Behind the Scenes of Today’s Apple Announcements ⇥ bloomberg.com

Apple was uncharacteristically open, relatively speaking, about today’s announcements. They gave an early peek at 3D Touch to Bloomberg reporter Josh Tyrangiel:

Everyone knows Apple is a design-first company, but the degree to which this is true has, if anything, been underappreciated. The relationship between the designers and the nondesign executives is a little like the relationship between American Pharoah and his trainer. One side is nominally in charge, but it’s conspicuously in service to the other. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, says that at most software companies the designers decide what they want and the engineers respond with what’s easy to build. “Every single feature becomes this unholy compromise,” says Federighi, who began his career at Apple and spent a decade at Ariba, a maker of financial management software, before returning in 2009. “With [3D Touch] it was only at the moment where we finally got a design experience that’s like, ‘Yes! This is what we want!’ that we [asked] how hard it’s going to be to make.”

Meanwhile, former Apple UI prototyper May-Li Khoe explained a little more on Twitter:

One of our first experiments for 3D touch was made with a stop animation of play-doh squishing. play < – > design.

And, finally, former Apple prototyper Linda Dong, also on Twitter, is very proud of the work she and her former team did on the Apple Pencil, which works with the iPad Pro:

Apple Pencil = the best stylus hands down. It was better than other styluses as a prototype.