Most of his information as properly credited is from: Paul Kunkel's AppleDesign: The work of the Apple Industrial Design Group, with photographs by Rick English, New York: Graphis, 1997.
If you can ever find a reasonably priced copy of the beautiful and highly collectable book, buy it. Not only is it fascinating reading, it has the most amazing pictures of prototype Macs that never were. Eventually I will scan some from my copy and post them. As wgoodf comments on, most people don't consider the design, yet as this book documents it was probably the most contentious and politically divisive aspect of running Apple in those days. In fact you can't take the design factor out of the hardware. Many of the innovations were designed from the outside-in, with the hardware being forced to adapt to the box that contained it.
Macclassic illustrates the design controversy quite clearly. I'm from the Manock school of Mac design and the post Snow-White design by the re-formed Apple Industrial Design group. I remember in 1987 when the Mac II ad SE Snow White designs came out, we were incredulous that anyone would design pointless grooves into a computer, a device that heated up and attracted dust. Within a month, it was clear that with normal use throughout the day, those grooves accumulated grime that could not be cleaned. To this day I still don't know how to really get all the dirt out of those channels (dishwasher?). Then, another part of Esslinger's design school which despised Manock's habit of highlighting slots and ports for no reason (but ironically did not apply for groves that served no purpose except to collect dust) created a floppy port on the Mac II that we routinely shoved two disks into by accident, jamming them, because you couldn't see the the one that was already inserted through the narrow featureless slot, particularly if you had two floppy ports and forgot which one you had inserted the disk into last. Needless to say I never wanted a Mac of the Snow White design. I think they were sterile and corporate, taking all of the friendliness out of them that the original Mac introduced and reeked of an arrogance that the German design school brought to Apple. I always said if Jobs had a reality distortion field Esslinger must have been the black hole of reality distortion, because even Steve Jobs got sucked up in it.
