Engineering Alumnus Plays Key Role at Apple

Tiffany Vu and Tony Blevins watched the NC State football team play Maryland in 2007. (Photo: submitted)
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When Apple product designers began thinking about a new kind of mobile phone, they started with the phones they had.

And they didn’t like what they saw.

"We all hated our phones," said Tony Blevins, a 1989 industrial engineering graduate of the College who is a core member of Apple’s iPhone team. "The genesis of the iPhone was that simple. We said 'We think we can do much better.'"

So they designed the iPhone, which hit stores last year to rapturous praise from critics and consumers. Within six months, the company had sold four million iPhones.

Blevins has played a key role in the iPhone’s success. As a senior executive at Apple, he is responsible for the operations of the iPod and iPhone business units. Duties include designing and managing supply-chain and product-cost relationships, as well as product fulfillment and delivery.

The job is one part technical, one part relationship-based, and all parts intense. Blevins draws on his engineering background to negotiate his long workweeks and extensive international travel schedule.

"What I learned at NC State more than anything else is how to develop and apply analytical thought patterns and processes to any particular problem," Blevins said. "And that’s what I rely on when I’m in really difficult situations." Blevins grew up in West Jefferson, N.C., a small town in the northwestern corner of the state. He excelled in school and received academic scholarships to attend NC State and Duke. He chose Raleigh over Durham.

"Growing up in North Carolina," he said, "my allegiances were always to NC State."

After graduation, he obtained a master’s degree in International Business from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and landed a job at IBM, where he had international assignments in both Europe and Asia and remained for 12 years.

He eventually moved west to take a job with Apple, and he’s been with the company during its best years. From 2000 to 2007, the company’s annual revenues grew from $6 billion to more than $24 billion.

On the company’s culture, Blevins said it might surprise some people to walk into an Apple meeting and see something that looks "more like a United Nations meeting." As many as 20 different nationalities are often represented, he said.

Those perspectives help keep Apple’s products fresh, and the company’s famously secretive culture keeps them under wraps until they’re released. Apple, Blevins said, chooses to let its products "do the talking."

"You’ll never find anyone from Apple describing in any detail whatsoever what we do or how we do it," he said. "It’s very core to the company."

Blevins has given back to his alma mater. Each March, he hosts students, faculty and staff with the NC State Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at his beachfront home in California. He also visits with the same group at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, sharing tips on leadership and business.

Some of those students might end up at Apple someday. Blevins takes some lucky new hires to MacWorld, the annual Apple expo in San Francisco that draws thousands of Apple aficionados to see the company’s latest offerings. This year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs used the event to unveil the super-thin MacBook Air. The year before, it was the iPhone.

It’s a rock-star environment," Blevins said. "You get the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from adoring fans and consumers.’" Blevins, of course, provided no comment on any Apple plans, but he promises that the products will be exciting.

The transition for Blevins from a very small North Carolina community perhaps best-known for its Christmas tree farms to the cutting-edge technology world of Silicon Valley was a somewhat unusual route. Blevins said the odyssey has been
enabled and fueled by his NC State education.

To that, he says, "Go Pack."

-degraff-

Play an audio message from Tony Blevins.

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