Watch: Inside Apple’s super-secret design studio, and how each product is designed to compete with the otherMumbai, Dec 21(AZINS) On a recent episode of 60 Minutes, anchor Charlie Rose had the chance to meet with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, along with several other key members of his team as they spoke about various aspects of the company. Most interestingly, Rose had unprecedented face time with many areas of Apple that have until now been inaccessible to all but a handful of people intimately involved in the creation their genre-defining products.

At the outset when the mandatory question about Steve Jobs was asked, Tim Cook said, “I’ve never met anyone on the face of the earth like him before.” “Who had this incredible, uncanny ability to see around the corner; who had this relentless  driving force for perfection,” he continued. Echoing Job’s legendary quest for perfection, he reaffirmed Apple’s belief that with Apple's products, merely being good isn’t good enough.

When asked whether the DNA of Steve Jobs still exists in the company, Tim Cook insisted, “This is Steve’s company. This is still Steve’s company. His spirit will always be the DNA of this company.”

The meeting with Jony Ive--considered to be the most important person at Apple today--happened within the Apple Design Studio; a room marked by black cloth shrouding what lay under apparently huge work tables. Ive’s team consists of 22 designers, all of whom understandably operate as a very tightly-knit unit: over the course of the last decade-and-a-half, only two have departed. The ‘Designed in California’ tag that sits behind every Apple product? This is where it happens.

With the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, for example, 10 different sized models were created before selected the ones that worked best. The two that were chosen were those that ‘felt right’; not just in the tactile sense, but in the sense that they felt right emotionally--clearly a belief that courses through the design of every Apple product. In referencing the iPhones, Ive said that these products represented just the tip of the iceberg, that the different textures “considerably impact your perception of the product.”

In the case of the Apple Watch, from sketching the prototype to designing an accurate 3D mesh using CAD software to creating highly precise models of the products using CNC machines, the entire process is overlooked by Apple’s design team which includes testing materials and colors that would finally make it to the product.

While describing the design of Apple’s impossibly slim Macbook, Dan Riccio, Head of Hardware Engineering said “Every tenth of a millimeter in our products is sacred,” referring specifically to the newly designed battery that makes day-long usage in a laptop that slim.

Speaking of the camera used in Apple’s iPhones, Graham Townsend, Director of Camera Hardware, revealed the camera assembly comprises over 200 individual parts, all occupying an area roughly the size of a coat button. Alluding to the phone’s processing power, he revealed, “24 billion operations go into the taking of a single photo.”

Interestingly, when asked about whether Apple’s successive products ran the risk of cannibalizing the sales of their predecessors, Phil Schiller, Apple’s Head of Marketing, said, “It’s not a danger, it’s almost by design. You need for these products to fight for their space, their time with you.” “Each one’s job is to compete with the other ones.”