“I worked at Apple, and had to present to Steve every now and then,” Brett Bilbrey writes for Quora. “I presented new technology to him a number of times. Sometimes it was my ideas, and sometimes it was the work my team did.”
“Over the years, I (and members of my team) did dozens of presentations for Steve. My team was responsible for products like the Mac Mini, Apple TV, and creating many product prototypes,” Bilbrey writes. “Steve was wicked smart. I was always amazed at how sharp he was and how quickly he could focus on what was important. I don’t know ANYONE that even comes close to how good he was at being able to do that.”
“Most of my presentations were to Jony Ive. Jony is a wonderful person to work with. One day my daughter joined me for lunch at the Apple ‘Cafe Macs,’ Steve and Jony were sitting nearby,” Bilbrey writes. “My daughter was going to school for design illustration and asked if she could say hi to Jony. I took her over and expected just to say hi, and leave. But Jony was charming and chatted with my daughter for about 45 minutes. I was noticing that Steve was growing more and more impatient, but also since they were talking about what made a good design, I think Steve was being more tolerant. Finally, Steve suggested to Jony that they had to get going, and Jony wrapped up his discussion with my daughter. She was floating out of the cafe. Jony is a really nice and thoughtful person. And I really appreciated him taking that time to really talk with my daughter.”
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Brett Bilbrey invented the real-time, green-screen, high-definition chroma-key software, first seen in Apple’s Motion software.