lab filled with talent, which has since grown into the mega-research-corp GE).
This Apple recruiting video shows the company in a light the public generally doesn’t get to see, totally nerding out on topics like battery chemistry and magnetic simulation software, sure, but also building products through small teams cross-pollinating across a huge company. In a sense, it’s a collaborative effort that’s a whole lot more impressive than two guys designing the iPad in a secret lab–a borderline impossible task that we’ve seen companies like Sony fail at, crushing innovation somewhere under the weight of their own incredible talent pool.
