CHILDHOOD

　　Abandoned and Chosen

　　The Adoption

　　When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a

　　wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship

　　was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two

　　weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing

　　resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his looks that got him a date with

　　Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact

　　that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned

　　to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to

　　Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that

　　lasted until death parted them more than forty years later.

　　Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin.

　　Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up

　　with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping

　　out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a

　　mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he

　　didn’t know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and

　　spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as

　　a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found

　　himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman.

　　Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the

　　Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when

　　she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had

　　been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met

　　Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life.

　　Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement

　　that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and

　　lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and

　　lived with Paul’s parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got

　　a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with

　　old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling

　　them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman.

　　Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to

　　move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the

　　Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance

　　company as a “repo man,” picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid

　　their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of

　　the cars, making a decent enough living in the process.

　　There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but

　　Clara had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was

　　implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to

　　have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a

　　child.

　　Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German

　　heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green

　　Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various

　　other businesses, including real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict,

　　especially regarding his daughter’s relationships, and he had strongly

　　disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no

　　surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate

　　student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah “John”

　　Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria.

　　Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His

　　father owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings

　　in Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat

　　in the region. His mother, he later said, was a “traditional Muslim woman” who

　　was a “conservative, obedient housewife.” Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis

　　put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school,

　　even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American

　　University in Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a

　　doctoral degree in political science.

　　In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two

　　months in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When

　　they returned to Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both

　　twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the

　　time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was

　　abortion an easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early 1955, Joanne

　　traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into the care of a kindly doctor

　　who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed

　　adoptions.

　　Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So

　　the doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But

　　when a boy was born—on February 24, 1955—the designated couple decided that they

　　wanted a girl and backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a

　　lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his

　　salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named

　　their new baby Steven Paul Jobs.

　　When Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not

　　even graduated from high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. The

　　standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled into the Jobs household.

　　Eventually Joanne relented, with the stipulation that the couple promise—indeed

　　sign a pledge—to fund a savings account to pay for the boy’s college education.

　　There was another reason that Joanne was balky about signing the adoption

　　papers. Her father was about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon

　　after. She held out hope, she would later tell family members, sometimes tearing

　　up at the memory, that once they were married, she could get their baby boy

　　back.

　　Arthur Schieble died in August 1955, after the adoption was finalized. Just

　　after Christmas that year, Joanne and Abdulfattah were married in St. Philip the

　　Apostle Catholic Church in Green Bay. He got his PhD in international politics

　　the next year, and then they had another child, a girl named Mona. After she and

　　Jandali divorced in 1962, Joanne embarked on a dreamy and peripatetic life that

　　her daughter, who grew up to become the acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would

　　capture in her book Anywhere but Here. Because Steve’s adoption had been closed,

　　it would be twenty years before they would all find each other.

　　Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. “My parents were very

　　open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the

　　lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who

　　lived across the street. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?”

　　the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according to Jobs. “I

　　remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to

　　understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They

　　said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and

　　repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that

　　sentence.”

　　Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how

　　he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was

　　given up at birth left some scars. “I think his desire for complete control of

　　whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was

　　abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to

　　control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.”

　　Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect.

　　“Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,” he

　　said. “It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and

　　that came from being in a different world than he was born into.”

　　Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he

　　abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually

　　took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said

　　that being put up for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass,” and it helps to

　　explain some of his behavior. “He who is abandoned is an abandoner,” she said.

　　Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the

　　few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. “The key question about Steve

　　is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and

　　harmful to some people,” he said. “That goes back to being abandoned at birth.

　　The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.”

　　Jobs dismissed this. “There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked

　　very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some

　　such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,” he insisted. “Knowing I was adopted may

　　have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always

　　felt special. My parents made me feel special.” He would later bristle whenever

　　anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents or implied that

　　they were not his “real” parents. “They were my parents 1,000%,” he said. When

　　speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: “They

　　were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm

　　bank thing, nothing more.”

　　Silicon Valley

　　The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many

　　ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl

　　they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the

　　suburbs. The finance company where Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had

　　transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he could not afford to live

　　there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less expensive town

　　just to the south.

　　There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. “Steve, this is

　　your workbench now,” he said as he marked off a section of the table in their

　　garage. Jobs remembered being impressed by his father’s focus on craftsmanship.

　　“I thought my dad’s sense of design was pretty good,” he said, “because he knew

　　how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built

　　our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.”

　　Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house

　　in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels

　　and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important,

　　his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though

　　they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of

　　the parts you couldn’t see.”

　　His father continued to refurbish and resell used cars, and he festooned the

　　garage with pictures of his favorites. He would point out the detailing of the

　　design to his son: the lines, the vents, the chrome, the trim of the seats.

　　After work each day, he would change into his dungarees and retreat to the

　　garage, often with Steve tagging along. “I figured I could get him nailed down

　　with a little mechanical ability, but he really wasn’t interested in getting his

　　hands dirty,” Paul later recalled. “He never really cared too much about

　　mechanical things.”

　　“I wasn’t that into fixing cars,” Jobs admitted. “But I was eager to hang out

　　with my dad.” Even as he was growing more aware that he had been adopted, he was

　　becoming more attached to his father. One day when he was about eight, he

　　discovered a photograph of his father from his time in the Coast Guard. “He’s in

　　the engine room, and he’s got his shirt off and looks like James Dean. It was

　　one of those Oh wow moments for a kid. Wow, oooh, my parents were actually once

　　very young and really good-looking.”

　　Through cars, his father gave Steve his first exposure to electronics. “My dad

　　did not have a deep understanding of electronics, but he’d encountered it a lot

　　in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of

　　electronics, and I got very interested in that.” Even more interesting were the

　　trips to scavenge for parts. “Every weekend, there’d be a junkyard trip. We’d be

　　looking for a generator, a carburetor, all sorts of components.” He remembered

　　watching his father negotiate at the counter. “He was a good bargainer, because

　　he knew better than the guys at the counter what the parts should cost.” This

　　helped fulfill the pledge his parents made when he was adopted. “My college fund

　　came from my dad paying $50 for a Ford Falcon or some other beat-up car that

　　didn’t run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it for $250—and not

　　telling the IRS.”

　　The Jobses’ house and the others in their neighborhood were built by the real

　　estate developer Joseph Eichler, whose company spawned more than eleven thousand

　　homes in various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by

　　Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American “everyman,”

　　Eichler built inexpensive houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls,

　　open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors, and

　　lots of sliding glass doors. “Eichler did a great thing,” Jobs said on one of

　　our walks around the neighborhood. “His houses were smart and cheap and good.

　　They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people. They had

　　awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors. You put carpet on

　　them, and we had nice toasty floors when we were kids.”

　　Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for

　　making nicely designed products for the mass market. “I love it when you can

　　bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost

　　much,” he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. “It was the

　　original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s

　　what we did with the iPod.”

　　Across the street from the Jobs family lived a man who had become successful as

　　a real estate agent. “He wasn’t that bright,” Jobs recalled, “but he seemed to

　　be making a fortune. So my dad thought, ‘I can do that.’ He worked so hard, I

　　remember. He took these night classes, passed the license test, and got into

　　real estate. Then the bottom fell out of the market.” As a result, the family

　　found itself financially strapped for a year or so while Steve was in elementary

　　school. His mother took a job as a bookkeeper for Varian Associates, a company

　　that made scientific instruments, and they took out a second mortgage. One day

　　his fourth-grade teacher asked him, “What is it you don’t understand about the

　　universe?” Jobs replied, “I don’t understand why all of a sudden my dad is so

　　broke.” He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick

　　style that may have made him a better salesman. “You had to suck up to people to

　　sell real estate, and he wasn’t good at that and it wasn’t in his nature. I

　　admired him for that.” Paul Jobs went back to being a mechanic.

　　His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son later praised more than

　　emulated. He was also resolute. Jobs described one example:

　　Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a single guy,

　　beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my

　　parents worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours.

　　He would get drunk and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night,

　　scared out of her wits, and he came over drunk, and my dad stood him

　　down—saying “She’s here, but you’re not coming in.” He stood right there. We

　　like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of

　　those engineers who had messed-up lives.

　　What made the neighborhood different from the thousands of other spindly-tree

　　subdivisions across America was that even the ne’er-do-wells tended to be

　　engineers. “When we moved here, there were apricot and plum orchards on all of

　　these corners,” Jobs recalled. “But it was beginning to boom because of military

　　investment.” He soaked up the history of the valley and developed a yearning to

　　play his own role. Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being asked by

　　Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane cameras to see how real the Soviet

　　threat was. The film was dropped in canisters and returned to the NASA Ames

　　Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from where Jobs lived. “The first computer

　　terminal I ever saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,” he said. “I

　　fell totally in love with it.”

　　Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during the 1950s. The Lockheed

　　Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles,

　　was founded in 1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time Jobs moved to the area

　　four years later, it employed twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away,

　　Westinghouse built facilities that produced tubes and electrical transformers

　　for the missile systems. “You had all these military companies on the cutting

　　edge,” he recalled. “It was mysterious and high-tech and made living here very

　　exciting.”

　　In the wake of the defense industries there arose a booming economy based on

　　technology. Its roots stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his new

　　wife moved into a house in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill

　　Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house had a garage—an appendage that would prove

　　both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they

　　had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was

　　a fast-growing company making technical instruments.

　　Fortunately there was a place nearby for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their

　　garages. In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the

　　tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman,

　　created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private

　　companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students. Its first tenant

　　was Varian Associates, where Clara Jobs worked. “Terman came up with this great

　　idea that did more than anything to cause the tech industry to grow up here,”

　　Jobs said. By the time Jobs was ten, HP had nine thousand employees and was the

　　blue-chip company where every engineer seeking financial stability wanted to

　　work.

　　The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the

　　semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the

　　transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956,

　　started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more

　　expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But Shockley became

　　increasingly erratic and abandoned his silicon transistor project, which led

　　eight of his engineers—most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore—to break away

　　to form Fairchild Semiconductor. That company grew to twelve thousand employees,

　　but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle to become CEO. He

　　took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called Integrated Electronics

　　Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated to Intel. Their third employee

　　was Andrew Grove, who later would grow the company by shifting its focus from

　　memory chips to microprocessors. Within a few years there would be more than

　　fifty companies in the area making semiconductors.

　　The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon

　　famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of

　　integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on

　　a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that

　　could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able

　　to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which

　　was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day,

　　and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of

　　young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost

　　projections for their forward-leaning products.

　　The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for

　　the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled

　　“Silicon Valley USA.” The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from

　　South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial

　　backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once connected California’s

　　twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies

　　and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital investment in the

　　United States each year. “Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the

　　place,” Jobs said. “That made me want to be a part of it.”

　　Like most kids, he became infused with the passions of the grown-ups around him.

　　“Most of the dads in the neighborhood did really neat stuff, like photovoltaics

　　and batteries and radar,” Jobs recalled. “I grew up in awe of that stuff and

　　asking people about it.” The most important of these neighbors, Larry Lang,

　　lived seven doors away. “He was my model of what an HP engineer was supposed to

　　be: a big ham radio operator, hard-core electronics guy,” Jobs recalled. “He

　　would bring me stuff to play with.” As we walked up to Lang’s old house, Jobs

　　pointed to the driveway. “He took a carbon microphone and a battery and a

　　speaker, and he put it on this driveway. He had me talk into the carbon mike and

　　it amplified out of the speaker.” Jobs had been taught by his father that

　　microphones always required an electronic amplifier. “So I raced home, and I

　　told my dad that he was wrong.”

　　“No, it needs an amplifier,” his father assured him. When Steve protested

　　otherwise, his father said he was crazy. “It can’t work without an amplifier.

　　There’s some trick.”

　　“I kept saying no to my dad, telling him he had to see it, and finally he

　　actually walked down with me and saw it. And he said, ‘Well I’ll be a bat out of

　　hell.’”

　　Jobs recalled the incident vividly because it was his first realization that his

　　father did not know everything. Then a more disconcerting discovery began to

　　dawn on him: He was smarter than his parents. He had always admired his father’s

　　competence and savvy. “He was not an educated man, but I had always thought he

　　was pretty damn smart. He didn’t read much, but he could do a lot. Almost

　　everything mechanical, he could figure it out.” Yet the carbon microphone

　　incident, Jobs said, began a jarring process of realizing that he was in fact

　　more clever and quick than his parents. “It was a very big moment that’s burned

　　into my mind. When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt

　　tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never forget that moment.” This

　　discovery, he later told friends, along with the fact that he was adopted, made

　　him feel apart—detached and separate—from both his family and the world.

　　Another layer of awareness occurred soon after. Not only did he discover that he

　　was brighter than his parents, but he discovered that they knew this. Paul and

　　Clara Jobs were loving parents, and they were willing to adapt their lives to

　　suit a son who was very smart—and also willful. They would go to great lengths

　　to accommodate him. And soon Steve discovered this fact as well. “Both my

　　parents got me. They felt a lot of responsibility once they sensed that I was

　　special. They found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in better

　　schools. They were willing to defer to my needs.”

　　So he grew up not only with a sense of having once been abandoned, but also with

　　a sense that he was special. In his own mind, that was more important in the

　　formation of his personality.

　　School

　　Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to

　　read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. “I was kind of

　　bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble.” It

　　also soon became clear that Jobs, by both nature and nurture, was not disposed

　　to accept authority. “I encountered authority of a different kind than I had

　　ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me.

　　They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

　　His school, Monta Loma Elementary, was a series of low-slung 1950s buildings

　　four blocks from his house. He countered his boredom by playing pranks. “I had a

　　good friend named Rick Ferrentino, and we’d get into all sorts of trouble,” he

　　recalled. “Like we made little posters announcing ‘Bring Your Pet to School

　　Day.’ It was crazy, with dogs chasing cats all over, and the teachers were

　　beside themselves.” Another time they convinced some kids to tell them the

　　combination numbers for their bike locks. “Then we went outside and switched all

　　of the locks, and nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late that

　　night to straighten things out.” When he was in third grade, the pranks became a

　　bit more dangerous. “One time we set off an explosive under the chair of our

　　teacher, Mrs. Thurman. We gave her a nervous twitch.”

　　Not surprisingly, he was sent home two or three times before he finished third

　　grade. By then, however, his father had begun to treat him as special, and in

　　his calm but firm manner he made it clear that he expected the school to do the

　　same. “Look, it’s not his fault,” Paul Jobs told the teachers, his son recalled.

　　“If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault.” His parents never punished

　　him for his transgressions at school. “My father’s father was an alcoholic and

　　whipped him with a belt, but I’m not sure if I ever got spanked.” Both of his

　　parents, he added, “knew the school was at fault for trying to make me memorize

　　stupid stuff rather than stimulating me.” He was already starting to show the

　　admixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and detachment, that

　　would mark him for the rest of his life.

　　When it came time for him to go into fourth grade, the school decided it was

　　best to put Jobs and Ferrentino into separate classes. The teacher for the

　　advanced class was a spunky woman named Imogene Hill, known as “Teddy,” and she

　　became, Jobs said, “one of the saints of my life.” After watching him for a

　　couple of weeks, she figured that the best way to handle him was to bribe him.

　　“After school one day, she gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and

　　she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this.’ And I thought, ‘Are you

　　nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these giant lollipops that seemed as big

　　as the world. And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it mostly

　　right, I will give you this and five dollars.’ And I handed it back within two

　　days.” After a few months, he no longer required the bribes. “I just wanted to

　　learn and to please her.”

　　She reciprocated by getting him a hobby kit for grinding a lens and making a

　　camera. “I learned more from her than any other teacher, and if it hadn’t been

　　for her I’m sure I would have gone to jail.” It reinforced, once again, the idea

　　that he was special. “In my class, it was just me she cared about. She saw

　　something in me.”

　　It was not merely intelligence that she saw. Years later she liked to show off a

　　picture of that year’s class on Hawaii Day. Jobs had shown up without the

　　suggested Hawaiian shirt, but in the picture he is front and center wearing one.

　　He had, literally, been able to talk the shirt off another kid’s back.

　　Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill had Jobs tested. “I scored at the high

　　school sophomore level,” he recalled. Now that it was clear, not only to himself

　　and his parents but also to his teachers, that he was intellectually special,

　　the school made the remarkable proposal that he skip two grades and go right

　　into seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep him challenged and stimulated.

　　His parents decided, more sensibly, to have him skip only one grade.

　　The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself

　　with kids a year older. Worse yet, the sixth grade was in a different school,

　　Crittenden Middle. It was only eight blocks from Monta Loma Elementary, but in

　　many ways it was a world apart, located in a neighborhood filled with ethnic

　　gangs. “Fights were a daily occurrence; as were shakedowns in bathrooms,” wrote

　　the Silicon Valley journalist Michael S. Malone. “Knives were regularly brought

　　to school as a show of macho.” Around the time that Jobs arrived, a group of

　　students were jailed for a gang rape, and the bus of a neighboring school was

　　destroyed after its team beat Crittenden’s in a wrestling match.

　　Jobs was often bullied, and in the middle of seventh grade he gave his parents

　　an ultimatum. “I insisted they put me in a different school,” he recalled.

　　Financially this was a tough demand. His parents were barely making ends meet,

　　but by this point there was little doubt that they would eventually bend to his

　　will. “When they resisted, I told them I would just quit going to school if I

　　had to go back to Crittenden. So they researched where the best schools were and

　　scraped together every dime and bought a house for $21,000 in a nicer district.”

　　The move was only three miles to the south, to a former apricot orchard in Los

　　Altos that had been turned into a subdivision of cookie-cutter tract homes.

　　Their house, at 2066 Crist Drive, was one story with three bedrooms and an

　　all-important attached garage with a roll-down door facing the street. There

　　Paul Jobs could tinker with cars and his son with electronics.

　　Its other significant attribute was that it was just over the line inside what

　　was then the Cupertino-Sunnyvale School District, one of the safest and best in

　　the valley. “When I moved here, these corners were still orchards,” Jobs pointed

　　out as we walked in front of his old house. “The guy who lived right there

　　taught me how to be a good organic gardener and to compost. He grew everything

　　to perfection. I never had better food in my life. That’s when I began to

　　appreciate organic fruits and vegetables.”

　　Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him

　　to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most

　　Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine

　　published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs

　　took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my

　　finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”

　　The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”

　　Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this

　　and what’s going to happen to those children?”

　　“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”

　　Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such

　　a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying

　　and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his

　　spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized

　　spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. “The juice goes out of

　　Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus

　　or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions

　　are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and

　　sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”

　　Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara

　　that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he

　　crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising. His son was

　　fascinated by the need for perfection. “Lasers require precision alignment,”

　　Jobs said. “The really sophisticated ones, for airborne applications or medical,

　　had very precise features. They would tell my dad something like, ‘This is what

　　we want, and we want it out of one piece of metal so that the coefficients of

　　expansion are all the same.’ And he had to figure out how to do it.” Most pieces

　　had to be made from scratch, which meant that Paul had to create custom tools

　　and dies. His son was impressed, but he rarely went to the machine shop. “It

　　would have been fun if he had gotten to teach me how to use a mill and lathe.

　　But unfortunately I never went, because I was more interested in electronics.”

　　One summer Paul took Steve to Wisconsin to visit the family’s dairy farm. Rural

　　life did not appeal to Steve, but one image stuck with him. He saw a calf being

　　born, and he was amazed when the tiny animal struggled up within minutes and

　　began to walk. “It was not something she had learned, but it was instead

　　hardwired into her,” he recalled. “A human baby couldn’t do that. I found it

　　remarkable, even though no one else did.” He put it in hardware-software terms:

　　“It was as if something in the animal’s body and in its brain had been

　　engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.”

　　In ninth grade Jobs went to Homestead High, which had a sprawling campus of

　　two-story cinderblock buildings painted pink that served two thousand students.

　　“It was designed by a famous prison architect,” Jobs recalled. “They wanted to

　　make it indestructible.” He had developed a love of walking, and he walked the

　　fifteen blocks to school by himself each day.

　　He had few friends his own age, but he got to know some seniors who were

　　immersed in the counterculture of the late 1960s. It was a time when the geek

　　and hippie worlds were beginning to show some overlap. “My friends were the

　　really smart kids,” he said. “I was interested in math and science and

　　electronics. They were too, and also into LSD and the whole counterculture

　　trip.”

　　His pranks by then typically involved electronics. At one point he wired his

　　house with speakers. But since speakers can also be used as microphones, he

　　built a control room in his closet, where he could listen in on what was

　　happening in other rooms. One night, when he had his headphones on and was

　　listening in on his parents’ bedroom, his father caught him and angrily demanded

　　that he dismantle the system. He spent many evenings visiting the garage of

　　Larry Lang, the engineer who lived down the street from his old house. Lang

　　eventually gave Jobs the carbon microphone that had fascinated him, and he

　　turned him on to Heathkits, those assemble-it-yourself kits for making ham

　　radios and other electronic gear that were beloved by the soldering set back

　　then. “Heathkits came with all the boards and parts color-coded, but the manual

　　also explained the theory of how it operated,” Jobs recalled. “It made you

　　realize you could build and understand anything. Once you built a couple of

　　radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say, ‘I can build that as well,’

　　even if you didn’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and

　　the Heathkits made me believe I could build anything.”

　　Lang also got him into the Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club, a group of fifteen or

　　so students who met in the company cafeteria on Tuesday nights. “They would get

　　an engineer from one of the labs to come and talk about what he was working on,”

　　Jobs recalled. “My dad would drive me there. I was in heaven. HP was a pioneer

　　of light-emitting diodes. So we talked about what to do with them.” Because his

　　father now worked for a laser company, that topic particularly interested him.

　　One night he cornered one of HP’s laser engineers after a talk and got a tour of

　　the holography lab. But the most lasting impression came from seeing the small

　　computers the company was developing. “I saw my first desktop computer there. It

　　was called the 9100A, and it was a glorified calculator but also really the

　　first desktop computer. It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a beauty of

　　a thing. I fell in love with it.”

　　The kids in the Explorers Club were encouraged to do projects, and Jobs decided

　　to build a frequency counter, which measures the number of pulses per second in

　　an electronic signal. He needed some parts that HP made, so he picked up the

　　phone and called the CEO. “Back then, people didn’t have unlisted numbers. So I

　　looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto and called him at home. And he answered and

　　chatted with me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a

　　job in the plant where they made frequency counters.” Jobs worked there the

　　summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. “My dad would drive me in the

　　morning and pick me up in the evening.”

　　His work mainly consisted of “just putting nuts and bolts on things” on an

　　assembly line. There was some resentment among his fellow line workers toward

　　the pushy kid who had talked his way in by calling the CEO. “I remember telling

　　one of the supervisors, ‘I love this stuff, I love this stuff,’ and then I asked

　　him what he liked to do best. And he said, ‘To fuck, to fuck.’” Jobs had an

　　easier time ingratiating himself with the engineers who worked one floor above.

　　“They served doughnuts and coffee every morning at ten. So I’d go upstairs and

　　hang out with them.”

　　Jobs liked to work. He also had a newspaper route—his father would drive him

　　when it was raining—and during his sophomore year spent weekends and the summer

　　as a stock clerk at a cavernous electronics store, Haltek. It was to electronics

　　what his father’s junkyards were to auto parts: a scavenger’s paradise sprawling

　　over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components

　　crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an

　　outdoor yard. “Out in the back, near the bay, they had a fenced-in area with

　　things like Polaris submarine interiors that had been ripped and sold for

　　salvage,” he recalled. “All the controls and buttons were right there. The

　　colors were military greens and grays, but they had these switches and bulb

　　covers of amber and red. There were these big old lever switches that, when you

　　flipped them, it was awesome, like you were blowing up Chicago.”

　　At the wooden counters up front, laden with thick catalogues in tattered

　　binders, people would haggle for switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes

　　the latest memory chips. His father used to do that for auto parts, and he

　　succeeded because he knew the value of each better than the clerks. Jobs

　　followed suit. He developed a knowledge of electronic parts that was honed by

　　his love of negotiating and turning a profit. He would go to electronic flea

　　markets, such as the San Jose swap meet, haggle for a used circuit board that

　　contained some valuable chips or components, and then sell those to his manager

　　at Haltek.

　　Jobs was able to get his first car, with his father’s help, when he was fifteen.

　　It was a two-tone Nash Metropolitan that his father had fitted out with an MG

　　engine. Jobs didn’t really like it, but he did not want to tell his father that,

　　or miss out on the chance to have his own car. “In retrospect, a Nash

　　Metropolitan might seem like the most wickedly cool car,” he later said. “But at

　　the time it was the most uncool car in the world. Still, it was a car, so that

　　was great.” Within a year he had saved up enough from his various jobs that he

　　could trade up to a red Fiat 850 coupe with an Abarth engine. “My dad helped me

　　buy and inspect it. The satisfaction of getting paid and saving up for

　　something, that was very exciting.”

　　That same summer, between his sophomore and junior years at Homestead, Jobs

　　began smoking marijuana. “I got stoned for the first time that summer. I was

　　fifteen, and then began using pot regularly.” At one point his father found some

　　dope in his son’s Fiat. “What’s this?” he asked. Jobs coolly replied, “That’s

　　marijuana.” It was one of the few times in his life that he faced his father’s

　　anger. “That was the only real fight I ever got in with my dad,” he said. But

　　his father again bent to his will. “He wanted me to promise that I’d never use

　　pot again, but I wouldn’t promise.” In fact by his senior year he was also

　　dabbling in LSD and hash as well as exploring the mind-bending effects of sleep

　　deprivation. “I was starting to get stoned a bit more. We would also drop acid

　　occasionally, usually in fields or in cars.”

　　He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and

　　found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were

　　geekily immersed in electronics and those who were into literature and creative

　　endeavors. “I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more

　　outside of just science and technology—Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear.”

　　His other favorites included Moby-Dick and the poems of Dylan Thomas. I asked

　　him why he related to King Lear and Captain Ahab, two of the most willful and

　　driven characters in literature, but he didn’t respond to the connection I was

　　making, so I let it drop. “When I was a senior I had this phenomenal AP English

　　class. The teacher was this guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway. He took a

　　bunch of us snowshoeing in Yosemite.”

　　One course that Jobs took would become part of Silicon Valley lore: the

　　electronics class taught by John McCollum, a former Navy pilot who had a

　　showman’s flair for exciting his students with such tricks as firing up a Tesla

　　coil. His little stockroom, to which he would lend the key to pet students, was

　　crammed with transistors and other components he had scored.

　　McCollum’s classroom was in a shed-like building on the edge of the campus, next

　　to the parking lot. “This is where it was,” Jobs recalled as he peered in the

　　window, “and here, next door, is where the auto shop class used to be.” The

　　juxtaposition highlighted the shift from the interests of his father’s

　　generation. “Mr. McCollum felt that electronics class was the new auto shop.”

　　McCollum believed in military discipline and respect for authority. Jobs didn’t.

　　His aversion to authority was something he no longer tried to hide, and he

　　affected an attitude that combined wiry and weird intensity with aloof

　　rebelliousness. McCollum later said, “He was usually off in a corner doing

　　something on his own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to do with

　　either me or the rest of the class.” He never trusted Jobs with a key to the

　　stockroom. One day Jobs needed a part that was not available, so he made a

　　collect call to the manufacturer, Burroughs in Detroit, and said he was

　　designing a new product and wanted to test out the part. It arrived by air

　　freight a few days later. When McCollum asked how he had gotten it, Jobs

　　described—with defiant pride—the collect call and the tale he had told. “I was

　　furious,” McCollum said. “That was not the way I wanted my students to behave.”

　　Jobs’s response was, “I don’t have the money for the phone call. They’ve got

　　plenty of money.”

　　Jobs took McCollum’s class for only one year, rather than the three that it was

　　offered. For one of his projects, he made a device with a photocell that would

　　switch on a circuit when exposed to light, something any high school science

　　student could have done. He was far more interested in playing with lasers,

　　something he learned from his father. With a few friends, he created light shows

　　for parties by bouncing lasers off mirrors that were attached to the speakers of

　　his stereo system.UnknownODD COUPLE

　　The Two Steves

　　Jobs and Wozniak in the garage, 1976

　　Woz

　　While a student in McCollum’s class, Jobs became friends with a graduate who was

　　the teacher’s all-time favorite and a school legend for his wizardry in the

　　class. Stephen Wozniak, whose younger brother had been on a swim team with Jobs,

　　was almost five years older than Jobs and far more knowledgeable about

　　electronics. But emotionally and socially he was still a high school geek.

　　Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father’s knee. But their lessons were

　　different. Paul Jobs was a high school dropout who, when fixing up cars, knew

　　how to turn a tidy profit by striking the right deal on parts. Francis Wozniak,

　　known as Jerry, was a brilliant engineering graduate from Cal Tech, where he had

　　quarterbacked the football team, who became a rocket scientist at Lockheed. He

　　exalted engineering and looked down on those in business, marketing, and sales.

　　“I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance

　　you could reach in the world,” Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It takes society

　　to a new level.”

　　One of Steve Wozniak’s first memories was going to his father’s workplace on a

　　weekend and being shown electronic parts, with his dad “putting them on a table

　　with me so I got to play with them.” He watched with fascination as his father

　　tried to get a waveform line on a video screen to stay flat so he could show

　　that one of his circuit designs was working properly. “I could see that whatever

　　my dad was doing, it was important and good.” Woz, as he was known even then,

　　would ask about the resistors and transistors lying around the house, and his

　　father would pull out a blackboard to illustrate what they did. “He would

　　explain what a resistor was by going all the way back to atoms and electrons. He

　　explained how resistors worked when I was in second grade, not by equations but

　　by having me picture it.”

　　Woz’s father taught him something else that became ingrained in his childlike,

　　socially awkward personality: Never lie. “My dad believed in honesty. Extreme

　　honesty. That’s the biggest thing he taught me. I never lie, even to this day.”

　　(The only partial exception was in the service of a good practical joke.) In

　　addition, he imbued his son with an aversion to extreme ambition, which set Woz

　　apart from Jobs. At an Apple product launch event in 2010, forty years after

　　they met, Woz reflected on their differences. “My father told me, ‘You always

　　want to be in the middle,’” he said. “I didn’t want to be up with the high-level

　　people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I was

　　way too shy ever to be a business leader like Steve.”

　　By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one of the “electronics kids.” He

　　had an easier time making eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he

　　developed the chunky and stooped look of a guy who spends most of his time

　　hunched over circuit boards. At the same age when Jobs was puzzling over a

　　carbon microphone that his dad couldn’t explain, Wozniak was using transistors

　　to build an intercom system featuring amplifiers, relays, lights, and buzzers

　　that connected the kids’ bedrooms of six houses in the neighborhood. And at an

　　age when Jobs was building Heathkits, Wozniak was assembling a transmitter and

　　receiver from Hallicrafters, the most sophisticated radios available.

　　Woz spent a lot of time at home reading his father’s electronics journals, and

　　he became enthralled by stories about new computers, such as the powerful ENIAC.

　　Because Boolean algebra came naturally to him, he marveled at how simple, rather

　　than complex, the computers were. In eighth grade he built a calculator that

　　included one hundred transistors, two hundred diodes, and two hundred resistors

　　on ten circuit boards. It won top prize in a local contest run by the Air Force,

　　even though the competitors included students through twelfth grade.

　　Woz became more of a loner when the boys his age began going out with girls and

　　partying, endeavors that he found far more complex than designing circuits.

　　“Where before I was popular and riding bikes and everything, suddenly I was

　　socially shut out,” he recalled. “It seemed like nobody spoke to me for the

　　longest time.” He found an outlet by playing juvenile pranks. In twelfth grade

　　he built an electronic metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep

　　time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels

　　off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he

　　rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that day he got

　　called to the principal’s office. He thought it was because he had won, yet

　　again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police. The

　　principal had been summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto the

　　football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz tried

　　and failed to suppress his laughter. He actually got sent to the juvenile

　　detention center, where he spent the night. It was a memorable experience. He

　　taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling

　　fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked when touching them.

　　Getting shocked was a badge of honor for Woz. He prided himself on being a

　　hardware engineer, which meant that random shocks were routine. He once devised

　　a roulette game where four people put their thumbs in a slot; when the ball

　　landed, one would get shocked. “Hardware guys will play this game, but software

　　guys are too chicken,” he noted.

　　During his senior year he got a part-time job at Sylvania and had the chance to

　　work on a computer for the first time. He learned FORTRAN from a book and read

　　the manuals for most of the systems of the day, starting with the Digital

　　Equipment PDP-8. Then he studied the specs for the latest microchips and tried

　　to redesign the computers using these newer parts. The challenge he set himself

　　was to replicate the design using the fewest components possible. Each night he

　　would try to improve his drawing from the night before. By the end of his senior

　　year, he had become a master. “I was now designing computers with half the

　　number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper.”

　　He never told his friends. After all, most seventeen-year-olds were getting

　　their kicks in other ways.

　　On Thanksgiving weekend of his senior year, Wozniak visited the University of

　　Colorado. It was closed for the holiday, but he found an engineering student who

　　took him on a tour of the labs. He begged his father to let him go there, even

　　though the out-of-state tuition was more than the family could easily afford.

　　They struck a deal: He would be allowed to go for one year, but then he would

　　transfer to De Anza Community College back home. After arriving at Colorado in

　　the fall of 1969, he spent so much time playing pranks (such as producing reams

　　of printouts saying “Fuck Nixon”) that he failed a couple of his courses and was

　　put on probation. In addition, he created a program to calculate Fibonacci

　　numbers that burned up so much computer time the university threatened to bill

　　him for the cost. So he readily lived up to his bargain with his parents and

　　transferred to De Anza.

　　After a pleasant year at De Anza, Wozniak took time off to make some money. He

　　found work at a company that made computers for the California Motor Vehicle

　　Department, and a coworker made him a wonderful offer: He would provide some

　　spare chips so Wozniak could make one of the computers he had been sketching on

　　paper. Wozniak decided to use as few chips as possible, both as a personal

　　challenge and because he did not want to take advantage of his colleague’s

　　largesse.

　　Much of the work was done in the garage of a friend just around the corner, Bill

　　Fernandez, who was still at Homestead High. To lubricate their efforts, they

　　drank large amounts of Cragmont cream soda, riding their bikes to the Sunnyvale

　　Safeway to return the bottles, collect the deposits, and buy more. “That’s how

　　we started referring to it as the Cream Soda Computer,” Wozniak recalled. It was

　　basically a calculator capable of multiplying numbers entered by a set of

　　switches and displaying the results in binary code with little lights.

　　When it was finished, Fernandez told Wozniak there was someone at Homestead High

　　he should meet. “His name is Steve. He likes to do pranks like you do, and he’s

　　also into building electronics like you are.” It may have been the most

　　significant meeting in a Silicon Valley garage since Hewlett went into Packard’s

　　thirty-two years earlier. “Steve and I just sat on the sidewalk in front of

　　Bill’s house for the longest time, just sharing stories—mostly about pranks we’d

　　pulled, and also what kind of electronic designs we’d done,” Wozniak recalled.

　　“We had so much in common. Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to

　　people what kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it right away. And I

　　liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.” Jobs was also

　　impressed. “Woz was the first person I’d met who knew more electronics than I

　　did,” he once said, stretching his own expertise. “I liked him right away. I was

　　a little more mature than my years, and he was a little less mature than his, so

　　it evened out. Woz was very bright, but emotionally he was my age.”

　　In addition to their interest in computers, they shared a passion for music. “It

　　was an incredible time for music,” Jobs recalled. “It was like living at a time

　　when Beethoven and Mozart were alive. Really. People will look back on it that

　　way. And Woz and I were deeply into it.” In particular, Wozniak turned Jobs on

　　to the glories of Bob Dylan. “We tracked down this guy in Santa Cruz who put out

　　this newsletter on Dylan,” Jobs said. “Dylan taped all of his concerts, and some

　　of the people around him were not scrupulous, because soon there were tapes all

　　around. Bootlegs of everything. And this guy had them all.”

　　Hunting down Dylan tapes soon became a joint venture. “The two of us would go

　　tramping through San Jose and Berkeley and ask about Dylan bootlegs and collect

　　them,” said Wozniak. “We’d buy brochures of Dylan lyrics and stay up late

　　interpreting them. Dylan’s words struck chords of creative thinking.” Added

　　Jobs, “I had more than a hundred hours, including every concert on the ’65 and

　　’66 tour,” the one where Dylan went electric. Both of them bought high-end TEAC

　　reel-to-reel tape decks. “I would use mine at a low speed to record many

　　concerts on one tape,” said Wozniak. Jobs matched his obsession: “Instead of big

　　speakers I bought a pair of awesome headphones and would just lie in my bed and

　　listen to that stuff for hours.”

　　Jobs had formed a club at Homestead High to put on music-and-light shows and

　　also play pranks. (They once glued a gold-painted toilet seat onto a flower

　　planter.) It was called the Buck Fry Club, a play on the name of the principal.

　　Even though they had already graduated, Wozniak and his friend Allen Baum joined

　　forces with Jobs, at the end of his junior year, to produce a farewell gesture

　　for the departing seniors. Showing off the Homestead campus four decades later,

　　Jobs paused at the scene of the escapade and pointed. “See that balcony? That’s

　　where we did the banner prank that sealed our friendship.” On a big bedsheet

　　Baum had tie-dyed with the school’s green and white colors, they painted a huge

　　hand flipping the middle-finger salute. Baum’s nice Jewish mother helped them

　　draw it and showed them how to do the shading and shadows to make it look more

　　real. “I know what that is,” she snickered. They devised a system of ropes and

　　pulleys so that it could be dramatically lowered as the graduating class marched

　　past the balcony, and they signed it “SWAB JOB,” the initials of Wozniak and

　　Baum combined with part of Jobs’s name. The prank became part of school lore—and

　　got Jobs suspended one more time.

　　Another prank involved a pocket device Wozniak built that could emit TV signals.

　　He would take it to a room where a group of people were watching TV, such as in

　　a dorm, and secretly press the button so that the screen would get fuzzy with

　　static. When someone got up and whacked the set, Wozniak would let go of the

　　button and the picture would clear up. Once he had the unsuspecting viewers

　　hopping up and down at his will, he would make things harder. He would keep the

　　picture fuzzy until someone touched the antenna. Eventually he would make people

　　think they had to hold the antenna while standing on one foot or touching the

　　top of the set. Years later, at a keynote presentation where he was having his

　　own trouble getting a video to work, Jobs broke from his script and recounted

　　the fun they had with the device. “Woz would have it in his pocket and we’d go

　　into a dorm . . . where a bunch of folks would be, like, watching Star Trek, and

　　he’d screw up the TV, and someone would go up to fix it, and just as they had

　　the foot off the ground he would turn it back on, and as they put their foot

　　back on the ground he’d screw it up again.” Contorting himself into a pretzel

　　onstage, Jobs concluded to great laughter, “And within five minutes he would

　　have someone like this.”

　　The Blue Box

　　The ultimate combination of pranks and electronics—and the escapade that helped

　　to create Apple—was launched one Sunday afternoon when Wozniak read an article

　　in Esquire that his mother had left for him on the kitchen table. It was

　　September 1971, and he was about to drive off the next day to Berkeley, his

　　third college. The story, Ron Rosenbaum’s “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,”

　　described how hackers and phone phreakers had found ways to make long-distance

　　calls for free by replicating the tones that routed signals on the AT&T network.

　　“Halfway through the article, I had to call my best friend, Steve Jobs, and read

　　parts of this long article to him,” Wozniak recalled. He knew that Jobs, then

　　beginning his senior year, was one of the few people who would share his

　　excitement.

　　A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker known as Captain Crunch because he

　　had discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the

　　breakfast cereal was the same 2600 Hertz tone used by the phone network’s

　　call-routing switches. It could fool the system into allowing a long-distance

　　call to go through without extra charges. The article revealed that other tones

　　that served to route calls could be found in an issue of the Bell System

　　Technical Journal, which AT&T immediately began asking libraries to pull from

　　their shelves.

　　As soon as Jobs got the call from Wozniak that Sunday afternoon, he knew they

　　would have to get their hands on the technical journal right away. “Woz picked

　　me up a few minutes later, and we went to the library at SLAC [the Stanford

　　Linear Accelerator Center] to see if we could find it,” Jobs recounted. It was

　　Sunday and the library was closed, but they knew how to get in through a door

　　that was rarely locked. “I remember that we were furiously digging through the

　　stacks, and it was Woz who finally found the journal with all the frequencies.

　　It was like, holy shit, and we opened it and there it was. We kept saying to

　　ourselves, ‘It’s real. Holy shit, it’s real.’ It was all laid out—the tones, the

　　frequencies.”

　　Wozniak went to Sunnyvale Electronics before it closed that evening and bought

　　the parts to make an analog tone generator. Jobs had built a frequency counter

　　when he was part of the HP Explorers Club, and they used it to calibrate the

　　desired tones. With a dial, they could replicate and tape-record the sounds

　　specified in the article. By midnight they were ready to test it. Unfortunately

　　the oscillators they used were not quite stable enough to replicate the right

　　chirps to fool the phone company. “We could see the instability using Steve’s

　　frequency counter,” recalled Wozniak, “and we just couldn’t make it work. I had

　　to leave for Berkeley the next morning, so we decided I would work on building a

　　digital version once I got there.”

　　No one had ever created a digital version of a Blue Box, but Woz was made for

　　the challenge. Using diodes and transistors from Radio Shack, and with the help

　　of a music student in his dorm who had perfect pitch, he got it built before

　　Thanksgiving. “I have never designed a circuit I was prouder of,” he said. “I

　　still think it was incredible.”

　　One night Wozniak drove down from Berkeley to Jobs’s house to try it. They

　　attempted to call Wozniak’s uncle in Los Angeles, but they got a wrong number.

　　It didn’t matter; their device had worked. “Hi! We’re calling you for free!

　　We’re calling you for free!” Wozniak shouted. The person on the other end was

　　confused and annoyed. Jobs chimed in, “We’re calling from California! From

　　California! With a Blue Box.” This probably baffled the man even more, since he

　　was also in California.

　　At first the Blue Box was used for fun and pranks. The most daring of these was

　　when they called the Vatican and Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting

　　to speak to the pope. “Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and ve need to

　　talk to de pope,” Woz intoned. He was told that it was 5:30 a.m. and the pope

　　was sleeping. When he called back, he got a bishop who was supposed to serve as

　　the translator. But they never actually got the pope on the line. “They realized

　　that Woz wasn’t Henry Kissinger,” Jobs recalled. “We were at a public phone

　　booth.”

　　It was then that they reached an important milestone, one that would establish a

　　pattern in their partnerships: Jobs came up with the idea that the Blue Box

　　could be more than merely a hobby; they could build and sell them. “I got

　　together the rest of the components, like the casing and power supply and

　　keypads, and figured out how we could price it,” Jobs said, foreshadowing roles

　　he would play when they founded Apple. The finished product was about the size

　　of two decks of playing cards. The parts cost about $40, and Jobs decided they

　　should sell it for $150.

　　Following the lead of other phone phreaks such as Captain Crunch, they gave

　　themselves handles. Wozniak became “Berkeley Blue,” Jobs was “Oaf Tobark.” They

　　took the device to college dorms and gave demonstrations by attaching it to a

　　phone and speaker. While the potential customers watched, they would call the

　　Ritz in London or a dial-a-joke service in Australia. “We made a hundred or so

　　Blue Boxes and sold almost all of them,” Jobs recalled.

　　The fun and profits came to an end at a Sunnyvale pizza parlor. Jobs and Wozniak

　　were about to drive to Berkeley with a Blue Box they had just finished making.

　　Jobs needed money and was eager to sell, so he pitched the device to some guys

　　at the next table. They were interested, so Jobs went to a phone booth and

　　demonstrated it with a call to Chicago. The prospects said they had to go to

　　their car for money. “So we walk over to the car, Woz and me, and I’ve got the

　　Blue Box in my hand, and the guy gets in, reaches under the seat, and he pulls

　　out a gun,” Jobs recounted. He had never been that close to a gun, and he was

　　terrified. “So he’s pointing the gun right at my stomach, and he says, ‘Hand it

　　over, brother.’ My mind raced. There was the car door here, and I thought maybe

　　I could slam it on his legs and we could run, but there was this high

　　probability that he would shoot me. So I slowly handed it to him, very

　　carefully.” It was a weird sort of robbery. The guy who took the Blue Box

　　actually gave Jobs a phone number and said he would try to pay for it if it

　　worked. When Jobs later called the number, the guy said he couldn’t figure out

　　how to use it. So Jobs, in his felicitous way, convinced the guy to meet him and

　　Wozniak at a public place. But they ended up deciding not to have another

　　encounter with the gunman, even on the off chance they could get their $150.

　　The partnership paved the way for what would be a bigger adventure together. “If

　　it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple,” Jobs

　　later reflected. “I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together,

　　and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually

　　put something into production.” They had created a device with a little circuit

　　board that could control billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. “You

　　cannot believe how much confidence that gave us.” Woz came to the same

　　conclusion: “It was probably a bad idea selling them, but it gave us a taste of

　　what we could do with my engineering skills and his vision.” The Blue Box

　　adventure established a template for a partnership that would soon be born.

　　Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would

　　have been happy just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it

　　user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks.UnknownTHE DROPOUT

　　Turn On, Tune In . . .

　　Chrisann Brennan

　　Toward the end of his senior year at Homestead, in the spring of 1972, Jobs

　　started going out with a girl named Chrisann Brennan, who was about his age but

　　still a junior. With her light brown hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, and

　　fragile aura, she was very attractive. She was also enduring the breakup of her

　　parents’ marriage, which made her vulnerable. “We worked together on an animated

　　movie, then started going out, and she became my first real girlfriend,” Jobs

　　recalled. As Brennan later said, “Steve was kind of crazy. That’s why I was

　　attracted to him.”

　　Jobs’s craziness was of the cultivated sort. He had begun his lifelong

　　experiments with compulsive diets, eating only fruits and vegetables, so he was

　　as lean and tight as a whippet. He learned to stare at people without blinking,

　　and he perfected long silences punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking.

　　This odd mix of intensity and aloofness, combined with his shoulder-length hair

　　and scraggly beard, gave him the aura of a crazed shaman. He oscillated between

　　charismatic and creepy. “He shuffled around and looked half-mad,” recalled

　　Brennan. “He had a lot of angst. It was like a big darkness around him.”

　　Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in

　　a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. “It was great,” he recalled. “I had been

　　listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It

　　was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the

　　conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.”

　　That summer of 1972, after his graduation, he and Brennan moved to a cabin in

　　the hills above Los Altos. “I’m going to go live in a cabin with Chrisann,” he

　　announced to his parents one day. His father was furious. “No you’re not,” he

　　said. “Over my dead body.” They had recently fought about marijuana, and once

　　again the younger Jobs was willful. He just said good-bye and walked out.

　　Brennan spent a lot of her time that summer painting; she was talented, and she

　　did a picture of a clown for Jobs that he kept on the wall. Jobs wrote poetry

　　and played guitar. He could be brutally cold and rude to her at times, but he

　　was also entrancing and able to impose his will. “He was an enlightened being

　　who was cruel,” she recalled. “That’s a strange combination.”

　　Midway through the summer, Jobs was almost killed when his red Fiat caught fire.

　　He was driving on Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a high

　　school friend, Tim Brown, who looked back, saw flames coming from the engine,

　　and casually said to Jobs, “Pull over, your car is on fire.” Jobs did. His

　　father, despite their arguments, drove out to the hills to tow the Fiat home.

　　In order to find a way to make money for a new car, Jobs got Wozniak to drive

　　him to De Anza College to look on the help-wanted bulletin board. They

　　discovered that the Westgate Shopping Center in San Jose was seeking college

　　students who could dress up in costumes and amuse the kids. So for $3 an hour,

　　Jobs, Wozniak, and Brennan donned heavy full-body costumes and headgear to play

　　Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit. Wozniak, in his

　　earnest and sweet way, found it fun. “I said, ‘I want to do it, it’s my chance,

　　because I love children.’ I think Steve looked at it as a lousy job, but I

　　looked at it as a fun adventure.” Jobs did indeed find it a pain. “It was hot,

　　the costumes were heavy, and after a while I felt like I wanted to smack some of

　　the kids.” Patience was never one of his virtues.

　　Reed College

　　Seventeen years earlier, Jobs’s parents had made a pledge when they adopted him:

　　He would go to college. So they had worked hard and saved dutifully for his

　　college fund, which was modest but adequate by the time he graduated. But Jobs,

　　becoming ever more willful, did not make it easy. At first he toyed with not

　　going to college at all. “I think I might have headed to New York if I didn’t go

　　to college,” he recalled, musing on how different his world—and perhaps all of

　　ours—might have been if he had chosen that path. When his parents pushed him to

　　go to college, he responded in a passive-aggressive way. He did not consider

　　state schools, such as Berkeley, where Woz then was, despite the fact that they

　　were more affordable. Nor did he look at Stanford, just up the road and likely

　　to offer a scholarship. “The kids who went to Stanford, they already knew what

　　they wanted to do,” he said. “They weren’t really artistic. I wanted something

　　that was more artistic and interesting.”

　　Instead he insisted on applying only to Reed College, a private liberal arts

　　school in Portland, Oregon, that was one of the most expensive in the nation. He

　　was visiting Woz at Berkeley when his father called to say an acceptance letter

　　had arrived from Reed, and he tried to talk Steve out of going there. So did his

　　mother. It was far more than they could afford, they said. But their son

　　responded with an ultimatum: If he couldn’t go to Reed, he wouldn’t go anywhere.

　　They relented, as usual.

　　Reed had only one thousand students, half the number at Homestead High. It was

　　known for its free-spirited hippie lifestyle, which combined somewhat uneasily

　　with its rigorous academic standards and core curriculum. Five years earlier

　　Timothy Leary, the guru of psychedelic enlightenment, had sat cross-legged at

　　the Reed College commons while on his League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD)

　　college tour, during which he exhorted his listeners, “Like every great religion

　　of the past we seek to find the divinity within. . . . These ancient goals we

　　define in the metaphor of the present—turn on, tune in, drop out.” Many of

　　Reed’s students took all three of those injunctions seriously; the dropout rate

　　during the 1970s was more than one-third.

　　When it came time for Jobs to matriculate in the fall of 1972, his parents drove

　　him up to Portland, but in another small act of rebellion he refused to let them

　　come on campus. In fact he refrained from even saying good-bye or thanks. He

　　recounted the moment later with uncharacteristic regret:

　　It’s one of the things in life I really feel ashamed about. I was not very

　　sensitive, and I hurt their feelings. I shouldn’t have. They had done so much

　　to make sure I could go there, but I just didn’t want them around. I didn’t

　　want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to be like an orphan who had

　　bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no

　　roots, no connections, no background.

　　In late 1972, there was a fundamental shift happening in American campus life.

　　The nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and the draft that accompanied it,

　　was winding down. Political activism at colleges receded and in many late-night

　　dorm conversations was replaced by an interest in pathways to personal

　　fulfillment. Jobs found himself deeply influenced by a variety of books on

　　spirituality and enlightenment, most notably Be Here Now, a guide to meditation

　　and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. “It

　　was profound,” Jobs said. “It transformed me and many of my friends.”

　　The closest of those friends was another wispy-bearded freshman named Daniel

　　Kottke, who met Jobs a week after they arrived at Reed and shared his interest

　　in Zen, Dylan, and acid. Kottke, from a wealthy New York suburb, was smart but

　　low-octane, with a sweet flower-child demeanor made even mellower by his

　　interest in Buddhism. That spiritual quest had caused him to eschew material

　　possessions, but he was nonetheless impressed by Jobs’s tape deck. “Steve had a

　　TEAC reel-to-reel and massive quantities of Dylan bootlegs,” Kottke recalled.

　　“He was both really cool and high-tech.”

　　Jobs started spending much of his time with Kottke and his girlfriend, Elizabeth

　　Holmes, even after he insulted her at their first meeting by grilling her about

　　how much money it would take to get her to have sex with another man. They

　　hitchhiked to the coast together, engaged in the typical dorm raps about the

　　meaning of life, attended the love festivals at the local Hare Krishna temple,

　　and went to the Zen center for free vegetarian meals. “It was a lot of fun,”

　　said Kottke, “but also philosophical, and we took Zen very seriously.”

　　Jobs began sharing with Kottke other books, including Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

　　by Shunryu Suzuki, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, and Cutting

　　Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa. They created a meditation room

　　in the attic crawl space above Elizabeth Holmes’s room and fixed it up with

　　Indian prints, a dhurrie rug, candles, incense, and meditation cushions. “There

　　was a hatch in the ceiling leading to an attic which had a huge amount of

　　space,” Jobs said. “We took psychedelic drugs there sometimes, but mainly we

　　just meditated.”

　　Jobs’s engagement with Eastern spirituality, and especially Zen Buddhism, was

　　not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his

　　typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his personality. “Steve is

　　very much Zen,” said Kottke. “It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole

　　approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.” Jobs also became

　　deeply influenced by the emphasis that Buddhism places on intuition. “I began to

　　realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant

　　than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis,” he later said. His

　　intensity, however, made it difficult for him to achieve inner peace; his Zen

　　awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind, or

　　interpersonal mellowness.

　　He and Kottke enjoyed playing a nineteenth-century German variant of chess

　　called Kriegspiel, in which the players sit back-to-back; each has his own board

　　and pieces and cannot see those of his opponent. A moderator informs them if a

　　move they want to make is legal or illegal, and they have to try to figure out

　　where their opponent’s pieces are. “The wildest game I played with them was

　　during a lashing rainstorm sitting by the fireside,” recalled Holmes, who served

　　as moderator. “They were tripping on acid. They were moving so fast I could

　　barely keep up with them.”

　　Another book that deeply influenced Jobs during his freshman year was Diet for a

　　Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, which extolled the personal and planetary

　　benefits of vegetarianism. “That’s when I swore off meat pretty much for good,”

　　he recalled. But the book also reinforced his tendency to embrace extreme diets,

　　which included purges, fasts, or eating only one or two foods, such as carrots

　　or apples, for weeks on end.

　　Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians during their freshman year. “Steve

　　got into it even more than I did,” said Kottke. “He was living off Roman Meal

　　cereal.” They would go shopping at a farmers’ co-op, where Jobs would buy a box

　　of cereal, which would last a week, and other bulk health food. “He would buy

　　flats of dates and almonds and lots of carrots, and he got a Champion juicer and

　　we’d make carrot juice and carrot salads. There is a story about Steve turning

　　orange from eating so many carrots, and there is some truth to that.” Friends

　　remember him having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue.

　　Jobs’s dietary habits became even more obsessive when he read Mucusless Diet

　　Healing System by Arnold Ehret, an early twentieth-century German-born nutrition

　　fanatic. He believed in eating nothing but fruits and starchless vegetables,

　　which he said prevented the body from forming harmful mucus, and he advocated

　　cleansing the body regularly through prolonged fasts. That meant the end of even

　　Roman Meal cereal—or any bread, grains, or milk. Jobs began warning friends of

　　the mucus dangers lurking in their bagels. “I got into it in my typical nutso

　　way,” he said. At one point he and Kottke went for an entire week eating only

　　apples, and then Jobs began to try even purer fasts. He started with two-day

　　fasts, and eventually tried to stretch them to a week or more, breaking them

　　carefully with large amounts of water and leafy vegetables. “After a week you

　　start to feel fantastic,” he said. “You get a ton of vitality from not having to

　　digest all this food. I was in great shape. I felt I could get up and walk to

　　San Francisco anytime I wanted.”

　　Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality, acid and rock—Jobs

　　rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks

　　of the enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era. And even though he

　　barely indulged it at Reed, there was still an undercurrent of electronic

　　geekiness in his soul that would someday combine surprisingly well with the rest

　　of the mix.

　　Robert Friedland

　　In order to raise some cash one day, Jobs decided to sell his IBM Selectric

　　typewriter. He walked into the room of the student who had offered to buy it

　　only to discover that he was having sex with his girlfriend. Jobs started to

　　leave, but the student invited him to take a seat and wait while they finished.

　　“I thought, ‘This is kind of far out,’” Jobs later recalled. And thus began his

　　relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few people in Jobs’s life who

　　were able to mesmerize him. He adopted some of Friedland’s charismatic traits

　　and for a few years treated him almost like a guru—until he began to see him as

　　a charlatan.

　　Friedland was four years older than Jobs, but still an undergraduate. The son of

　　an Auschwitz survivor who became a prosperous Chicago architect, he had

　　originally gone to Bowdoin, a liberal arts college in Maine. But while a

　　sophomore, he was arrested for possession of 24,000 tablets of LSD worth

　　$125,000. The local newspaper pictured him with shoulder-length wavy blond hair

　　smiling at the photographers as he was led away. He was sentenced to two years

　　at a federal prison in Virginia, from which he was paroled in 1972. That fall he

　　headed off to Reed, where he immediately ran for student body president, saying

　　that he needed to clear his name from the “miscarriage of justice” he had

　　suffered. He won.

　　Friedland had heard Baba Ram Dass, the author of Be Here Now, give a speech in

　　Boston, and like Jobs and Kottke had gotten deeply into Eastern spirituality.

　　During the summer of 1973, he traveled to India to meet Ram Dass’s Hindu guru,

　　Neem Karoli Baba, famously known to his many followers as Maharaj-ji. When he

　　returned that fall, Friedland had taken a spiritual name and walked around in

　　sandals and flowing Indian robes. He had a room off campus, above a garage, and

　　Jobs would go there many afternoons to seek him out. He was entranced by the

　　apparent intensity of Friedland’s conviction that a state of enlightenment truly

　　existed and could be attained. “He turned me on to a different level of

　　consciousness,” Jobs said.

　　Friedland found Jobs fascinating as well. “He was always walking around

　　barefoot,” he later told a reporter. “The thing that struck me was his

　　intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an

　　irrational extreme.” Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to

　　master other people. “One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was

　　talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and

　　would want a response without the other person averting their eyes.”

　　According to Kottke, some of Jobs’s personality traits—including a few that

　　lasted throughout his career—were borrowed from Friedland. “Friedland taught

　　Steve the reality distortion field,” said Kottke. “He was charismatic and a bit

　　of a con man and could bend situations to his very strong will. He was

　　mercurial, sure of himself, a little dictatorial. Steve admired that, and he

　　became more like that after spending time with Robert.”

　　Jobs also absorbed how Friedland made himself the center of attention. “Robert

　　was very much an outgoing, charismatic guy, a real salesman,” Kottke recalled.

　　“When I first met Steve he was shy and self-effacing, a very private guy. I

　　think Robert taught him a lot about selling, about coming out of his shell, of

　　opening up and taking charge of a situation.” Friedland projected a high-wattage

　　aura. “He would walk into a room and you would instantly notice him. Steve was

　　the absolute opposite when he came to Reed. After he spent time with Robert,

　　some of it started to rub off.”

　　On Sunday evenings Jobs and Friedland would go to the Hare Krishna temple on the

　　western edge of Portland, often with Kottke and Holmes in tow. They would dance

　　and sing songs at the top of their lungs. “We would work ourselves into an

　　ecstatic frenzy,” Holmes recalled. “Robert would go insane and dance like crazy.

　　Steve was more subdued, as if he was embarrassed to let loose.” Then they would

　　be treated to paper plates piled high with vegetarian food.

　　Friedland had stewardship of a 220-acre apple farm, about forty miles southwest

　　of Portland, that was owned by an eccentric millionaire uncle from Switzerland

　　named Marcel Müller. After Friedland became involved with Eastern spirituality,

　　he turned it into a commune called the All One Farm, and Jobs would spend

　　weekends there with Kottke, Holmes, and like-minded seekers of enlightenment.

　　The farm had a main house, a large barn, and a garden shed, where Kottke and

　　Holmes slept. Jobs took on the task of pruning the Gravenstein apple trees.

　　“Steve ran the apple orchard,” said Friedland. “We were in the organic cider

　　business. Steve’s job was to lead a crew of freaks to prune the orchard and whip

　　it back into shape.”

　　Monks and disciples from the Hare Krishna temple would come and prepare

　　vegetarian feasts redolent of cumin, coriander, and turmeric. “Steve would be

　　starving when he arrived, and he would stuff himself,” Holmes recalled. “Then he

　　would go and purge. For years I thought he was bulimic. It was very upsetting,

　　because we had gone to all that trouble of creating these feasts, and he

　　couldn’t hold it down.”

　　Jobs was also beginning to have a little trouble stomaching Friedland’s cult

　　leader style. “Perhaps he saw a little bit too much of Robert in himself,” said

　　Kottke. Although the commune was supposed to be a refuge from materialism,

　　Friedland began operating it more as a business; his followers were told to chop

　　and sell firewood, make apple presses and wood stoves, and engage in other

　　commercial endeavors for which they were not paid. One night Jobs slept under

　　the table in the kitchen and was amused to notice that people kept coming in and

　　stealing each other’s food from the refrigerator. Communal economics were not

　　for him. “It started to get very materialistic,” Jobs recalled. “Everybody got

　　the idea they were working very hard for Robert’s farm, and one by one they

　　started to leave. I got pretty sick of it.”

　　Many years later, after Friedland had become a billionaire copper and gold

　　mining executive—working out of Vancouver, Singapore, and Mongolia—I met him for

　　drinks in New York. That evening I emailed Jobs and mentioned my encounter. He

　　telephoned me from California within an hour and warned me against listening to

　　Friedland. He said that when Friedland was in trouble because of environmental

　　abuses committed by some of his mines, he had tried to contact Jobs to intervene

　　with Bill Clinton, but Jobs had not responded. “Robert always portrayed himself

　　as a spiritual person, but he crossed the line from being charismatic to being a

　　con man,” Jobs said. “It was a strange thing to have one of the spiritual people

　　in your young life turn out to be, symbolically and in reality, a gold miner.”

　　. . . Drop Out

　　Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at Reed, just not taking

　　the required classes. In fact he was surprised when he found out that, for all

　　of its hippie aura, there were strict course requirements. When Wozniak came to

　　visit, Jobs waved his schedule at him and complained, “They are making me take

　　all these courses.” Woz replied, “Yes, that’s what they do in college.” Jobs

　　refused to go to the classes he was assigned and instead went to the ones he

　　wanted, such as a dance class where he could enjoy both the creativity and the

　　chance to meet girls. “I would never have refused to take the courses you were

　　supposed to, that’s a difference in our personality,” Wozniak marveled.

　　Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his

　　parents’ money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. “All of my

　　working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition,” he

　　recounted in a famous commencement address at Stanford. “I had no idea what I

　　wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it

　　out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire

　　life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.”

　　He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and

　　taking classes that didn’t interest him. Remarkably, Reed tolerated that. “He

　　had a very inquiring mind that was enormously attractive,” said the dean of

　　students, Jack Dudman. “He refused to accept automatically received truths, and

　　he wanted to examine everything himself.” Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes

　　and stay with friends in the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition.

　　“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t

　　interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,” he

　　said. Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw

　　posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. “I learned about serif and sans

　　serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter

　　combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,

　　historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found

　　it fascinating.”

　　It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the

　　intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology

　　would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. He

　　would be in the fore of pushing friendly graphical user interfaces. The

　　calligraphy course would become iconic in that regard. “If I had never dropped

　　in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple

　　typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac,

　　it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

　　In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian existence on the fringes of Reed. He

　　went barefoot most of the time, wearing sandals when it snowed. Elizabeth Holmes

　　made meals for him, trying to keep up with his obsessive diets. He returned soda

　　bottles for spare change, continued his treks to the free Sunday dinners at the

　　Hare Krishna temple, and wore a down jacket in the heatless garage apartment he

　　rented for $20 a month. When he needed money, he found work at the psychology

　　department lab maintaining the electronic equipment that was used for animal

　　behavior experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan would come to visit. Their

　　relationship sputtered along erratically. But mostly he tended to the stirrings

　　of his own soul and personal quest for enlightenment.

　　“I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was

　　raised by Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic

　　drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a profound experience,

　　one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another

　　side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it.

　　It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of

　　making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human

　　consciousness as much as I could.”UnknownATARI AND INDIA

　　Zen and the Art of Game Design

　　Atari

　　In February 1974, after eighteen months of hanging around Reed, Jobs decided to

　　move back to his parents’ home in Los Altos and look for a job. It was not a

　　difficult search. At peak times during the 1970s, the classified section of the

　　San Jose Mercury carried up to sixty pages of technology help-wanted ads. One of

　　those caught Jobs’s eye. “Have fun, make money,” it said. That day Jobs walked

　　into the lobby of the video game manufacturer Atari and told the personnel

　　director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and attire, that he wouldn’t

　　leave until they gave him a job.

　　Atari’s founder was a burly entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell, who was a

　　charismatic visionary with a nice touch of showmanship in him—in other words,

　　another role model waiting to be emulated. After he became famous, he liked

　　driving around in a Rolls, smoking dope, and holding staff meetings in a hot

　　tub. As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do, he was able to turn

　　charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate and distort reality with

　　the power of his personality. His chief engineer was Al Alcorn, beefy and jovial

　　and a bit more grounded, the house grown-up trying to implement the vision and

　　curb the enthusiasms of Bushnell. Their big hit thus far was a video game called

　　Pong, in which two players tried to volley a blip on a screen with two movable

　　lines that acted as paddles. (If you’re under thirty, ask your parents.)

　　When Jobs arrived in the Atari lobby wearing sandals and demanding a job, Alcorn

　　was the one who was summoned. “I was told, ‘We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby.

　　He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or

　　let him in?’ I said bring him on in!”

　　Jobs thus became one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a

　　technician for $5 an hour. “In retrospect, it was weird to hire a dropout from

　　Reed,” Alcorn recalled. “But I saw something in him. He was very intelligent,

　　enthusiastic, excited about tech.” Alcorn assigned him to work with a

　　straitlaced engineer named Don Lang. The next day Lang complained, “This guy’s a

　　goddamn hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me? And he’s impossible to deal

　　with.” Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would

　　prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use deodorant or

　　shower regularly. It was a flawed theory.

　　Lang and others wanted to let Jobs go, but Bushnell worked out a solution. “The

　　smell and behavior wasn’t an issue with me,” he said. “Steve was prickly, but I

　　kind of liked him. So I asked him to go on the night shift. It was a way to save

　　him.” Jobs would come in after Lang and others had left and work through most of

　　the night. Even thus isolated, he became known for his brashness. On those

　　occasions when he happened to interact with others, he was prone to informing

　　them that they were “dumb shits.” In retrospect, he stands by that judgment.

　　“The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad,” Jobs recalled.

　　Despite his arrogance (or perhaps because of it) he was able to charm Atari’s

　　boss. “He was more philosophical than the other people I worked with,” Bushnell

　　recalled. “We used to discuss free will versus determinism. I tended to believe

　　that things were much more determined, that we were programmed. If we had

　　perfect information, we could predict people’s actions. Steve felt the

　　opposite.” That outlook accorded with his faith in the power of the will to bend

　　reality.

　　Jobs helped improve some of the games by pushing the chips to produce fun

　　designs, and Bushnell’s inspiring willingness to play by his own rules rubbed

　　off on him. In addition, he intuitively appreciated the simplicity of Atari’s

　　games. They came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a

　　stoned freshman could figure them out. The only instructions for Atari’s Star

　　Trek game were “1. Insert quarter. 2. Avoid Klingons.”

　　Not all of his coworkers shunned Jobs. He became friends with Ron Wayne, a

　　draftsman at Atari, who had earlier started a company that built slot machines.

　　It subsequently failed, but Jobs became fascinated with the idea that it was

　　possible to start your own company. “Ron was an amazing guy,” said Jobs. “He

　　started companies. I had never met anybody like that.” He proposed to Wayne that

　　they go into business together; Jobs said he could borrow $50,000, and they

　　could design and market a slot machine. But Wayne had already been burned in

　　business, so he declined. “I said that was the quickest way to lose $50,000,”

　　Wayne recalled, “but I admired the fact that he had a burning drive to start his

　　own business.”

　　One weekend Jobs was visiting Wayne at his apartment, engaging as they often did

　　in philosophical discussions, when Wayne said that there was something he needed

　　to tell him. “Yeah, I think I know what it is,” Jobs replied. “I think you like

　　men.” Wayne said yes. “It was my first encounter with someone who I knew was

　　gay,” Jobs recalled. “He planted the right perspective of it for me.” Jobs

　　grilled him: “When you see a beautiful woman, what do you feel?” Wayne replied,

　　“It’s like when you look at a beautiful horse. You can appreciate it, but you

　　don’t want to sleep with it. You appreciate beauty for what it is.” Wayne said

　　that it is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to him. “Nobody

　　at Atari knew, and I could count on my toes and fingers the number of people I

　　told in my whole life. But I guess it just felt right to tell him, that he would

　　understand, and it didn’t have any effect on our relationship.”

　　India

　　One reason Jobs was eager to make some money in early 1974 was that Robert

　　Friedland, who had gone to India the summer before, was urging him to take his

　　own spiritual journey there. Friedland had studied in India with Neem Karoli

　　Baba (Maharaj-ji), who had been the guru to much of the sixties hippie movement.

　　Jobs decided he should do the same, and he recruited Daniel Kottke to go with

　　him. Jobs was not motivated by mere adventure. “For me it was a serious search,”

　　he said. “I’d been turned on to the idea of enlightenment and trying to figure

　　out who I was and how I fit into things.” Kottke adds that Jobs’s quest seemed

　　driven partly by not knowing his birth parents. “There was a hole in him, and he

　　was trying to fill it.”

　　When Jobs told the folks at Atari that he was quitting to go search for a guru

　　in India, the jovial Alcorn was amused. “He comes in and stares at me and

　　declares, ‘I’m going to find my guru,’ and I say, ‘No shit, that’s super. Write

　　me!’ And he says he wants me to help pay, and I tell him, ‘Bullshit!’” Then

　　Alcorn had an idea. Atari was making kits and shipping them to Munich, where

　　they were built into finished machines and distributed by a wholesaler in Turin.

　　But there was a problem: Because the games were designed for the American rate

　　of sixty frames per second, there were frustrating interference problems in

　　Europe, where the rate was fifty frames per second. Alcorn sketched out a fix

　　with Jobs and then offered to pay for him to go to Europe to implement it. “It’s

　　got to be cheaper to get to India from there,” he said. Jobs agreed. So Alcorn

　　sent him on his way with the exhortation, “Say hi to your guru for me.”

　　Jobs spent a few days in Munich, where he solved the interference problem, but

　　in the process he flummoxed the dark-suited German managers. They complained to

　　Alcorn that he dressed and smelled like a bum and behaved rudely. “I said, ‘Did

　　he solve the problem?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘If you got any more

　　problems, you just call me, I got more guys just like him!’ They said, ‘No, no

　　we’ll take care of it next time.’” For his part, Jobs was upset that the Germans

　　kept trying to feed him meat and potatoes. “They don’t even have a word for

　　vegetarian,” he complained (incorrectly) in a phone call to Alcorn.

　　He had a better time when he took the train to see the distributor in Turin,

　　where the Italian pastas and his host’s camaraderie were more simpatico. “I had

　　a wonderful couple of weeks in Turin, which is this charged-up industrial town,”

　　he recalled. “The distributor took me every night to dinner at this place where

　　there were only eight tables and no menu. You’d just tell them what you wanted,

　　and they made it. One of the tables was on reserve for the chairman of Fiat. It

　　was really super.” He next went to Lugano, Switzerland, where he stayed with

　　Friedland’s uncle, and from there took a flight to India.

　　When he got off the plane in New Delhi, he felt waves of heat rising from the

　　tarmac, even though it was only April. He had been given the name of a hotel,

　　but it was full, so he went to one his taxi driver insisted was good. “I’m sure

　　he was getting some baksheesh, because he took me to this complete dive.” Jobs

　　asked the owner whether the water was filtered and foolishly believed the

　　answer. “I got dysentery pretty fast. I was sick, really sick, a really high

　　fever. I dropped from 160 pounds to 120 in about a week.”

　　Once he got healthy enough to move, he decided that he needed to get out of

　　Delhi. So he headed to the town of Haridwar, in western India near the source of

　　the Ganges, which was having a festival known as the Kumbh Mela. More than ten

　　million people poured into a town that usually contained fewer than 100,000

　　residents. “There were holy men all around. Tents with this teacher and that

　　teacher. There were people riding elephants, you name it. I was there for a few

　　days, but I decided that I needed to get out of there too.”

　　He went by train and bus to a village near Nainital in the foothills of the

　　Himalayas. That was where Neem Karoli Baba lived, or had lived. By the time Jobs

　　got there, he was no longer alive, at least in the same incarnation. Jobs rented

　　a room with a mattress on the floor from a family who helped him recuperate by

　　feeding him vegetarian meals. “There was a copy there of Autobiography of a Yogi

　　in English that a previous traveler had left, and I read it several times

　　because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from village to village

　　and recovered from my dysentery.” Among those who were part of the community

　　there was Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was working to eradicate

　　smallpox and who later ran Google’s philanthropic arm and the Skoll Foundation.

　　He became Jobs’s lifelong friend.

　　At one point Jobs was told of a young Hindu holy man who was holding a gathering

　　of his followers at the Himalayan estate of a wealthy businessman. “It was a

　　chance to meet a spiritual being and hang out with his followers, but it was

　　also a chance to have a good meal. I could smell the food as we got near, and I

　　was very hungry.” As Jobs was eating, the holy man—who was not much older than

　　Jobs—picked him out of the crowd, pointed at him, and began laughing maniacally.

　　“He came running over and grabbed me and made a tooting sound and said, ‘You are

　　just like a baby,’” recalled Jobs. “I was not relishing this attention.” Taking

　　Jobs by the hand, he led him out of the worshipful crowd and walked him up to a

　　hill, where there was a well and a small pond. “We sit down and he pulls out

　　this straight razor. I’m thinking he’s a nutcase and begin to worry. Then he

　　pulls out a bar of soap—I had long hair at the time—and he lathered up my hair

　　and shaved my head. He told me that he was saving my health.”

　　Daniel Kottke arrived in India at the beginning of the summer, and Jobs went

　　back to New Delhi to meet him. They wandered, mainly by bus, rather aimlessly.

　　By this point Jobs was no longer trying to find a guru who could impart wisdom,

　　but instead was seeking enlightenment through ascetic experience, deprivation,

　　and simplicity. He was not able to achieve inner calm. Kottke remembers him

　　getting into a furious shouting match with a Hindu woman in a village

　　marketplace who, Jobs alleged, had been watering down the milk she was selling

　　them.

　　Yet Jobs could also be generous. When they got to the town of Manali, Kottke’s

　　sleeping bag was stolen with his traveler’s checks in it. “Steve covered my food

　　expenses and bus ticket back to Delhi,” Kottke recalled. He also gave Kottke the

　　rest of his own money, $100, to tide him over.

　　During his seven months in India, he had written to his parents only

　　sporadically, getting mail at the American Express office in New Delhi when he

　　passed through, and so they were somewhat surprised when they got a call from

　　the Oakland airport asking them to pick him up. They immediately drove up from

　　Los Altos. “My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my

　　skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m

　　sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times and finally my

　　mother came up and said ‘Steve?’ and I said ‘Hi!’”

　　They took him back home, where he continued trying to find himself. It was a

　　pursuit with many paths toward enlightenment. In the mornings and evenings he

　　would meditate and study Zen, and in between he would drop in to audit physics

　　or engineering courses at Stanford.

　　The Search

　　Jobs’s interest in Eastern spirituality, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the search

　　for enlightenment was not merely the passing phase of a nineteen-year-old.

　　Throughout his life he would seek to follow many of the basic precepts of

　　Eastern religions, such as the emphasis on experiential prajñā, wisdom or

　　cognitive understanding that is intuitively experienced through concentration of

　　the mind. Years later, sitting in his Palo Alto garden, he reflected on the

　　lasting influence of his trip to India:

　　Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going

　　to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like

　　we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more

　　developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing,

　　more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my

　　work.

　　Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned

　　and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of

　　India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some

　　ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition

　　and experiential wisdom.

　　Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the

　　Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit

　　and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it

　　only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s

　　room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom

　　and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind

　　just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so

　　much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice

　　it.

　　Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. At one point I was

　　thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery,

　　but my spiritual advisor urged me to stay here. He said there is nothing over

　　there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I learned the truth of the Zen

　　saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher,

　　one will appear next door.

　　Jobs did in fact find a teacher right in his own neighborhood. Shunryu Suzuki,

　　who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and ran the San Francisco Zen Center, used

　　to come to Los Altos every Wednesday evening to lecture and meditate with a

　　small group of followers. After a while he asked his assistant, Kobun Chino

　　Otogawa, to open a full-time center there. Jobs became a faithful follower,

　　along with his occasional girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, and Daniel Kottke and

　　Elizabeth Holmes. He also began to go by himself on retreats to the Tassajara

　　Zen Center, a monastery near Carmel where Kobun also taught.

　　Kottke found Kobun amusing. “His English was atrocious,” he recalled. “He would

　　speak in a kind of haiku, with poetic, suggestive phrases. We would sit and

　　listen to him, and half the time we had no idea what he was going on about. I

　　took the whole thing as a kind of lighthearted interlude.” Holmes was more into

　　the scene. “We would go to Kobun’s meditations, sit on zafu cushions, and he

　　would sit on a dais,” she said. “We learned how to tune out distractions. It was

　　a magical thing. One evening we were meditating with Kobun when it was raining,

　　and he taught us how to use ambient sounds to bring us back to focus on our

　　meditation.”

　　As for Jobs, his devotion was intense. “He became really serious and

　　self-important and just generally unbearable,” according to Kottke. He began

　　meeting with Kobun almost daily, and every few months they went on retreats

　　together to meditate. “I ended up spending as much time as I could with him,”

　　Jobs recalled. “He had a wife who was a nurse at Stanford and two kids. She

　　worked the night shift, so I would go over and hang out with him in the

　　evenings. She would get home about midnight and shoo me away.” They sometimes

　　discussed whether Jobs should devote himself fully to spiritual pursuits, but

　　Kobun counseled otherwise. He assured Jobs that he could keep in touch with his

　　spiritual side while working in a business. The relationship turned out to be

　　lasting and deep; seventeen years later Kobun would perform Jobs’s wedding

　　ceremony.

　　Jobs’s compulsive search for self-awareness also led him to undergo primal

　　scream therapy, which had recently been developed and popularized by a Los

　　Angeles psychotherapist named Arthur Janov. It was based on the Freudian theory

　　that psychological problems are caused by the repressed pains of childhood;

　　Janov argued that they could be resolved by re-suffering these primal moments

　　while fully expressing the pain—sometimes in screams. To Jobs, this seemed

　　preferable to talk therapy because it involved intuitive feeling and emotional

　　action rather than just rational analyzing. “This was not something to think

　　about,” he later said. “This was something to do: to close your eyes, hold your

　　breath, jump in, and come out the other end more insightful.”

　　A group of Janov’s adherents ran a program called the Oregon Feeling Center in

　　an old hotel in Eugene that was managed by Jobs’s Reed College guru Robert

　　Friedland, whose All One Farm commune was nearby. In late 1974, Jobs signed up

　　for a twelve-week course of therapy there costing $1,000. “Steve and I were both

　　into personal growth, so I wanted to go with him,” Kottke recounted, “but I

　　couldn’t afford it.”

　　Jobs confided to close friends that he was driven by the pain he was feeling

　　about being put up for adoption and not knowing about his birth parents. “Steve

　　had a very profound desire to know his physical parents so he could better know

　　himself,” Friedland later said. He had learned from Paul and Clara Jobs that his

　　birth parents had both been graduate students at a university and that his

　　father might be Syrian. He had even thought about hiring a private investigator,

　　but he decided not to do so for the time being. “I didn’t want to hurt my

　　parents,” he recalled, referring to Paul and Clara.

　　“He was struggling with the fact that he had been adopted,” according to

　　Elizabeth Holmes. “He felt that it was an issue that he needed to get hold of

　　emotionally.” Jobs admitted as much to her. “This is something that is bothering

　　me, and I need to focus on it,” he said. He was even more open with Greg

　　Calhoun. “He was doing a lot of soul-searching about being adopted, and he

　　talked about it with me a lot,” Calhoun recalled. “The primal scream and the

　　mucusless diets, he was trying to cleanse himself and get deeper into his

　　frustration about his birth. He told me he was deeply angry about the fact that

　　he had been given up.”

　　John Lennon had undergone the same primal scream therapy in 1970, and in

　　December of that year he released the song “Mother” with the Plastic Ono Band.

　　It dealt with Lennon’s own feelings about a father who had abandoned him and a

　　mother who had been killed when he was a teenager. The refrain includes the

　　haunting chant “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home.” Jobs used to play the song

　　often.

　　Jobs later said that Janov’s teachings did not prove very useful. “He offered a

　　ready-made, buttoned-down answer which turned out to be far too oversimplistic.

　　It became obvious that it was not going to yield any great insight.” But Holmes

　　contended that it made him more confident: “After he did it, he was in a

　　different place. He had a very abrasive personality, but there was a peace about

　　him for a while. His confidence improved and his feelings of inadequacy were

　　reduced.”

　　Jobs came to believe that he could impart that feeling of confidence to others

　　and thus push them to do things they hadn’t thought possible. Holmes had broken

　　up with Kottke and joined a religious cult in San Francisco that expected her to

　　sever ties with all past friends. But Jobs rejected that injunction. He arrived

　　at the cult house in his Ford Ranchero one day and announced that he was driving

　　up to Friedland’s apple farm and she was to come. Even more brazenly, he said

　　she would have to drive part of the way, even though she didn’t know how to use

　　the stick shift. “Once we got on the open road, he made me get behind the wheel,

　　and he shifted the car until we got up to 55 miles per hour,” she recalled.

　　“Then he puts on a tape of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, lays his head in my lap,

　　and goes to sleep. He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore

　　so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn’t

　　think I could do.”

　　It was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion

　　field. “If you trust him, you can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that

　　something should happen, then he’s just going to make it happen.”

　　Breakout

　　One day in early 1975 Al Alcorn was sitting in his office at Atari when Ron

　　Wayne burst in. “Hey, Stevie is back!” he shouted.

　　“Wow, bring him on in,” Alcorn replied.

　　Jobs shuffled in barefoot, wearing a saffron robe and carrying a copy of Be Here

　　Now, which he handed to Alcorn and insisted he read. “Can I have my job back?”

　　he asked.

　　“He looked like a Hare Krishna guy, but it was great to see him,” Alcorn

　　recalled. “So I said, sure!”

　　Once again, for the sake of harmony, Jobs worked mostly at night. Wozniak, who

　　was living in an apartment nearby and working at HP, would come by after dinner

　　to hang out and play the video games. He had become addicted to Pong at a

　　Sunnyvale bowling alley, and he was able to build a version that he hooked up to

　　his home TV set.

　　One day in the late summer of 1975, Nolan Bushnell, defying the prevailing

　　wisdom that paddle games were over, decided to develop a single-player version

　　of Pong; instead of competing against an opponent, the player would volley the

　　ball into a wall that lost a brick whenever it was hit. He called Jobs into his

　　office, sketched it out on his little blackboard, and asked him to design it.

　　There would be a bonus, Bushnell told him, for every chip fewer than fifty that

　　he used. Bushnell knew that Jobs was not a great engineer, but he assumed,

　　correctly, that he would recruit Wozniak, who was always hanging around. “I

　　looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell recalled. “Woz was a better

　　engineer.”

　　Wozniak was thrilled when Jobs asked him to help and proposed splitting the fee.

　　“This was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that

　　people would use,” he recalled. Jobs said it had to be done in four days and

　　with the fewest chips possible. What he hid from Wozniak was that the deadline

　　was one that Jobs had imposed, because he needed to get to the All One Farm to

　　help prepare for the apple harvest. He also didn’t mention that there was a

　　bonus tied to keeping down the number of chips.

　　“A game like this might take most engineers a few months,” Wozniak recalled. “I

　　thought that there was no way I could do it, but Steve made me sure that I

　　could.” So he stayed up four nights in a row and did it. During the day at HP,

　　Wozniak would sketch out his design on paper. Then, after a fast-food meal, he

　　would go right to Atari and stay all night. As Wozniak churned out the design,

　　Jobs sat on a bench to his left implementing it by wire-wrapping the chips onto

　　a breadboard. “While Steve was breadboarding, I spent time playing my favorite

　　game ever, which was the auto racing game Gran Trak 10,” Wozniak said.

　　Astonishingly, they were able to get the job done in four days, and Wozniak used

　　only forty-five chips. Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply

　　gave Wozniak half of the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving

　　five chips. It would be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being

　　shown the tale in a book on the history of Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been

　　paid this bonus. “I think that Steve needed the money, and he just didn’t tell

　　me the truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there are long

　　pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been honest.

　　If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just

　　given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.” To Wozniak, it showed

　　a fundamental difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to me, and

　　I still don’t understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d

　　gotten paid another,” he said. “But, you know, people are different.”

　　When Jobs learned this story was published, he called Wozniak to deny it. “He

　　told me that he didn’t remember doing it, and that if he did something like that

　　he would remember it, so he probably didn’t do it,” Wozniak recalled. When I

　　asked Jobs directly, he became unusually quiet and hesitant. “I don’t know where

　　that allegation comes from,” he said. “I gave him half the money I ever got.

　　That’s how I’ve always been with Woz. I mean, Woz stopped working in 1978. He

　　never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got exactly the same shares

　　of Apple stock that I did.”

　　Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did not, in fact,

　　shortchange Wozniak? “There’s a chance that my memory is all wrong and messed

　　up,” Wozniak told me, but after a pause he reconsidered. “But no. I remember the

　　details of this one, the $350 check.” He confirmed his memory with Nolan

　　Bushnell and Al Alcorn. “I remember talking about the bonus money to Woz, and he

　　was upset,” Bushnell said. “I said yes, there was a bonus for each chip they

　　saved, and he just shook his head and then clucked his tongue.”

　　Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it was not worth rehashing. Jobs

　　is a complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of

　　the traits that make him successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but

　　as he points out, he also could never have built Apple. “I would rather let it

　　pass,” he said when I pressed the point. “It’s not something I want to judge

　　Steve by.”

　　The Atari experience helped shape Jobs’s approach to business and design. He

　　appreciated the user-friendliness of Atari’s insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons

　　games. “That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product

　　person,” said Ron Wayne. Jobs also absorbed some of Bushnell’s take-no-prisoners

　　attitude. “Nolan wouldn’t take no for an answer,” according to Alcorn, “and this

　　was Steve’s first impression of how things got done. Nolan was never abusive,

　　like Steve sometimes is. But he had the same driven attitude. It made me cringe,

　　but dammit, it got things done. In that way Nolan was a mentor for Jobs.”

　　Bushnell agreed. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw

　　that in Steve,” he said. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also

　　the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something,

　　then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people

　　will assume that you are.’”UnknownTHE APPLE I

　　Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .

　　Daniel Kottke and Jobs with the Apple I at the Atlantic City computer fair,

　　1976

　　Machines of Loving Grace

　　In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various

　　cultural currents flowed together. There was the technology revolution that

　　began with the growth of military contractors and soon included electronics

　　firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and computer companies. There was

　　a hacker subculture—filled with wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and

　　just plain geeks—that included engineers who didn’t conform to the HP mold and

　　their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions. There

　　were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD; participants

　　included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto, who

　　later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken

　　Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light shows featuring a house band

　　that became the Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, born out of the

　　Bay Area’s beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of

　　the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various

　　self-fulfillment movements pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and

　　Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation, Esalen and

　　est.

　　This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology,

　　was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics

　　classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own

　　business. “There was just something going on here,” he said, looking back at the

　　time and place. “The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson

　　Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things

　　like the Whole Earth Catalog.”

　　Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the

　　counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the

　　Pentagon and the power structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the historian

　　Lewis Mumford warned that computers were sucking away our freedom and destroying

　　“life-enhancing values.” An injunction on punch cards of the period—“Do not

　　fold, spindle or mutilate”—became an ironic phrase of the antiwar Left.

　　But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. “Computing went from being

　　dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of

　　individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his study of the

　　counterculture’s convergence with the computer industry, What the Dormouse Said.

　　It was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, “All

　　Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” and the cyberdelic fusion was

　　certified when Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new

　　LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot up,

　　jack in.” The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often discussed

　　with him why those immersed in the rock-drugs-rebel counterculture of the Bay

　　Area ended up helping to create the personal computer industry. “The people who

　　invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from

　　the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. “The

　　hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not

　　encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set

　　that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”

　　One person who encouraged the denizens of the counterculture to make common

　　cause with the hackers was Stewart Brand. A puckish visionary who generated fun

　　and ideas over many decades, Brand was a participant in one of the early sixties

　　LSD studies in Palo Alto. He joined with his fellow subject Ken Kesey to produce

　　the acid-celebrating Trips Festival, appeared in the opening scene of Tom

　　Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and worked with Doug Engelbart to

　　create a seminal sound-and-light presentation of new technologies called the

　　Mother of All Demos. “Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment

　　of centralized control,” Brand later noted. “But a tiny contingent—later called

　　hackers—embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of

　　liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.”

　　Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold

　　useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its

　　reach with the Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of

　　Earth taken from space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying

　　philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first

　　page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is

　　developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own

　　inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is

　　interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole

　　Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God

　　in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”

　　Jobs became a Whole Earth fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue,

　　which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school, and he brought it with

　　him to college and then to the All One Farm. “On the back cover of their final

　　issue” Jobs recalled, “was a photograph of an early morning country road, the

　　kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath

　　it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” Brand sees Jobs as one of the

　　purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog sought to celebrate.

　　“Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he said. “He

　　got the notion of tools for human use.”

　　Brand’s catalog was published with the help of the Portola Institute, a

　　foundation dedicated to the fledgling field of computer education. The

　　foundation also helped launch the People’s Computer Company, which was not a

　　company at all but a newsletter and organization with the motto “Computer power

　　to the people.” There were occasional Wednesday-night potluck dinners, and two

　　of the regulars, Gordon French and Fred Moore, decided to create a more formal

　　club where news about personal electronics could be shared.

　　They were energized by the arrival of the January 1975 issue of Popular

　　Mechanics, which had on its cover the first personal computer kit, the Altair.

　　The Altair wasn’t much—just a $495 pile of parts that had to be soldered to a

　　board that would then do little—but for hobbyists and hackers it heralded the

　　dawn of a new era. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the magazine and started

　　working on a version of BASIC, an easy-to-use programming language, for the

　　Altair. It also caught the attention of Jobs and Wozniak. And when an Altair kit

　　arrived at the People’s Computer Company, it became the centerpiece for the

　　first meeting of the club that French and Moore had decided to launch.

　　The Homebrew Computer Club

　　The group became known as the Homebrew Computer Club, and it encapsulated the

　　Whole Earth fusion between the counterculture and technology. It would become to

　　the personal computer era something akin to what the Turk’s Head coffeehouse was

　　to the age of Dr. Johnson, a place where ideas were exchanged and disseminated.

　　Moore wrote the flyer for the first meeting, held on March 5, 1975, in French’s

　　Menlo Park garage: “Are you building your own computer? Terminal, TV,

　　typewriter?” it asked. “If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people

　　with like-minded interests.”

　　Allen Baum spotted the flyer on the HP bulletin board and called Wozniak, who

　　agreed to go with him. “That night turned out to be one of the most important

　　nights of my life,” Wozniak recalled. About thirty other people showed up,

　　spilling out of French’s open garage door, and they took turns describing their

　　interests. Wozniak, who later admitted to being extremely nervous, said he liked

　　“video games, pay movies for hotels, scientific calculator design, and TV

　　terminal design,” according to the minutes prepared by Moore. There was a

　　demonstration of the new Altair, but more important to Wozniak was seeing the

　　specification sheet for a microprocessor.

　　As he thought about the microprocessor—a chip that had an entire central

　　processing unit on it—he had an insight. He had been designing a terminal, with

　　a keyboard and monitor, that would connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a

　　microprocessor, he could put some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the

　　terminal itself, so it could become a small stand-alone computer on a desktop.

　　It was an enduring idea: keyboard, screen, and computer all in one integrated

　　personal package. “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my

　　head,” he said. “That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later

　　become known as the Apple I.”

　　At first he planned to use the same microprocessor that was in the Altair, an

　　Intel 8080. But each of those “cost almost more than my monthly rent,” so he

　　looked for an alternative. He found one in the Motorola 6800, which a friend at

　　HP was able to get for $40 apiece. Then he discovered a chip made by MOS

　　Technologies that was electronically the same but cost only $20. It would make

　　his machine affordable, but it would carry a long-term cost. Intel’s chips ended

　　up becoming the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its computers

　　were incompatible with it.

　　After work each day, Wozniak would go home for a TV dinner and then return to HP

　　to moonlight on his computer. He spread out the parts in his cubicle, figured

　　out their placement, and soldered them onto his motherboard. Then he began

　　writing the software that would get the microprocessor to display images on the

　　screen. Because he could not afford to pay for computer time, he wrote the code

　　by hand. After a couple of months he was ready to test it. “I typed a few keys

　　on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen.” It

　　was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer. “It was the

　　first time in history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had typed a character on a

　　keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of

　　them.”

　　Jobs was impressed. He peppered Wozniak with questions: Could the computer ever

　　be networked? Was it possible to add a disk for memory storage? He also began to

　　help Woz get components. Particularly important were the dynamic random-access

　　memory chips. Jobs made a few calls and was able to score some from Intel for

　　free. “Steve is just that sort of person,” said Wozniak. “I mean, he knew how to

　　talk to a sales representative. I could never have done that. I’m too shy.”

　　Jobs began to accompany Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the TV monitor

　　and helping to set things up. The meetings now attracted more than one hundred

　　enthusiasts and had been moved to the auditorium of the Stanford Linear

　　Accelerator Center. Presiding with a pointer and a free-form manner was Lee

　　Felsenstein, another embodiment of the merger between the world of computing and

　　the counterculture. He was an engineering school dropout, a participant in the

　　Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He had written for the

　　alternative newspaper Berkeley Barb and then gone back to being a computer

　　engineer.

　　Woz was usually too shy to talk in the meetings, but people would gather around

　　his machine afterward, and he would proudly show off his progress. Moore had

　　tried to instill in the Homebrew an ethos of swapping and sharing rather than

　　commerce. “The theme of the club,” Woz said, “was ‘Give to help others.’” It was

　　an expression of the hacker ethic that information should be free and all

　　authority mistrusted. “I designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away

　　for free to other people,” said Wozniak.

　　This was not an outlook that Bill Gates embraced. After he and Paul Allen had

　　completed their BASIC interpreter for the Altair, Gates was appalled that

　　members of the Homebrew were making copies of it and sharing it without paying

　　him. So he wrote what would become a famous letter to the club: “As the majority

　　of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Is this fair? . . .

　　One thing you do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to

　　do professional work for nothing? . . . I would appreciate letters from anyone

　　who wants to pay up.”

　　Steve Jobs, similarly, did not embrace the notion that Wozniak’s creations, be

　　it a Blue Box or a computer, wanted to be free. So he convinced Wozniak to stop

　　giving away copies of his schematics. Most people didn’t have time to build it

　　themselves anyway, Jobs argued. “Why don’t we build and sell printed circuit

　　boards to them?” It was an example of their symbiosis. “Every time I’d design

　　something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us,” said Wozniak.

　　Wozniak admitted that he would have never thought of doing that on his own. “It

　　never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them

　　in the air and sell a few.’”

　　Jobs worked out a plan to pay a guy he knew at Atari to draw the circuit boards

　　and then print up fifty or so. That would cost about $1,000, plus the fee to the

　　designer. They could sell them for $40 apiece and perhaps clear a profit of

　　$700. Wozniak was dubious that they could sell them all. “I didn’t see how we

　　would make our money back,” he recalled. He was already in trouble with his

　　landlord for bouncing checks and now had to pay each month in cash.

　　Jobs knew how to appeal to Wozniak. He didn’t argue that they were sure to make

　　money, but instead that they would have a fun adventure. “Even if we lose our

　　money, we’ll have a company,” said Jobs as they were driving in his Volkswagen

　　bus. “For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” This was enticing to

　　Wozniak, even more than any prospect of getting rich. He recalled, “I was

　　excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company.

　　Wow. I knew right then that I’d do it. How could I not?”

　　In order to raise the money they needed, Wozniak sold his HP 65 calculator for

　　$500, though the buyer ended up stiffing him for half of that. For his part,

　　Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus for $1,500. But the person who bought it came to

　　find him two weeks later and said the engine had broken down, and Jobs agreed to

　　pay for half of the repairs. Despite these little setbacks, they now had, with

　　their own small savings thrown in, about $1,300 in working capital, the design

　　for a product, and a plan. They would start their own computer company.

　　Apple Is Born

　　Now that they had decided to start a business, they needed a name. Jobs had gone

　　for another visit to the All One Farm, where he had been pruning the Gravenstein

　　apple trees, and Wozniak picked him up at the airport. On the ride down to Los

　　Altos, they bandied around options. They considered some typical tech words,

　　such as Matrix, and some neologisms, such as Executek, and some straightforward

　　boring names, like Personal Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was the

　　next day, when Jobs wanted to start filing the papers. Finally Jobs proposed

　　Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just

　　come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating.

　　Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of

　　Atari in the phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name did not hit them

　　by the next afternoon, they would just stick with Apple. And they did.

　　Apple. It was a smart choice. The word instantly signaled friendliness and

　　simplicity. It managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of

　　pie. There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet

　　nothing could be more American. And the two words together—Apple

　　Computer—provided an amusing disjuncture. “It doesn’t quite make sense,” said

　　Mike Markkula, who soon thereafter became the first chairman of the new company.

　　“So it forces your brain to dwell on it. Apple and computers, that doesn’t go

　　together! So it helped us grow brand awareness.”

　　Wozniak was not yet ready to commit full-time. He was an HP company man at

　　heart, or so he thought, and he wanted to keep his day job there. Jobs realized

　　he needed an ally to help corral Wozniak and adjudicate if there was a

　　disagreement. So he enlisted his friend Ron Wayne, the middle-aged engineer at

　　Atari who had once started a slot machine company.

　　Wayne knew that it would not be easy to make Wozniak quit HP, nor was it

　　necessary right away. Instead the key was to convince him that his computer

　　designs would be owned by the Apple partnership. “Woz had a parental attitude

　　toward the circuits he developed, and he wanted to be able to use them in other

　　applications or let HP use them,” Wayne said. “Jobs and I realized that these

　　circuits would be the core of Apple. We spent two hours in a roundtable

　　discussion at my apartment, and I was able to get Woz to accept this.” His

　　argument was that a great engineer would be remembered only if he teamed with a

　　great marketer, and this required him to commit his designs to the partnership.

　　Jobs was so impressed and grateful that he offered Wayne a 10% stake in the new

　　partnership, turning him into a tie-breaker if Jobs and Wozniak disagreed over

　　an issue.

　　“They were very different, but they made a powerful team,” said Wayne. Jobs at

　　times seemed to be driven by demons, while Woz seemed a naïf who was toyed with

　　by angels. Jobs had a bravado that helped him get things done, occasionally by

　　manipulating people. He could be charismatic, even mesmerizing, but also cold

　　and brutal. Wozniak, in contrast, was shy and socially awkward, which made him

　　seem childishly sweet. “Woz is very bright in some areas, but he’s almost like a

　　savant, since he was so stunted when it came to dealing with people he didn’t

　　know,” said Jobs. “We were a good pair.” It helped that Jobs was awed by

　　Wozniak’s engineering wizardry, and Wozniak was awed by Jobs’s business drive.

　　“I never wanted to deal with people and step on toes, but Steve could call up

　　people he didn’t know and make them do things,” Wozniak recalled. “He could be

　　rough on people he didn’t think were smart, but he never treated me rudely, even

　　in later years when maybe I couldn’t answer a question as well as he wanted.”

　　Even after Wozniak became convinced that his new computer design should become

　　the property of the Apple partnership, he felt that he had to offer it first to

　　HP, since he was working there. “I believed it was my duty to tell HP about what

　　I had designed while working for them. That was the right thing and the ethical

　　thing.” So he demonstrated it to his managers in the spring of 1976. The senior

　　executive at the meeting was impressed, and seemed torn, but he finally said it

　　was not something that HP could develop. It was a hobbyist product, at least for

　　now, and didn’t fit into the company’s high-quality market segments. “I was

　　disappointed,” Wozniak recalled, “but now I was free to enter into the Apple

　　partnership.”

　　On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak went to Wayne’s apartment in Mountain View to

　　draw up the partnership agreement. Wayne said he had some experience “writing in

　　legalese,” so he composed the three-page document himself. His “legalese” got

　　the better of him. Paragraphs began with various flourishes: “Be it noted

　　herewith . . . Be it further noted herewith . . . Now the refore [sic], in

　　consideration of the respective assignments of interests . . .” But the division

　　of shares and profits was clear—45%-45%-10%—and it was stipulated that any

　　expenditures of more than $100 would require agreement of at least two of the

　　partners. Also, the responsibilities were spelled out. “Wozniak shall assume

　　both general and major responsibility for the conduct of Electrical Engineering;

　　Jobs shall assume general responsibility for Electrical Engineering and

　　Marketing, and Wayne shall assume major responsibility for Mechanical

　　Engineering and Documentation.” Jobs signed in lowercase script, Wozniak in

　　careful cursive, and Wayne in an illegible squiggle.

　　Wayne then got cold feet. As Jobs started planning to borrow and spend more

　　money, he recalled the failure of his own company. He didn’t want to go through

　　that again. Jobs and Wozniak had no personal assets, but Wayne (who worried

　　about a global financial Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his mattress.

　　Because they had structured Apple as a simple partnership rather than a

　　corporation, the partners would be personally liable for the debts, and Wayne

　　was afraid potential creditors would go after him. So he returned to the Santa

　　Clara County office just eleven days later with a “statement of withdrawal” and

　　an amendment to the partnership agreement. “By virtue of a re-assessment of

　　understandings by and between all parties,” it began, “Wayne shall hereinafter

　　cease to function in the status of ‘Partner.’” It noted that in payment for his

　　10% of the company, he received $800, and shortly afterward $1,500 more.

　　Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010 it would have been

　　worth approximately $2.6 billion. Instead he was then living alone in a small

　　home in Pahrump, Nevada, where he played the penny slot machines and lived off

　　his social security check. He later claimed he had no regrets. “I made the best

　　decision for me at the time. Both of them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my

　　stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride.”

　　Jobs and Wozniak took the stage together for a presentation to the Homebrew

　　Computer Club shortly after they signed Apple into existence. Wozniak held up

　　one of their newly produced circuit boards and described the microprocessor, the

　　eight kilobytes of memory, and the version of BASIC he had written. He also

　　emphasized what he called the main thing: “a human-typable keyboard instead of a

　　stupid, cryptic front panel with a bunch of lights and switches.” Then it was

　　Jobs’s turn. He pointed out that the Apple, unlike the Altair, had all the

　　essential components built in. Then he challenged them with a question: How much

　　would people be willing to pay for such a wonderful machine? He was trying to

　　get them to see the amazing value of the Apple. It was a rhetorical flourish he

　　would use at product presentations over the ensuing decades.

　　The audience was not very impressed. The Apple had a cut-rate microprocessor,

　　not the Intel 8080. But one important person stayed behind to hear more. His

　　name was Paul Terrell, and in 1975 he had opened a computer store, which he

　　dubbed the Byte Shop, on Camino Real in Menlo Park. Now, a year later, he had

　　three stores and visions of building a national chain. Jobs was thrilled to give

　　him a private demo. “Take a look at this,” he said. “You’re going to like what

　　you see.” Terrell was impressed enough to hand Jobs and Woz his card. “Keep in

　　touch,” he said.

　　“I’m keeping in touch,” Jobs announced the next day when he walked barefoot into

　　the Byte Shop. He made the sale. Terrell agreed to order fifty computers. But

　　there was a condition: He didn’t want just $50 printed circuit boards, for which

　　customers would then have to buy all the chips and do the assembly. That might

　　appeal to a few hard-core hobbyists, but not to most customers. Instead he

　　wanted the boards to be fully assembled. For that he was willing to pay about

　　$500 apiece, cash on delivery.

　　Jobs immediately called Wozniak at HP. “Are you sitting down?” he asked. Wozniak

　　said he wasn’t. Jobs nevertheless proceeded to give him the news. “I was

　　shocked, just completely shocked,” Wozniak recalled. “I will never forget that

　　moment.”

　　To fill the order, they needed about $15,000 worth of parts. Allen Baum, the

　　third prankster from Homestead High, and his father agreed to loan them $5,000.

　　Jobs tried to borrow more from a bank in Los Altos, but the manager looked at

　　him and, not surprisingly, declined. He went to Haltek Supply and offered an

　　equity stake in Apple in return for the parts, but the owner decided they were

　　“a couple of young, scruffy-looking guys,” and declined. Alcorn at Atari would

　　sell them chips only if they paid cash up front. Finally, Jobs was able to

　　convince the manager of Cramer Electronics to call Paul Terrell to confirm that

　　he had really committed to a $25,000 order. Terrell was at a conference when he

　　heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been

　　persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked

　　in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it

　　was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit.

　　Garage Band

　　The Jobs house in Los Altos became the assembly point for the fifty Apple I

　　boards that had to be delivered to the Byte Shop within thirty days, when the

　　payment for the parts would come due. All available hands were enlisted: Jobs

　　and Wozniak, plus Daniel Kottke, his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes (who had

　　broken away from the cult she’d joined), and Jobs’s pregnant sister, Patty. Her

　　vacated bedroom as well as the kitchen table and garage were commandeered as

　　work space. Holmes, who had taken jewelry classes, was given the task of

　　soldering chips. “Most I did well, but I got flux on a few of them,” she

　　recalled. This didn’t please Jobs. “We don’t have a chip to spare,” he railed,

　　correctly. He shifted her to bookkeeping and paperwork at the kitchen table, and

　　he did the soldering himself. When they completed a board, they would hand it

　　off to Wozniak. “I would plug each assembled board into the TV and keyboard to

　　test it to see if it worked,” he said. “If it did, I put it in a box. If it

　　didn’t, I’d figure what pin hadn’t gotten into the socket right.”

　　Paul Jobs suspended his sideline of repairing old cars so that the Apple team

　　could have the whole garage. He put in a long old workbench, hung a schematic of

　　the computer on the new plasterboard wall he built, and set up rows of labeled

　　drawers for the components. He also built a burn box bathed in heat lamps so the

　　computer boards could be tested by running overnight at high temperatures. When

　　there was the occasional eruption of temper, an occurrence not uncommon around

　　his son, Paul would impart some of his calm. “What’s the matter?” he would say.

　　“You got a feather up your ass?” In return he occasionally asked to borrow back

　　the TV set so he could watch the end of a football game. During some of these

　　breaks, Jobs and Kottke would go outside and play guitar on the lawn.

　　Clara Jobs didn’t mind losing most of her house to piles of parts and

　　houseguests, but she was frustrated by her son’s increasingly quirky diets. “She

　　would roll her eyes at his latest eating obsessions,” recalled Holmes. “She just

　　wanted him to be healthy, and he would be making weird pronouncements like, ‘I’m

　　a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight.’”

　　After a dozen assembled boards had been approved by Wozniak, Jobs drove them

　　over to the Byte Shop. Terrell was a bit taken aback. There was no power supply,

　　case, monitor, or keyboard. He had expected something more finished. But Jobs

　　stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.

　　After thirty days Apple was on the verge of being profitable. “We were able to

　　build the boards more cheaply than we thought, because I got a good deal on

　　parts,” Jobs recalled. “So the fifty we sold to the Byte Shop almost paid for

　　all the material we needed to make a hundred boards.” Now they could make a real

　　profit by selling the remaining fifty to their friends and Homebrew compatriots.

　　Elizabeth Holmes officially became the part-time bookkeeper at $4 an hour,

　　driving down from San Francisco once a week and figuring out how to port Jobs’s

　　checkbook into a ledger. In order to make Apple seem like a real company, Jobs

　　hired an answering service, which would relay messages to his mother. Ron Wayne

　　drew a logo, using the ornate line-drawing style of Victorian illustrated

　　fiction, that featured Newton sitting under a tree framed by a quote from

　　Wordsworth: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” It

　　was a rather odd motto, one that fit Wayne’s self-image more than Apple

　　Computer. Perhaps a better Wordsworth line would have been the poet’s

　　description of those involved in the start of the French Revolution: “Bliss was

　　it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!” As Wozniak later

　　exulted, “We were participating in the biggest revolution that had ever

　　happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it.”

　　Woz had already begun thinking about the next version of the machine, so they

　　started calling their current model the Apple I. Jobs and Woz would drive up and

　　down Camino Real trying to get the electronics stores to sell it. In addition to

　　the fifty sold by the Byte Shop and almost fifty sold to friends, they were

　　building another hundred for retail outlets. Not surprisingly, they had

　　contradictory impulses: Wozniak wanted to sell them for about what it cost to

　　build them, but Jobs wanted to make a serious profit. Jobs prevailed. He picked

　　a retail price that was about three times what it cost to build the boards and a

　　33% markup over the $500 wholesale price that Terrell and other stores paid. The

　　result was $666.66. “I was always into repeating digits,” Wozniak said. “The

　　phone number for my dial-a-joke service was 255-6666.” Neither of them knew that

　　in the Book of Revelation 666 symbolized the “number of the beast,” but they

　　soon were faced with complaints, especially after 666 was featured in that

　　year’s hit movie, The Omen. (In 2010 one of the original Apple I computers was

　　sold at auction by Christie’s for $213,000.)

　　The first feature story on the new machine appeared in the July 1976 issue of

　　Interface, a now-defunct hobbyist magazine. Jobs and friends were still making

　　them by hand in his house, but the article referred to him as the director of

　　marketing and “a former private consultant to Atari.” It made Apple sound like a

　　real company. “Steve communicates with many of the computer clubs to keep his

　　finger on the heartbeat of this young industry,” the article reported, and it

　　quoted him explaining, “If we can rap about their needs, feelings and

　　motivations, we can respond appropriately by giving them what they want.”

　　By this time they had other competitors, in addition to the Altair, most notably

　　the IMSAI 8080 and Processor Technology Corporation’s SOL-20. The latter was

　　designed by Lee Felsenstein and Gordon French of the Homebrew Computer Club.

　　They all had the chance to go on display during Labor Day weekend of 1976, at

　　the first annual Personal Computer Festival, held in a tired hotel on the

　　decaying boardwalk of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Jobs and Wozniak took a TWA

　　flight to Philadelphia, cradling one cigar box with the Apple I and another with

　　the prototype for the successor that Woz was working on. Sitting in the row

　　behind them was Felsenstein, who looked at the Apple I and pronounced it

　　“thoroughly unimpressive.” Wozniak was unnerved by the conversation in the row

　　behind him. “We could hear them talking in advanced business talk,” he recalled,

　　“using businesslike acronyms we’d never heard before.”

　　Wozniak spent most of his time in their hotel room, tweaking his new prototype.

　　He was too shy to stand at the card table that Apple had been assigned near the

　　back of the exhibition hall. Daniel Kottke had taken the train down from

　　Manhattan, where he was now attending Columbia, and he manned the table while

　　Jobs walked the floor to inspect the competition. What he saw did not impress

　　him. Wozniak, he felt reassured, was the best circuit engineer, and the Apple I

　　(and surely its successor) could beat the competition in terms of functionality.

　　However, the SOL-20 was better looking. It had a sleek metal case, a keyboard, a

　　power supply, and cables. It looked as if it had been produced by grown-ups. The

　　Apple I, on the other hand, appeared as scruffy as its creators.UnknownTHE APPLE II

　　Dawn of a New Age

　　An Integrated Package

　　As Jobs walked the floor of the Personal Computer Festival, he came to the

　　realization that Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop had been right: Personal

　　computers should come in a complete package. The next Apple, he decided, needed

　　to have a great case and a built-in keyboard, and be integrated end to end, from

　　the power supply to the software. “My vision was to create the first fully

　　packaged computer,” he recalled. “We were no longer aiming for the handful of

　　hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers, who knew how to buy

　　transformers and keyboards. For every one of them there were a thousand people

　　who would want the machine to be ready to run.”

　　In their hotel room on that Labor Day weekend of 1976, Wozniak tinkered with the

　　prototype of the new machine, to be named the Apple II, that Jobs hoped would

　　take them to this next level. They brought the prototype out only once, late at

　　night, to test it on the color projection television in one of the conference

　　rooms. Wozniak had come up with an ingenious way to goose the machine’s chips

　　into creating color, and he wanted to see if it would work on the type of

　　television that uses a projector to display on a movie-like screen. “I figured a

　　projector might have a different color circuitry that would choke on my color

　　method,” he recalled. “So I hooked up the Apple II to this projector and it

　　worked perfectly.” As he typed on his keyboard, colorful lines and swirls burst

　　on the screen across the room. The only outsider who saw this first Apple II was

　　the hotel’s technician. He said he had looked at all the machines, and this was

　　the one he would be buying.

　　To produce the fully packaged Apple II would require significant capital, so

　　they considered selling the rights to a larger company. Jobs went to Al Alcorn

　　and asked for the chance to pitch it to Atari’s management. He set up a meeting

　　with the company’s president, Joe Keenan, who was a lot more conservative than

　　Alcorn and Bushnell. “Steve goes in to pitch him, but Joe couldn’t stand him,”

　　Alcorn recalled. “He didn’t appreciate Steve’s hygiene.” Jobs was barefoot, and

　　at one point put his feet up on a desk. “Not only are we not going to buy this

　　thing,” Keenan shouted, “but get your feet off my desk!” Alcorn recalled

　　thinking, “Oh, well. There goes that possibility.”

　　In September Chuck Peddle of the Commodore computer company came by the Jobs

　　house to get a demo. “We’d opened Steve’s garage to the sunlight, and he came in

　　wearing a suit and a cowboy hat,” Wozniak recalled. Peddle loved the Apple II,

　　and he arranged a presentation for his top brass a few weeks later at Commodore

　　headquarters. “You might want to buy us for a few hundred thousand dollars,”

　　Jobs said when they got there. Wozniak was stunned by this “ridiculous”

　　suggestion, but Jobs persisted. The Commodore honchos called a few days later to

　　say they had decided it would be cheaper to build their own machine. Jobs was

　　not upset. He had checked out Commodore and decided that its leadership was

　　“sleazy.” Wozniak did not rue the lost money, but his engineering sensibilities

　　were offended when the company came out with the Commodore PET nine months

　　later. “It kind of sickened me. They made a real crappy product by doing it so

　　quick. They could have had Apple.”

　　The Commodore flirtation brought to the surface a potential conflict between

　　Jobs and Wozniak: Were they truly equal in what they contributed to Apple and

　　what they should get out of it? Jerry Wozniak, who exalted the value of

　　engineers over mere entrepreneurs and marketers, thought most of the money

　　should be going to his son. He confronted Jobs personally when he came by the

　　Wozniak house. “You don’t deserve shit,” he told Jobs. “You haven’t produced

　　anything.” Jobs began to cry, which was not unusual. He had never been, and

　　would never be, adept at containing his emotions. He told Steve Wozniak that he

　　was willing to call off the partnership. “If we’re not fifty-fifty,” he said to

　　his friend, “you can have the whole thing.” Wozniak, however, understood better

　　than his father the symbiosis they had. If it had not been for Jobs, he might

　　still be handing out schematics of his boards for free at the back of Homebrew

　　meetings. It was Jobs who had turned his ingenious designs into a budding

　　business, just as he had with the Blue Box. He agreed they should remain

　　partners.

　　It was a smart call. To make the Apple II successful required more than just

　　Wozniak’s awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully

　　integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs’s role.

　　He began by asking their erstwhile partner Ron Wayne to design a case. “I

　　assumed they had no money, so I did one that didn’t require any tooling and

　　could be fabricated in a standard metal shop,” he said. His design called for a

　　Plexiglas cover attached by metal straps and a rolltop door that slid down over

　　the keyboard.

　　Jobs didn’t like it. He wanted a simple and elegant design, which he hoped would

　　set Apple apart from the other machines, with their clunky gray metal cases.

　　While haunting the appliance aisles at Macy’s, he was struck by the Cuisinart

　　food processors and decided that he wanted a sleek case made of light molded

　　plastic. At a Homebrew meeting, he offered a local consultant, Jerry Manock,

　　$1,500 to produce such a design. Manock, dubious about Jobs’s appearance, asked

　　for the money up front. Jobs refused, but Manock took the job anyway. Within

　　weeks he had produced a simple foam-molded plastic case that was uncluttered and

　　exuded friendliness. Jobs was thrilled.

　　Next came the power supply. Digital geeks like Wozniak paid little attention to

　　something so analog and mundane, but Jobs decided it was a key component. In

　　particular he wanted—as he would his entire career—to provide power in a way

　　that avoided the need for a fan. Fans inside computers were not Zen-like; they

　　distracted. He dropped by Atari to consult with Alcorn, who knew old-fashioned

　　electrical engineering. “Al turned me on to this brilliant guy named Rod Holt,

　　who was a chain-smoking Marxist who had been through many marriages and was an

　　expert on everything,” Jobs recalled. Like Manock and others meeting Jobs for

　　the first time, Holt took a look at him and was skeptical. “I’m expensive,” Holt

　　said. Jobs sensed he was worth it and said that cost was no problem. “He just

　　conned me into working,” said Holt, who ended up joining Apple full-time.

　　Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one like those used in

　　oscilloscopes. It switched the power on and off not sixty times per second, but

　　thousands of times; this allowed it to store the power for far less time, and

　　thus throw off less heat. “That switching power supply was as revolutionary as

　　the Apple II logic board was,” Jobs later said. “Rod doesn’t get a lot of credit

　　for this in the history books, but he should. Every computer now uses switching

　　power supplies, and they all rip off Rod’s design.” For all of Wozniak’s

　　brilliance, this was not something he could have done. “I only knew vaguely what

　　a switching power supply was,” Woz admitted.

　　Jobs’s father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about

　　the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of

　　the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because

　　the lines were not straight enough.

　　This passion for perfection led him to indulge his instinct to control. Most

　　hackers and hobbyists liked to customize, modify, and jack various things into

　　their computers. To Jobs, this was a threat to a seamless end-to-end user

　　experience. Wozniak, a hacker at heart, disagreed. He wanted to include eight

　　slots on the Apple II for users to insert whatever smaller circuit boards and

　　peripherals they might want. Jobs insisted there be only two, for a printer and

　　a modem. “Usually I’m really easy to get along with, but this time I told him,

　　‘If that’s what you want, go get yourself another computer,’” Wozniak recalled.

　　“I knew that people like me would eventually come up with things to add to any

　　computer.” Wozniak won the argument that time, but he could sense his power

　　waning. “I was in a position to do that then. I wouldn’t always be.”

　　Mike Markkula

　　All of this required money. “The tooling of this plastic case was going to cost,

　　like, $100,000,” Jobs said. “Just to get this whole thing into production was

　　going to be, like, $200,000.” He went back to Nolan Bushnell, this time to get

　　him to put in some money and take a minority equity stake. “He asked me if I

　　would put $50,000 in and he would give me a third of the company,” said

　　Bushnell. “I was so smart, I said no. It’s kind of fun to think about that, when

　　I’m not crying.”

　　Bushnell suggested that Jobs try Don Valentine, a straight-shooting former

　　marketing manager at National Semiconductor who had founded Sequoia Capital, a

　　pioneering venture capital firm. Valentine arrived at the Jobses’ garage in a

　　Mercedes wearing a blue suit, button-down shirt, and rep tie. His first

　　impression was that Jobs looked and smelled odd. “Steve was trying to be the

　　embodiment of the counterculture. He had a wispy beard, was very thin, and

　　looked like Ho Chi Minh.”

　　Valentine, however, did not become a preeminent Silicon Valley investor by

　　relying on surface appearances. What bothered him more was that Jobs knew

　　nothing about marketing and seemed content to peddle his product to individual

　　stores one by one. “If you want me to finance you,” Valentine told him, “you

　　need to have one person as a partner who understands marketing and distribution

　　and can write a business plan.” Jobs tended to be either bristly or solicitous

　　when older people offered him advice. With Valentine he was the latter. “Send me

　　three suggestions,” he replied. Valentine did, Jobs met them, and he clicked

　　with one of them, a man named Mike Markkula, who would end up playing a critical

　　role at Apple for the next two decades.

　　Markkula was only thirty-three, but he had already retired after working at

　　Fairchild and then Intel, where he made millions on his stock options when the

　　chip maker went public. He was a cautious and shrewd man, with the precise moves

　　of someone who had been a gymnast in high school, and he excelled at figuring

　　out pricing strategies, distribution networks, marketing, and finance. Despite

　　being slightly reserved, he had a flashy side when it came to enjoying his newly

　　minted wealth. He built himself a house in Lake Tahoe and later an outsize

　　mansion in the hills of Woodside. When he showed up for his first meeting at

　　Jobs’s garage, he was driving not a dark Mercedes like Valentine, but a highly

　　polished gold Corvette convertible. “When I arrived at the garage, Woz was at

　　the workbench and immediately began showing off the Apple II,” Markkula

　　recalled. “I looked past the fact that both guys needed a haircut and was amazed

　　by what I saw on that workbench. You can always get a haircut.”

　　Jobs immediately liked Markkula. “He was short and he had been passed over for

　　the top marketing job at Intel, which I suspect made him want to prove himself.”

　　He also struck Jobs as decent and fair. “You could tell that if he could screw

　　you, he wouldn’t. He had a real moral sense to him.” Wozniak was equally

　　impressed. “I thought he was the nicest person ever,” he recalled. “Better

　　still, he actually liked what we had!”

　　Markkula proposed to Jobs that they write a business plan together. “If it comes

　　out well, I’ll invest,” Markkula said, “and if not, you’ve got a few weeks of my

　　time for free.” Jobs began going to Markkula’s house in the evenings, kicking

　　around projections and talking through the night. “We made a lot of assumptions,

　　such as about how many houses would have a personal computer, and there were

　　nights we were up until 4 a.m.,” Jobs recalled. Markkula ended up writing most

　　of the plan. “Steve would say, ‘I will bring you this section next time,’ but he

　　usually didn’t deliver on time, so I ended up doing it.”

　　Markkula’s plan envisioned ways of getting beyond the hobbyist market. “He

　　talked about introducing the computer to regular people in regular homes, doing

　　things like keeping track of your favorite recipes or balancing your checkbook,”

　　Wozniak recalled. Markkula made a wild prediction: “We’re going to be a Fortune

　　500 company in two years,” he said. “This is the start of an industry. It

　　happens once in a decade.” It would take Apple seven years to break into the

　　Fortune 500, but the spirit of Markkula’s prediction turned out to be true.

　　Markkula offered to guarantee a line of credit of up to $250,000 in return for

　　being made a one-third equity participant. Apple would incorporate, and he along

　　with Jobs and Wozniak would each own 26% of the stock. The rest would be

　　reserved to attract future investors. The three met in the cabana by Markkula’s

　　swimming pool and sealed the deal. “I thought it was unlikely that Mike would

　　ever see that $250,000 again, and I was impressed that he was willing to risk

　　it,” Jobs recalled.

　　Now it was necessary to convince Wozniak to come on board full-time. “Why can’t

　　I keep doing this on the side and just have HP as my secure job for life?” he

　　asked. Markkula said that wouldn’t work, and he gave Wozniak a deadline of a few

　　days to decide. “I felt very insecure in starting a company where I would be

　　expected to push people around and control what they did,” Wozniak recalled.

　　“I’d decided long ago that I would never become someone authoritative.” So he

　　went to Markkula’s cabana and announced that he was not leaving HP.

　　Markkula shrugged and said okay. But Jobs got very upset. He cajoled Wozniak; he

　　got friends to try to convince him; he cried, yelled, and threw a couple of

　　fits. He even went to Wozniak’s parents’ house, burst into tears, and asked

　　Jerry for help. By this point Wozniak’s father had realized there was real money

　　to be made by capitalizing on the Apple II, and he joined forces on Jobs’s

　　behalf. “I started getting phone calls at work and home from my dad, my mom, my

　　brother, and various friends,” Wozniak recalled. “Every one of them told me I’d

　　made the wrong decision.” None of that worked. Then Allen Baum, their Buck Fry

　　Club mate at Homestead High, called. “You really ought to go ahead and do it,”

　　he said. He argued that if he joined Apple full-time, he would not have to go

　　into management or give up being an engineer. “That was exactly what I needed to

　　hear,” Wozniak later said. “I could stay at the bottom of the organization

　　chart, as an engineer.” He called Jobs and declared that he was now ready to

　　come on board.

　　On January 3, 1977, the new corporation, the Apple Computer Co., was officially

　　created, and it bought out the old partnership that had been formed by Jobs and

　　Wozniak nine months earlier. Few people noticed. That month the Homebrew

　　surveyed its members and found that, of the 181 who owned personal computers,

　　only six owned an Apple. Jobs was convinced, however, that the Apple II would

　　change that.

　　Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs. Like Jobs’s adoptive father, he

　　would indulge Jobs’s strong will, and like his biological father, he would end

　　up abandoning him. “Markkula was as much a father-son relationship as Steve ever

　　had,” said the venture capitalist Arthur Rock. He began to teach Jobs about

　　marketing and sales. “Mike really took me under his wing,” Jobs recalled. “His

　　values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a

　　company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you

　　believe in and making a company that will last.”

　　Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing

　　Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate

　　connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their

　　needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a

　　good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the

　　unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly

　　named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or

　　product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its

　　cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most

　　useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be

　　perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we

　　will impute the desired qualities.”

　　For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand the needs and desires of

　　customers better than any other business leader, he would focus on a handful of

　　core products, and he would care, sometimes obsessively, about marketing and

　　image and even the details of packaging. “When you open the box of an iPhone or

　　iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the

　　product,” he said. “Mike taught me that.”

　　Regis McKenna

　　The first step in this process was convincing the Valley’s premier publicist,

　　Regis McKenna, to take on Apple as a client. McKenna was from a large

　　working-class Pittsburgh family, and bred into his bones was a steeliness that

　　he cloaked with charm. A college dropout, he had worked for Fairchild and

　　National Semiconductor before starting his own PR and advertising firm. His two

　　specialties were doling out exclusive interviews with his clients to journalists

　　he had cultivated and coming up with memorable ad campaigns that created brand

　　awareness for products such as microchips. One of these was a series of colorful

　　magazine ads for Intel that featured racing cars and poker chips rather than the

　　usual dull performance charts. These caught Jobs’s eye. He called Intel and

　　asked who created them. “Regis McKenna,” he was told. “I asked them what Regis

　　McKenna was,” Jobs recalled, “and they told me he was a person.” When Jobs

　　phoned, he couldn’t get through to McKenna. Instead he was transferred to Frank

　　Burge, an account executive, who tried to put him off. Jobs called back almost

　　every day.

　　Burge finally agreed to drive out to the Jobs garage. “Holy Christ, this guy is

　　going to be something else,” he recalled thinking. “What’s the least amount of

　　time I can spend with this clown without being rude.” Then, when he was

　　confronted with the unwashed and shaggy Jobs, two things hit him: “First, he was

　　an incredibly smart young man. Second, I didn’t understand a fiftieth of what he

　　was talking about.”

　　So Jobs and Wozniak were invited to have a meeting with, as his impish business

　　cards read, “Regis McKenna, himself.” This time it was the normally shy Wozniak

　　who became prickly. McKenna glanced at an article Wozniak was writing about

　　Apple and suggested that it was too technical and needed to be livened up. “I

　　don’t want any PR man touching my copy,” Wozniak snapped. McKenna suggested it

　　was time for them to leave his office. “But Steve called me back right away and

　　said he wanted to meet again,” McKenna recalled. “This time he came without Woz,

　　and we hit it off.”

　　McKenna had his team get to work on brochures for the Apple II. The first thing

　　they did was to replace Ron Wayne’s ornate Victorian woodcut-style logo, which

　　ran counter to McKenna’s colorful and playful advertising style. So an art

　　director, Rob Janoff, was assigned to create a new one. “Don’t make it cute,”

　　Jobs ordered. Janoff came up with a simple apple shape in two versions, one

　　whole and the other with a bite taken out of it. The first looked too much like

　　a cherry, so Jobs chose the one with a bite. He also picked a version that was

　　striped in six colors, with psychedelic hues sandwiched between whole-earth

　　green and sky blue, even though that made printing the logo significantly more

　　expensive. Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo

　　da Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design philosophy:

　　“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

　　The First Launch Event

　　The introduction of the Apple II was scheduled to coincide with the first West

　　Coast Computer Faire, to be held in April 1977 in San Francisco, organized by a

　　Homebrew stalwart, Jim Warren. Jobs signed Apple up for a booth as soon as he

　　got the information packet. He wanted to secure a location right at the front of

　　the hall as a dramatic way to launch the Apple II, and so he shocked Wozniak by

　　paying $5,000 in advance. “Steve decided that this was our big launch,” said

　　Wozniak. “We would show the world we had a great machine and a great company.”

　　It was an application of Markkula’s admonition that it was important to “impute”

　　your greatness by making a memorable impression on people, especially when

　　launching a new product. That was reflected in the care that Jobs took with

　　Apple’s display area. Other exhibitors had card tables and poster board signs.

　　Apple had a counter draped in black velvet and a large pane of backlit Plexiglas

　　with Janoff’s new logo. They put on display the only three Apple IIs that had

　　been finished, but empty boxes were piled up to give the impression that there

　　were many more on hand.

　　Jobs was furious that the computer cases had arrived with tiny blemishes on

　　them, so he had his handful of employees sand and polish them. The imputing even

　　extended to gussying up Jobs and Wozniak. Markkula sent them to a San Francisco

　　tailor for three-piece suits, which looked faintly ridiculous on them, like

　　tuxes on teenagers. “Markkula explained how we would all have to dress up

　　nicely, how we should appear and look, how we should act,” Wozniak recalled.

　　It was worth the effort. The Apple II looked solid yet friendly in its sleek

　　beige case, unlike the intimidating metal-clad machines and naked boards on the

　　other tables. Apple got three hundred orders at the show, and Jobs met a

　　Japanese textile maker, Mizushima Satoshi, who became Apple’s first dealer in

　　Japan.

　　The fancy clothes and Markkula’s injunctions could not, however, stop the

　　irrepressible Wozniak from playing some practical jokes. One program that he

　　displayed tried to guess people’s nationality from their last name and then

　　produced the relevant ethnic jokes. He also created and distributed a hoax

　　brochure for a new computer called the “Zaltair,” with all sorts of fake ad-copy

　　superlatives like “Imagine a car with five wheels.” Jobs briefly fell for the

　　joke and even took pride that the Apple II stacked up well against the Zaltair

　　in the comparison chart. He didn’t realize who had pulled the prank until eight

　　years later, when Woz gave him a framed copy of the brochure as a birthday gift.

　　Mike Scott

　　Apple was now a real company, with a dozen employees, a line of credit, and the

　　daily pressures that can come from customers and suppliers. It had even moved

　　out of the Jobses’ garage, finally, into a rented office on Stevens Creek

　　Boulevard in Cupertino, about a mile from where Jobs and Wozniak went to high

　　school.

　　Jobs did not wear his growing responsibilities gracefully. He had always been

　　temperamental and bratty. At Atari his behavior had caused him to be banished to

　　the night shift, but at Apple that was not possible. “He became increasingly

　　tyrannical and sharp in his criticism,” according to Markkula. “He would tell

　　people, ‘That design looks like shit.’” He was particularly rough on Wozniak’s

　　young programmers, Randy Wigginton and Chris Espinosa. “Steve would come in,

　　take a quick look at what I had done, and tell me it was shit without having any

　　idea what it was or why I had done it,” said Wigginton, who was just out of high

　　school.

　　There was also the issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced, against all

　　evidence, that his vegan diets meant that he didn’t need to use a deodorant or

　　take regular showers. “We would have to literally put him out the door and tell

　　him to go take a shower,” said Markkula. “At meetings we had to look at his

　　dirty feet.” Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet,

　　a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues.

　　Markkula was averse to confrontation, so he decided to bring in a president,

　　Mike Scott, to keep a tighter rein on Jobs. Markkula and Scott had joined

　　Fairchild on the same day in 1967, had adjoining offices, and shared the same

　　birthday, which they celebrated together each year. At their birthday lunch in

　　February 1977, when Scott was turning thirty-two, Markkula invited him to become

　　Apple’s new president.

　　On paper he looked like a great choice. He was running a manufacturing line for

　　National Semiconductor, and he had the advantage of being a manager who fully

　　understood engineering. In person, however, he had some quirks. He was

　　overweight, afflicted with tics and health problems, and so tightly wound that

　　he wandered the halls with clenched fists. He also could be argumentative. In

　　dealing with Jobs, that could be good or bad.

　　Wozniak quickly embraced the idea of hiring Scott. Like Markkula, he hated

　　dealing with the conflicts that Jobs engendered. Jobs, not surprisingly, had

　　more conflicted emotions. “I was only twenty-two, and I knew I wasn’t ready to

　　run a real company,” he said. “But Apple was my baby, and I didn’t want to give

　　it up.” Relinquishing any control was agonizing to him. He wrestled with the

　　issue over long lunches at Bob’s Big Boy hamburgers (Woz’s favorite place) and

　　at the Good Earth restaurant (Jobs’s). He finally acquiesced, reluctantly.

　　Mike Scott, called “Scotty” to distinguish him from Mike Markkula, had one

　　primary duty: managing Jobs. This was usually accomplished by Jobs’s preferred

　　mode of meeting, which was taking a walk together. “My very first walk was to

　　tell him to bathe more often,” Scott recalled. “He said that in exchange I had

　　to read his fruitarian diet book and consider it as a way to lose weight.” Scott

　　never adopted the diet or lost much weight, and Jobs made only minor

　　modifications to his hygiene. “Steve was adamant that he bathed once a week, and

　　that was adequate as long as he was eating a fruitarian diet.”

　　Jobs’s desire for control and disdain for authority was destined to be a problem

　　with the man who was brought in to be his regent, especially when Jobs

　　discovered that Scott was one of the only people he had yet encountered who

　　would not bend to his will. “The question between Steve and me was who could be

　　most stubborn, and I was pretty good at that,” Scott said. “He needed to be sat

　　on, and he sure didn’t like that.” Jobs later said, “I never yelled at anyone

　　more than I yelled at Scotty.”

　　An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak

　　and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t let him

　　have it, because that would stoke his ego even more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a

　　tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge #0.

　　Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge, but the Bank of America

　　required a positive integer for its payroll system and Jobs’s remained #2.

　　There was a more fundamental disagreement that went beyond personal petulance.

　　Jay Elliot, who was hired by Jobs after a chance meeting in a restaurant, noted

　　Jobs’s salient trait: “His obsession is a passion for the product, a passion for

　　product perfection.” Mike Scott, on the other hand, never let a passion for the

　　perfect take precedence over pragmatism. The design of the Apple II case was one

　　of many examples. The Pantone company, which Apple used to specify colors for

　　its plastic, had more than two thousand shades of beige. “None of them were good

　　enough for Steve,” Scott marveled. “He wanted to create a different shade, and I

　　had to stop him.” When the time came to tweak the design of the case, Jobs spent

　　days agonizing over just how rounded the corners should be. “I didn’t care how

　　rounded they were,” said Scott, “I just wanted it decided.” Another dispute was

　　over engineering benches. Scott wanted a standard gray; Jobs insisted on

　　special-order benches that were pure white. All of this finally led to a

　　showdown in front of Markkula about whether Jobs or Scott had the power to sign

　　purchase orders; Markkula sided with Scott. Jobs also insisted that Apple be

　　different in how it treated customers. He wanted a one-year warranty to come

　　with the Apple II. This flabbergasted Scott; the usual warranty was ninety days.

　　Again Jobs dissolved into tears during one of their arguments over the issue.

　　They walked around the parking lot to calm down, and Scott decided to relent on

　　this one.

　　Wozniak began to rankle at Jobs’s style. “Steve was too tough on people. I

　　wanted our company to feel like a family where we all had fun and shared

　　whatever we made.” Jobs, for his part, felt that Wozniak simply would not grow

　　up. “He was very childlike. He did a great version of BASIC, but then never

　　could buckle down and write the floating-point BASIC we needed, so we ended up

　　later having to make a deal with Microsoft. He was just too unfocused.”

　　But for the time being the personality clashes were manageable, mainly because

　　the company was doing so well. Ben Rosen, the analyst whose newsletters shaped

　　the opinions of the tech world, became an enthusiastic proselytizer for the

　　Apple II. An independent developer came up with the first spreadsheet and

　　personal finance program for personal computers, VisiCalc, and for a while it

　　was available only on the Apple II, turning the computer into something that

　　businesses and families could justify buying. The company began attracting

　　influential new investors. The pioneering venture capitalist Arthur Rock had

　　initially been unimpressed when Markkula sent Jobs to see him. “He looked as if

　　he had just come back from seeing that guru he had in India,” Rock recalled,

　　“and he kind of smelled that way too.” But after Rock scoped out the Apple II,

　　he made an investment and joined the board.

　　The Apple II would be marketed, in various models, for the next sixteen years,

　　with close to six million sold. More than any other machine, it launched the

　　personal computer industry. Wozniak deserves the historic credit for the design

　　of its awe-inspiring circuit board and related operating software, which was one

　　of the era’s great feats of solo invention. But Jobs was the one who integrated

　　Wozniak’s boards into a friendly package, from the power supply to the sleek

　　case. He also created the company that sprang up around Wozniak’s machines. As

　　Regis McKenna later said, “Woz designed a great machine, but it would be sitting

　　in hobby shops today were it not for Steve Jobs.” Nevertheless most people

　　considered the Apple II to be Wozniak’s creation. That would spur Jobs to pursue

　　the next great advance, one that he could call his own.UnknownCHRISANN AND LISA

　　He Who Is Abandoned . . .

　　Ever since they had lived together in a cabin during the summer after he

　　graduated from high school, Chrisann Brennan had woven in and out of Jobs’s

　　life. When he returned from India in 1974, they spent time together at Robert

　　Friedland’s farm. “Steve invited me up there, and we were just young and easy

　　and free,” she recalled. “There was an energy there that went to my heart.”

　　When they moved back to Los Altos, their relationship drifted into being, for

　　the most part, merely friendly. He lived at home and worked at Atari; she had a

　　small apartment and spent a lot of time at Kobun Chino’s Zen center. By early

　　1975 she had begun a relationship with a mutual friend, Greg Calhoun. “She was

　　with Greg, but went back to Steve occasionally,” according to Elizabeth Holmes.

　　“That was pretty much the way it was with all of us. We were sort of shifting

　　back and forth; it was the seventies, after all.”

　　Calhoun had been at Reed with Jobs, Friedland, Kottke, and Holmes. Like the

　　others, he became deeply involved with Eastern spirituality, dropped out of

　　Reed, and found his way to Friedland’s farm. There he moved into an eight-by

　　twenty-foot chicken coop that he converted into a little house by raising it

　　onto cinderblocks and building a sleeping loft inside. In the spring of 1975

　　Brennan moved in with him, and the next year they decided to make their own

　　pilgrimage to India. Jobs advised Calhoun not to take Brennan with him, saying

　　that she would interfere with his spiritual quest, but they went together

　　anyway. “I was just so impressed by what happened to Steve on his trip to India

　　that I wanted to go there,” she said.

　　Theirs was a serious trip, beginning in March 1976 and lasting almost a year. At

　　one point they ran out of money, so Calhoun hitchhiked to Iran to teach English

　　in Tehran. Brennan stayed in India, and when Calhoun’s teaching stint was over

　　they hitchhiked to meet each other in the middle, in Afghanistan. The world was

　　a very different place back then.

　　After a while their relationship frayed, and they returned from India

　　separately. By the summer of 1977 Brennan had moved back to Los Altos, where she

　　lived for a while in a tent on the grounds of Kobun Chino’s Zen center. By this

　　time Jobs had moved out of his parents’ house and was renting a $600 per month

　　suburban ranch house in Cupertino with Daniel Kottke. It was an odd scene of

　　free-spirited hippie types living in a tract house they dubbed Rancho Suburbia.

　　“It was a four-bedroom house, and we occasionally rented one of the bedrooms out

　　to all sorts of crazy people, including a stripper for a while,” recalled Jobs.

　　Kottke couldn’t quite figure out why Jobs had not just gotten his own house,

　　which he could have afforded by then. “I think he just wanted to have a

　　roommate,” Kottke speculated.

　　Even though her relationship with Jobs was sporadic, Brennan soon moved in as

　　well. This made for a set of living arrangements worthy of a French farce. The

　　house had two big bedrooms and two tiny ones. Jobs, not surprisingly,

　　commandeered the largest of them, and Brennan (who was not really living with

　　him) moved into the other big bedroom. “The two middle rooms were like for

　　babies, and I didn’t want either of them, so I moved into the living room and

　　slept on a foam pad,” said Kottke. They turned one of the small rooms into space

　　for meditating and dropping acid, like the attic space they had used at Reed. It

　　was filled with foam packing material from Apple boxes. “Neighborhood kids used

　　to come over and we would toss them in it and it was great fun,” said Kottke,

　　“but then Chrisann brought home some cats who peed in the foam, and then we had

　　to get rid of it.”

　　Living in the house at times rekindled the physical relationship between Brennan

　　and Jobs, and within a few months she was pregnant. “Steve and I were in and out

　　of a relationship for five years before I got pregnant,” she said. “We didn’t

　　know how to be together and we didn’t know how to be apart.” When Greg Calhoun

　　hitchhiked from Colorado to visit them on Thanksgiving 1977, Brennan told him

　　the news: “Steve and I got back together, and now I’m pregnant, but now we are

　　on again and off again, and I don’t know what to do.”

　　Calhoun noticed that Jobs was disconnected from the whole situation. He even

　　tried to convince Calhoun to stay with them and come to work at Apple. “Steve

　　was just not dealing with Chrisann or the pregnancy,” he recalled. “He could be

　　very engaged with you in one moment, but then very disengaged. There was a side

　　to him that was frighteningly cold.”

　　When Jobs did not want to deal with a distraction, he sometimes just ignored it,

　　as if he could will it out of existence. At times he was able to distort reality

　　not just for others but even for himself. In the case of Brennan’s pregnancy, he

　　simply shut it out of his mind. When confronted, he would deny that he knew he

　　was the father, even though he admitted that he had been sleeping with her. “I

　　wasn’t sure it was my kid, because I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one she

　　was sleeping with,” he told me later. “She and I were not really even going out

　　when she got pregnant. She just had a room in our house.” Brennan had no doubt

　　that Jobs was the father. She had not been involved with Greg or any other men

　　at the time.

　　Was he lying to himself, or did he not know that he was the father? “I just

　　think he couldn’t access that part of his brain or the idea of being

　　responsible,” Kottke said. Elizabeth Holmes agreed: “He considered the option of

　　parenthood and considered the option of not being a parent, and he decided to

　　believe the latter. He had other plans for his life.”

　　There was no discussion of marriage. “I knew that she was not the person I

　　wanted to marry, and we would never be happy, and it wouldn’t last long,” Jobs

　　later said. “I was all in favor of her getting an abortion, but she didn’t know

　　what to do. She thought about it repeatedly and decided not to, or I don’t know

　　that she ever really decided—I think time just decided for her.” Brennan told me

　　that it was her choice to have the baby: “He said he was fine with an abortion

　　but never pushed for it.” Interestingly, given his own background, he was

　　adamantly against one option. “He strongly discouraged me putting the child up

　　for adoption,” she said.

　　There was a disturbing irony. Jobs and Brennan were both twenty-three, the same

　　age that Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali had been when they had Jobs. He

　　had not yet tracked down his biological parents, but his adoptive parents had

　　told him some of their tale. “I didn’t know then about this coincidence of our

　　ages, so it didn’t affect my discussions with Chrisann,” he later said. He

　　dismissed the notion that he was somehow following his biological father’s

　　pattern of getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was twenty-three, but he did

　　admit that the ironic resonance gave him pause. “When I did find out that he was

　　twenty-three when he got Joanne pregnant with me, I thought, whoa!”

　　The relationship between Jobs and Brennan quickly deteriorated. “Chrisann would

　　get into this kind of victim mode, when she would say that Steve and I were

　　ganging up on her,” Kottke recalled. “Steve would just laugh and not take her

　　seriously.” Brennan was not, as even she later admitted, very emotionally

　　stable. She began breaking plates, throwing things, trashing the house, and

　　writing obscene words in charcoal on the wall. She said that Jobs kept provoking

　　her with his callousness: “He was an enlightened being who was cruel.” Kottke

　　was caught in the middle. “Daniel didn’t have that DNA of ruthlessness, so he

　　was a bit flipped by Steve’s behavior,” according to Brennan. “He would go from

　　‘Steve’s not treating you right’ to laughing at me with Steve.”

　　Robert Friedland came to her rescue. “He heard that I was pregnant, and he said

　　to come on up to the farm to have the baby,” she recalled. “So I did.” Elizabeth

　　Holmes and other friends were still living there, and they found an Oregon

　　midwife to help with the delivery. On May 17, 1978, Brennan gave birth to a baby

　　girl. Three days later Jobs flew up to be with them and help name the new baby.

　　The practice on the commune was to give children Eastern spiritual names, but

　　Jobs insisted that she had been born in America and ought to have a name that

　　fit. Brennan agreed. They named her Lisa Nicole Brennan, not giving her the last

　　name Jobs. And then he left to go back to work at Apple. “He didn’t want to have

　　anything to do with her or with me,” said Brennan.

　　She and Lisa moved to a tiny, dilapidated house in back of a home in Menlo Park.

　　They lived on welfare because Brennan did not feel up to suing for child

　　support. Finally, the County of San Mateo sued Jobs to try to prove paternity

　　and get him to take financial responsibility. At first Jobs was determined to

　　fight the case. His lawyers wanted Kottke to testify that he had never seen them

　　in bed together, and they tried to line up evidence that Brennan had been

　　sleeping with other men. “At one point I yelled at Steve on the phone, ‘You know

　　that is not true,’” Brennan recalled. “He was going to drag me through court

　　with a little baby and try to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have

　　been the father of that baby.”

　　A year after Lisa was born, Jobs agreed to take a paternity test. Brennan’s

　　family was surprised, but Jobs knew that Apple would soon be going public and he

　　decided it was best to get the issue resolved. DNA tests were new, and the one

　　that Jobs took was done at UCLA. “I had read about DNA testing, and I was happy

　　to do it to get things settled,” he said. The results were pretty dispositive.

　　“Probability of paternity . . . is 94.41%,” the report read. The California

　　courts ordered Jobs to start paying $385 a month in child support, sign an

　　agreement admitting paternity, and reimburse the county $5,856 in back welfare

　　payments. He was given visitation rights but for a long time didn’t exercise

　　them.

　　Even then Jobs continued at times to warp the reality around him. “He finally

　　told us on the board,” Arthur Rock recalled, “but he kept insisting that there

　　was a large probability that he wasn’t the father. He was delusional.” He told a

　　reporter for Time, Michael Moritz, that when you analyzed the statistics, it was

　　clear that “28% of the male population in the United States could be the

　　father.” It was not only a false claim but an odd one. Worse yet, when Chrisann

　　Brennan later heard what he said, she mistakenly thought that Jobs was

　　hyperbolically claiming that she might have slept with 28% of the men in the

　　United States. “He was trying to paint me as a slut or a whore,” she recalled.

　　“He spun the whore image onto me in order to not take responsibility.”

　　Years later Jobs was remorseful for the way he behaved, one of the few times in

　　his life he admitted as much:

　　I wish I had handled it differently. I could not see myself as a father then,

　　so I didn’t face up to it. But when the test results showed she was my

　　daughter, it’s not true that I doubted it. I agreed to support her until she

　　was eighteen and give some money to Chrisann as well. I found a house in Palo

　　Alto and fixed it up and let them live there rent-free. Her mother found her

　　great schools which I paid for. I tried to do the right thing. But if I could

　　do it over, I would do a better job.

　　Once the case was resolved, Jobs began to move on with his life—maturing in some

　　respects, though not all. He put aside drugs, eased away from being a strict

　　vegan, and cut back the time he spent on Zen retreats. He began getting stylish

　　haircuts and buying suits and shirts from the upscale San Francisco haberdashery

　　Wilkes Bashford. And he settled into a serious relationship with one of Regis

　　McKenna’s employees, a beautiful Polynesian-Polish woman named Barbara Jasinski.

　　There was still, to be sure, a childlike rebellious streak in him. He, Jasinski,

　　and Kottke liked to go skinny-dipping in Felt Lake on the edge of Interstate 280

　　near Stanford, and he bought a 1966 BMW R60/2 motorcycle that he adorned with

　　orange tassels on the handlebars. He could also still be bratty. He belittled

　　waitresses and frequently returned food with the proclamation that it was

　　“garbage.” At the company’s first Halloween party, in 1979, he dressed in robes

　　as Jesus Christ, an act of semi-ironic self-awareness that he considered funny

　　but that caused a lot of eye rolling. Even his initial stirrings of domesticity

　　had some quirks. He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which he

　　adorned with a Maxfield Parrish painting, a Braun coffeemaker, and Henckels

　　knives. But because he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings,

　　it remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his

　　bedroom had a mattress in the center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji

　　on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor.UnknownXEROX AND LISA

　　Graphical User Interfaces

　　A New Baby

　　The Apple II took the company from Jobs’s garage to the pinnacle of a new

　　industry. Its sales rose dramatically, from 2,500 units in 1977 to 210,000 in

　　1981. But Jobs was restless. The Apple II could not remain successful forever,

　　and he knew that, no matter how much he had done to package it, from power cord

　　to case, it would always be seen as Wozniak’s masterpiece. He needed his own

　　machine. More than that, he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a

　　dent in the universe.

　　At first he hoped that the Apple III would play that role. It would have more

　　memory, the screen would display eighty characters across rather than forty, and

　　it would handle uppercase and lowercase letters. Indulging his passion for

　　industrial design, Jobs decreed the size and shape of the external case, and he

　　refused to let anyone alter it, even as committees of engineers added more

　　components to the circuit boards. The result was piggybacked boards with poor

　　connectors that frequently failed. When the Apple III began shipping in May

　　1980, it flopped. Randy Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed it up: “The

　　Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and later

　　everybody had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone

　　says, ‘It’s not mine.’”

　　By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple III and was thrashing about

　　for ways to produce something more radically different. At first he flirted with

　　the idea of touchscreens, but he found himself frustrated. At one demonstration

　　of the technology, he arrived late, fidgeted awhile, then abruptly cut off the

　　engineers in the middle of their presentation with a brusque “Thank you.” They

　　were confused. “Would you like us to leave?” one asked. Jobs said yes, then

　　berated his colleagues for wasting his time.

　　Then he and Apple hired two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to conceive a totally

　　new computer. The name Jobs chose for it would have caused even the most jaded

　　psychiatrist to do a double take: the Lisa. Other computers had been named after

　　daughters of their designers, but Lisa was a daughter Jobs had abandoned and had

　　not yet fully admitted was his. “Maybe he was doing it out of guilt,” said

　　Andrea Cunningham, who worked at Regis McKenna on public relations for the

　　project. “We had to come up with an acronym so that we could claim it was not

　　named after Lisa the child.” The one they reverse-engineered was “local

　　integrated systems architecture,” and despite being meaningless it became the

　　official explanation for the name. Among the engineers it was referred to as

　　“Lisa: invented stupid acronym.” Years later, when I asked about the name, Jobs

　　admitted simply, “Obviously it was named for my daughter.”

　　The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine based on a sixteen-bit

　　microprocessor, rather than the eight-bit one used in the Apple II. Without the

　　wizardry of Wozniak, who was still working quietly on the Apple II, the

　　engineers began producing a straightforward computer with a conventional text

　　display, unable to push the powerful microprocessor to do much exciting stuff.

　　Jobs began to grow impatient with how boring it was turning out to be.

　　There was, however, one programmer who was infusing the project with some life:

　　Bill Atkinson. He was a doctoral student in neuroscience who had experimented

　　with his fair share of acid. When he was asked to come work for Apple, he

　　declined. But then Apple sent him a nonrefundable plane ticket, and he decided

　　to use it and let Jobs try to persuade him. “We are inventing the future,” Jobs

　　told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. “Think about surfing on the front

　　edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the

　　tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here

　　and make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson did.

　　With his shaggy hair and droopy moustache that did not hide the animation in his

　　face, Atkinson had some of Woz’s ingenuity along with Jobs’s passion for awesome

　　products. His first job was to develop a program to track a stock portfolio by

　　auto-dialing the Dow Jones service, getting quotes, then hanging up. “I had to

　　create it fast because there was a magazine ad for the Apple II showing a hubby

　　at the kitchen table looking at an Apple screen filled with graphs of stock

　　prices, and his wife is beaming at him—but there wasn’t such a program, so I had

　　to create one.” Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a

　　high-level programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all

　　the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, “Since you’re so passionate about it,

　　I’ll give you six days to prove me wrong.” He did, and Jobs respected him ever

　　after.

　　By the fall of 1979 Apple was breeding three ponies to be potential successors

　　to the Apple II workhorse. There was the ill-fated Apple III. There was the Lisa

　　project, which was beginning to disappoint Jobs. And somewhere off Jobs’s radar

　　screen, at least for the moment, there was a small skunkworks project for a

　　low-cost machine that was being developed by a colorful employee named Jef

　　Raskin, a former professor who had taught Bill Atkinson. Raskin’s goal was to

　　make an inexpensive “computer for the masses” that would be like an appliance—a

　　self-contained unit with computer, keyboard, monitor, and software all

　　together—and have a graphical interface. He tried to turn his colleagues at

　　Apple on to a cutting-edge research center, right in Palo Alto, that was

　　pioneering such ideas.

　　Xerox PARC

　　The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been

　　established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely

　　located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial

　　pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries

　　was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The

　　best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious

　　about software should make their own hardware.” Kay pushed the vision of a small

　　personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would be easy enough for children

　　to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that

　　could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer

　　screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The

　　screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to

　　point and click on the one you wanted to use.

　　This graphical user interface—or GUI, pronounced “gooey”—was facilitated by

　　another concept pioneered at Xerox PARC: bitmapping. Until then, most computers

　　were character-based. You would type a character on a keyboard, and the computer

　　would generate that character on the screen, usually in glowing greenish

　　phosphor against a dark background. Since there were a limited number of

　　letters, numerals, and symbols, it didn’t take a whole lot of computer code or

　　processing power to accomplish this. In a bitmap system, on the other hand, each

　　and every pixel on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer’s memory. To

　　render something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer has to tell each

　　pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of color displays, what color to be.

　　This uses a lot of computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, fonts, and

　　gee-whiz screen displays.

　　Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC’s prototype

　　computers, such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language,

　　Smalltalk. Jef Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing.

　　So he began urging Jobs and other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC.

　　Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use

　　Jobs’s own more precise terminology, “a shithead who sucks.” So Raskin enlisted

　　his friend Atkinson, who fell on the other side of Jobs’s shithead/genius

　　division of the world, to convince Jobs to take an interest in what was

　　happening at Xerox PARC. What Raskin didn’t know was that Jobs was working on a

　　more complex deal. Xerox’s venture capital division wanted to be part of the

　　second round of Apple financing during the summer of 1979. Jobs made an offer:

　　“I will let you invest a million dollars in Apple if you will open the kimono at

　　PARC.” Xerox accepted. It agreed to show Apple its new technology and in return

　　got to buy 100,000 shares at about $10 each.

　　By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares

　　were worth $17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and

　　his colleagues went to see Xerox PARC’s technology in December 1979 and, when

　　Jobs realized he hadn’t been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration a

　　few days later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox scientists called upon to do

　　the briefings, and he was thrilled to show off the work that his bosses back

　　east had never seemed to appreciate. But the other briefer, Adele Goldberg, was

　　appalled that her company seemed willing to give away its crown jewels. “It was

　　incredibly stupid, completely nuts, and I fought to prevent giving Jobs much of

　　anything,” she recalled.

　　Goldberg got her way at the first briefing. Jobs, Raskin, and the Lisa team

　　leader John Couch were ushered into the main lobby, where a Xerox Alto had been

　　set up. “It was a very controlled show of a few applications, primarily a

　　word-processing one,” Goldberg said. Jobs wasn’t satisfied, and he called Xerox

　　headquarters demanding more.

　　So he was invited back a few days later, and this time he brought a larger team

　　that included Bill Atkinson and Bruce Horn, an Apple programmer who had worked

　　at Xerox PARC. They both knew what to look for. “When I arrived at work, there

　　was a lot of commotion, and I was told that Jobs and a bunch of his programmers

　　were in the conference room,” said Goldberg. One of her engineers was trying to

　　keep them entertained with more displays of the word-processing program. But

　　Jobs was growing impatient. “Let’s stop this bullshit!” he kept shouting. So the

　　Xerox folks huddled privately and decided to open the kimono a bit more, but

　　only slowly. They agreed that Tesler could show off Smalltalk, the programming

　　language, but he would demonstrate only what was known as the “unclassified”

　　version. “It will dazzle [Jobs] and he’ll never know he didn’t get the

　　confidential disclosure,” the head of the team told Goldberg.

　　They were wrong. Atkinson and others had read some of the papers published by

　　Xerox PARC, so they knew they were not getting a full description. Jobs phoned

　　the head of the Xerox venture capital division to complain; a call immediately

　　came back from corporate headquarters in Connecticut decreeing that Jobs and his

　　group should be shown everything. Goldberg stormed out in a rage.

　　When Tesler finally showed them what was truly under the hood, the Apple folks

　　were astonished. Atkinson stared at the screen, examining each pixel so closely

　　that Tesler could feel the breath on his neck. Jobs bounced around and waved his

　　arms excitedly. “He was hopping around so much I don’t know how he actually saw

　　most of the demo, but he did, because he kept asking questions,” Tesler

　　recalled. “He was the exclamation point for every step I showed.” Jobs kept

　　saying that he couldn’t believe that Xerox had not commercialized the

　　technology. “You’re sitting on a gold mine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox

　　is not taking advantage of this.”

　　The Smalltalk demonstration showed three amazing features. One was how computers

　　could be networked; the second was how object-oriented programming worked. But

　　Jobs and his team paid little attention to these attributes because they were so

　　amazed by the third feature, the graphical interface that was made possible by a

　　bitmapped screen. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” Jobs recalled.

　　“I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

　　When the Xerox PARC meeting ended after more than two hours, Jobs drove Bill

　　Atkinson back to the Apple office in Cupertino. He was speeding, and so were his

　　mind and mouth. “This is it!” he shouted, emphasizing each word. “We’ve got to

　　do it!” It was the breakthrough he had been looking for: bringing computers to

　　the people, with the cheerful but affordable design of an Eichler home and the

　　ease of use of a sleek kitchen appliance.

　　“How long would this take to implement?” he asked.

　　“I’m not sure,” Atkinson replied. “Maybe six months.” It was a wildly optimistic

　　assessment, but also a motivating one.

　　“Great Artists Steal”

　　The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists

　　in the chronicles of industry. Jobs occasionally endorsed this view, with pride.

　　As he once said, “Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists

　　steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

　　Another assessment, also sometimes endorsed by Jobs, is that what transpired was

　　less a heist by Apple than a fumble by Xerox. “They were copier-heads who had no

　　clue about what a computer could do,” he said of Xerox’s management. “They just

　　grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could

　　have owned the entire computer industry.”

　　Both assessments contain a lot of truth, but there is more to it than that.

　　There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the

　　creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation.

　　Execution is just as important.

　　Jobs and his engineers significantly improved the graphical interface ideas they

　　saw at Xerox PARC, and then were able to implement them in ways that Xerox never

　　could accomplish. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons, was

　　complicated, cost $300 apiece, and didn’t roll around smoothly; a few days after

　　his second Xerox PARC visit, Jobs went to a local industrial design firm, IDEO,

　　and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple single-button

　　model that cost $15, “and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my blue

　　jeans.” Hovey complied.

　　The improvements were in not just the details but the entire concept. The mouse

　　at Xerox PARC could not be used to drag a window around the screen. Apple’s

　　engineers devised an interface so you could not only drag windows and files

　　around, you could even drop them into folders. The Xerox system required you to

　　select a command in order to do anything, ranging from resizing a window to

　　changing the extension that located a file. The Apple system transformed the

　　desktop metaphor into virtual reality by allowing you to directly touch,

　　manipulate, drag, and relocate things. And Apple’s engineers worked in tandem

　　with its designers—with Jobs spurring them on daily—to improve the desktop

　　concept by adding delightful icons and menus that pulled down from a bar atop

　　each window and the capability to open files and folders with a double click.

　　It’s not as if Xerox executives ignored what their scientists had created at

　　PARC. In fact they did try to capitalize on it, and in the process they showed

　　why good execution is as important as good ideas. In 1981, well before the Apple

　　Lisa or Macintosh, they introduced the Xerox Star, a machine that featured their

　　graphical user interface, mouse, bitmapped display, windows, and desktop

　　metaphor. But it was clunky (it could take minutes to save a large file), costly

　　($16,595 at retail stores), and aimed mainly at the networked office market. It

　　flopped; only thirty thousand were ever sold.

　　Jobs and his team went to a Xerox dealer to look at the Star as soon as it was

　　released. But he deemed it so worthless that he told his colleagues they

　　couldn’t spend the money to buy one. “We were very relieved,” he recalled. “We

　　knew they hadn’t done it right, and that we could—at a fraction of the price.” A

　　few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the

　　Xerox Star team. “Everything you’ve ever done in your life is shit,” Jobs said,

　　“so why don’t you come work for me?” Belleville did, and so did Larry Tesler.

　　In his excitement, Jobs began to take over the daily management of the Lisa

　　project, which was being run by John Couch, the former HP engineer. Ignoring

　　Couch, he dealt directly with Atkinson and Tesler to insert his own ideas,

　　especially on Lisa’s graphical interface design. “He would call me at all hours,

　　2 a.m. or 5 a.m.,” said Tesler. “I loved it. But it upset my bosses at the Lisa

　　division.” Jobs was told to stop making out-of-channel calls. He held himself

　　back for a while, but not for long.

　　One important showdown occurred when Atkinson decided that the screen should

　　have a white background rather than a dark one. This would allow an attribute

　　that both Atkinson and Jobs wanted: WYSIWYG, pronounced “wiz-ee-wig,” an acronym

　　for “What you see is what you get.” What you saw on the screen was what you’d

　　get when you printed it out. “The hardware team screamed bloody murder,”

　　Atkinson recalled. “They said it would force us to use a phosphor that was a lot

　　less persistent and would flicker more.” So Atkinson enlisted Jobs, who came

　　down on his side. The hardware folks grumbled, but then went off and figured it

　　out. “Steve wasn’t much of an engineer himself, but he was very good at

　　assessing people’s answers. He could tell whether the engineers were defensive

　　or unsure of themselves.”

　　One of Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we

　　rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the

　　“top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move

　　these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below

　　becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of course, on a computer

　　screen there are no layers of pixels underneath the pixels that you see, so

　　there are no windows actually lurking underneath the ones that appear to be on

　　top. To create the illusion of overlapping windows requires complex coding that

　　involves what are called “regions.” Atkinson pushed himself to make this trick

　　work because he thought he had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox

　　PARC. In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told

　　him they were amazed that he had done so. “I got a feeling for the empowering

　　aspect of naïveté,” Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I

　　was enabled to do it.” He was working so hard that one morning, in a daze, he

　　drove his Corvette into a parked truck and nearly killed himself. Jobs

　　immediately drove to the hospital to see him. “We were pretty worried about

　　you,” he said when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a pained

　　smile and replied, “Don’t worry, I still remember regions.”

　　Jobs also had a passion for smooth scrolling. Documents should not lurch line by

　　line as you scroll through them, but instead should flow. “He was adamant that

　　everything on the interface had a good feeling to the user,” Atkinson said. They

　　also wanted a mouse that could easily move the cursor in any direction, not just

　　up-down/left-right. This required using a ball rather than the usual two wheels.

　　One of the engineers told Atkinson that there was no way to build such a mouse

　　commercially. After Atkinson complained to Jobs over dinner, he arrived at the

　　office the next day to discover that Jobs had fired the engineer. When his

　　replacement met Atkinson, his first words were, “I can build the mouse.”

　　Atkinson and Jobs became best friends for a while, eating together at the Good

　　Earth most nights. But John Couch and the other professional engineers on his

　　Lisa team, many of them buttoned-down HP types, resented Jobs’s meddling and

　　were infuriated by his frequent insults. There was also a clash of visions. Jobs

　　wanted to build a VolksLisa, a simple and inexpensive product for the masses.

　　“There was a tug-of-war between people like me, who wanted a lean machine, and

　　those from HP, like Couch, who were aiming for the corporate market,” Jobs

　　recalled.

　　Both Mike Scott and Mike Markkula were intent on bringing some order to Apple

　　and became increasingly concerned about Jobs’s disruptive behavior. So in

　　September 1980, they secretly plotted a reorganization. Couch was made the

　　undisputed manager of the Lisa division. Jobs lost control of the computer he

　　had named after his daughter. He was also stripped of his role as vice president

　　for research and development. He was made non-executive chairman of the board.

　　This position allowed him to remain Apple’s public face, but it meant that he

　　had no operating control. That hurt. “I was upset and felt abandoned by

　　Markkula,” he said. “He and Scotty felt I wasn’t up to running the Lisa

　　division. I brooded about it a lot.”UnknownGOING PUBLIC

　　A Man of Wealth and Fame

　　With Wozniak, 1981

　　Options

　　When Mike Markkula joined Jobs and Wozniak to turn their fledgling partnership

　　into the Apple Computer Co. in January 1977, they valued it at $5,309. Less than

　　four years later they decided it was time to take it public. It would become the

　　most oversubscribed initial public offering since that of Ford Motors in 1956.

　　By the end of December 1980, Apple would be valued at $1.79 billion. Yes,

　　billion. In the process it would make three hundred people millionaires.

　　Daniel Kottke was not one of them. He had been Jobs’s soul mate in college, in

　　India, at the All One Farm, and in the rental house they shared during the

　　Chrisann Brennan crisis. He joined Apple when it was headquartered in Jobs’s

　　garage, and he still worked there as an hourly employee. But he was not at a

　　high enough level to be cut in on the stock options that were awarded before the

　　IPO. “I totally trusted Steve, and I assumed he would take care of me like I’d

　　taken care of him, so I didn’t push,” said Kottke. The official reason he wasn’t

　　given stock options was that he was an hourly technician, not a salaried

　　engineer, which was the cutoff level for options. Even so, he could have

　　justifiably been given “founder’s stock,” but Jobs decided not to. “Steve is the

　　opposite of loyal,” according to Andy Hertz-feld, an early Apple engineer who

　　has nevertheless remained friends with him. “He’s anti-loyal. He has to abandon

　　the people he is close to.”

　　Kottke decided to press his case with Jobs by hovering outside his office and

　　catching him to make a plea. But at each encounter, Jobs brushed him off. “What

　　was really so difficult for me is that Steve never told me I wasn’t eligible,”

　　recalled Kottke. “He owed me that as a friend. When I would ask him about stock,

　　he would tell me I had to talk to my manager.” Finally, almost six months after

　　the IPO, Kottke worked up the courage to march into Jobs’s office and try to

　　hash out the issue. But when he got in to see him, Jobs was so cold that Kottke

　　froze. “I just got choked up and began to cry and just couldn’t talk to him,”

　　Kottke recalled. “Our friendship was all gone. It was so sad.”

　　Rod Holt, the engineer who had built the power supply, was getting a lot of

　　options, and he tried to turn Jobs around. “We have to do something for your

　　buddy Daniel,” he said, and he suggested they each give him some of their own

　　options. “Whatever you give him, I will match it,” said Holt. Replied Jobs,

　　“Okay. I will give him zero.”

　　Wozniak, not surprisingly, had the opposite attitude. Before the shares went

　　public, he decided to sell, at a very low price, two thousand of his options to

　　forty different midlevel employees. Most of his beneficiaries made enough to buy

　　a home. Wozniak bought a dream home for himself and his new wife, but she soon

　　divorced him and kept the house. He also later gave shares outright to employees

　　he felt had been shortchanged, including Kottke, Fernandez, Wigginton, and

　　Espinosa. Everyone loved Wozniak, all the more so after his generosity, but many

　　also agreed with Jobs that he was “awfully naïve and childlike.” A few months

　　later a United Way poster showing a destitute man went up on a company bulletin

　　board. Someone scrawled on it “Woz in 1990.”

　　Jobs was not naïve. He had made sure his deal with Chrisann Brennan was signed

　　before the IPO occurred.

　　Jobs was the public face of the IPO, and he helped choose the two investment

　　banks handling it: the traditional Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley and the

　　untraditional boutique firm Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco. “Steve was very

　　irreverent toward the guys from Morgan Stanley, which was a pretty uptight firm

　　in those days,” recalled Bill Hambrecht. Morgan Stanley planned to price the

　　offering at $18, even though it was obvious the shares would quickly shoot up.

　　“Tell me what happens to this stock that we priced at eighteen?” Jobs asked the

　　bankers. “Don’t you sell it to your good customers? If so, how can you charge me

　　a 7% commission?” Hambrecht recognized that there was a basic unfairness in the

　　system, and he later went on to formulate the idea of a reverse auction to price

　　shares before an IPO.

　　Apple went public the morning of December 12, 1980. By then the bankers had

　　priced the stock at $22 a share. It went to $29 the first day. Jobs had come

　　into the Hambrecht & Quist office just in time to watch the opening trades. At

　　age twenty-five, he was now worth $256 million.

　　Baby You’re a Rich Man

　　Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being

　　both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex.

　　He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend

　　who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a

　　pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business.

　　And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.

　　He had a great love for some material objects, especially those that were finely

　　designed and crafted, such as Porsche and Mercedes cars, Henckels knives and

　　Braun appliances, BMW motorcycles and Ansel Adams prints, Bösendorfer pianos and

　　Bang & Olufsen audio equipment. Yet the houses he lived in, no matter how rich

　　he became, tended not to be ostentatious and were furnished so simply they would

　　have put a Shaker to shame. Neither then nor later would he travel with an

　　entourage, keep a personal staff, or even have security protection. He bought a

　　nice car, but always drove himself. When Markkula asked Jobs to join him in

　　buying a Lear jet, he declined (though he eventually would demand of Apple a

　　Gulfstream to use). Like his father, he could be flinty when bargaining with

　　suppliers, but he didn’t allow a craving for profits to take precedence over his

　　passion for building great products.

　　Thirty years after Apple went public, he reflected on what it was like to come

　　into money suddenly:

　　I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never

　　thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay

　　engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was

　　in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was

　　working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t

　　have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have

　　to worry about money.

　　I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live

　　differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a

　　house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got

　　plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I

　　wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to

　　let this money ruin my life.

　　He was not particularly philanthropic. He briefly set up a foundation, but he

　　discovered that it was annoying to have to deal with the person he had hired to

　　run it, who kept talking about “venture” philanthropy and how to “leverage”

　　giving. Jobs became contemptuous of people who made a display of philanthropy or

　　thinking they could reinvent it. Earlier he had quietly sent in a $5,000 check

　　to help launch Larry Brilliant’s Seva Foundation to fight diseases of poverty,

　　and he even agreed to join the board. But when Brilliant brought some board

　　members, including Wavy Gravy and Jerry Garcia, to Apple right after its IPO to

　　solicit a donation, Jobs was not forthcoming. He instead worked on finding ways

　　that a donated Apple II and a VisiCalc program could make it easier for the

　　foundation to do a survey it was planning on blindness in Nepal.

　　His biggest personal gift was to his parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, to whom he

　　gave about $750,000 worth of stock. They sold some to pay off the mortgage on

　　their Los Altos home, and their son came over for the little celebration. “It

　　was the first time in their lives they didn’t have a mortgage,” Jobs recalled.

　　“They had a handful of their friends over for the party, and it was really

　　nice.” Still, they didn’t consider buying a nicer house. “They weren’t

　　interested in that,” Jobs said. “They had a life they were happy with.” Their

　　only splurge was to take a Princess cruise each year. The one through the Panama

　　Canal “was the big one for my dad,” according to Jobs, because it reminded him

　　of when his Coast Guard ship went through on its way to San Francisco to be

　　decommissioned.

　　With Apple’s success came fame for its poster boy. Inc. became the first

　　magazine to put him on its cover, in October 1981. “This man has changed

　　business forever,” it proclaimed. It showed Jobs with a neatly trimmed beard and

　　well-styled long hair, wearing blue jeans and a dress shirt with a blazer that

　　was a little too satiny. He was leaning on an Apple II and looking directly into

　　the camera with the mesmerizing stare he had picked up from Robert Friedland.

　　“When Steve Jobs speaks, it is with the gee-whiz enthusiasm of someone who sees

　　the future and is making sure it works,” the magazine reported.

　　Time followed in February 1982 with a package on young entrepreneurs. The cover

　　was a painting of Jobs, again with his hypnotic stare. Jobs, said the main

　　story, “practically singlehanded created the personal computer industry.” The

　　accompanying profile, written by Michael Moritz, noted, “At 26, Jobs heads a

　　company that six years ago was located in a bedroom and garage of his parents’

　　house, but this year it is expected to have sales of $600 million. . . . As an

　　executive, Jobs has sometimes been petulant and harsh on subordinates. Admits

　　he: ‘I’ve got to learn to keep my feelings private.’”

　　Despite his new fame and fortune, he still fancied himself a child of the

　　counterculture. On a visit to a Stanford class, he took off his Wilkes Bashford

　　blazer and his shoes, perched on top of a table, and crossed his legs into a

　　lotus position. The students asked questions, such as when Apple’s stock price

　　would rise, which Jobs brushed off. Instead he spoke of his passion for future

　　products, such as someday making a computer as small as a book. When the

　　business questions tapered off, Jobs turned the tables on the well-groomed

　　students. “How many of you are virgins?” he asked. There were nervous giggles.

　　“How many of you have taken LSD?” More nervous laughter, and only one or two

　　hands went up. Later Jobs would complain about the new generation of kids, who

　　seemed to him more materialistic and careerist than his own. “When I went to

　　school, it was right after the sixties and before this general wave of practical

　　purposefulness had set in,” he said. “Now students aren’t even thinking in

　　idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much.” His generation, he said,

　　was different. “The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs,

　　though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them

　　forever.”UnknownTHE MAC IS BORN

　　You Say You Want a Revolution

　　Jobs in 1982

　　Jef Raskin’s Baby

　　Jef Raskin was the type of character who could enthrall Steve Jobs—or annoy him.

　　As it turned out, he did both. A philosophical guy who could be both playful and

　　ponderous, Raskin had studied computer science, taught music and visual arts,

　　conducted a chamber opera company, and organized guerrilla theater. His 1967

　　doctoral thesis at U.C. San Diego argued that computers should have graphical

　　rather than text-based interfaces. When he got fed up with teaching, he rented a

　　hot air balloon, flew over the chancellor’s house, and shouted down his decision

　　to quit.

　　When Jobs was looking for someone to write a manual for the Apple II in 1976, he

　　called Raskin, who had his own little consulting firm. Raskin went to the

　　garage, saw Wozniak beavering away at a workbench, and was convinced by Jobs to

　　write the manual for $50. Eventually he became the manager of Apple’s

　　publications department. One of Raskin’s dreams was to build an inexpensive

　　computer for the masses, and in 1979 he convinced Mike Markkula to put him in

　　charge of a small development project code-named “Annie” to do just that. Since

　　Raskin thought it was sexist to name computers after women, he redubbed the

　　project in honor of his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh. But he changed the

　　spelling in order not to conflict with the name of the audio equipment maker

　　McIntosh Laboratory. The proposed computer became known as the Macintosh.

　　Raskin envisioned a machine that would sell for $1,000 and be a simple

　　appliance, with screen and keyboard and computer all in one unit. To keep the

　　cost down, he proposed a tiny five-inch screen and a very cheap (and

　　underpowered) microprocessor, the Motorola 6809. Raskin fancied himself a

　　philosopher, and he wrote his thoughts in an ever-expanding notebook that he

　　called “The Book of Macintosh.” He also issued occasional manifestos. One of

　　these was called “Computers by the Millions,” and it began with an aspiration:

　　“If personal computers are to be truly personal, it will have to be as likely as

　　not that a family, picked at random, will own one.”

　　Throughout 1979 and early 1980 the Macintosh project led a tenuous existence.

　　Every few months it would almost get killed off, but each time Raskin managed to

　　cajole Markkula into granting clemency. It had a research team of only four

　　engineers located in the original Apple office space next to the Good Earth

　　restaurant, a few blocks from the company’s new main building. The work space

　　was filled with enough toys and radio-controlled model airplanes (Raskin’s

　　passion) to make it look like a day care center for geeks. Every now and then

　　work would cease for a loosely organized game of Nerf ball tag. Andy Hertzfeld

　　recalled, “This inspired everyone to surround their work area with barricades

　　made out of cardboard, to provide cover during the game, making part of the

　　office look like a cardboard maze.”

　　The star of the team was a blond, cherubic, and psychologically intense

　　self-taught young engineer named Burrell Smith, who worshipped the code work of

　　Wozniak and tried to pull off similar dazzling feats. Atkinson discovered Smith

　　working in Apple’s service department and, amazed at his ability to improvise

　　fixes, recommended him to Raskin. Smith would later succumb to schizophrenia,

　　but in the early 1980s he was able to channel his manic intensity into weeklong

　　binges of engineering brilliance.

　　Jobs was enthralled by Raskin’s vision, but not by his willingness to make

　　compromises to keep down the cost. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told

　　him instead to focus on building what he repeatedly called an “insanely great”

　　product. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” Jobs

　　told him. Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo. It spelled out everything you

　　would want in the proposed computer: a high-resolution color display, a printer

　　that worked without a ribbon and could produce graphics in color at a page per

　　second, unlimited access to the ARPA net, and the capability to recognize speech

　　and synthesize music, “even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon tabernacle

　　choir, with variable reverberation.” The memo concluded, “Starting with the

　　abilities desired is nonsense. We must start both with a price goal, and a set

　　of abilities, and keep an eye on today’s and the immediate future’s technology.”

　　In other words, Raskin had little patience for Jobs’s belief that you could

　　distort reality if you had enough passion for your product.

　　Thus they were destined to clash, especially after Jobs was ejected from the

　　Lisa project in September 1980 and began casting around for someplace else to

　　make his mark. It was inevitable that his gaze would fall on the Macintosh

　　project. Raskin’s manifestos about an inexpensive machine for the masses, with a

　　simple graphic interface and clean design, stirred his soul. And it was also

　　inevitable that once Jobs set his sights on the Macintosh project, Raskin’s days

　　were numbered. “Steve started acting on what he thought we should do, Jef

　　started brooding, and it instantly was clear what the outcome would be,”

　　recalled Joanna Hoffman, a member of the Mac team.

　　The first conflict was over Raskin’s devotion to the underpowered Motorola 6809

　　microprocessor. Once again it was a clash between Raskin’s desire to keep the

　　Mac’s price under $1,000 and Jobs’s determination to build an insanely great

　　machine. So Jobs began pushing for the Mac to switch to the more powerful

　　Motorola 68000, which is what the Lisa was using. Just before Christmas 1980, he

　　challenged Burrell Smith, without telling Raskin, to make a redesigned prototype

　　that used the more powerful chip. As his hero Wozniak would have done, Smith

　　threw himself into the task around the clock, working nonstop for three weeks

　　and employing all sorts of breathtaking programming leaps. When he succeeded,

　　Jobs was able to force the switch to the Motorola 68000, and Raskin had to brood

　　and recalculate the cost of the Mac.

　　There was something larger at stake. The cheaper microprocessor that Raskin

　　wanted would not have been able to accommodate all of the gee-whiz

　　graphics—windows, menus, mouse, and so on—that the team had seen on the Xerox

　　PARC visits. Raskin had convinced everyone to go to Xerox PARC, and he liked the

　　idea of a bitmapped display and windows, but he was not as charmed by all the

　　cute graphics and icons, and he absolutely detested the idea of using a

　　point-and-click mouse rather than the keyboard. “Some of the people on the

　　project became enamored of the quest to do everything with the mouse,” he later

　　groused. “Another example is the absurd application of icons. An icon is a

　　symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There’s a reason why

　　humans invented phonetic languages.”

　　Raskin’s former student Bill Atkinson sided with Jobs. They both wanted a

　　powerful processor that could support whizzier graphics and the use of a mouse.

　　“Steve had to take the project away from Jef,” Atkinson said. “Jef was pretty

　　firm and stubborn, and Steve was right to take it over. The world got a better

　　result.”

　　The disagreements were more than just philosophical; they became clashes of

　　personality. “I think that he likes people to jump when he says jump,” Raskin

　　once said. “I felt that he was untrustworthy, and that he does not take kindly

　　to being found wanting. He doesn’t seem to like people who see him without a

　　halo.” Jobs was equally dismissive of Raskin. “Jef was really pompous,” he said.

　　“He didn’t know much about interfaces. So I decided to nab some of his people

　　who were really good, like Atkinson, bring in some of my own, take the thing

　　over and build a less expensive Lisa, not some piece of junk.”

　　Some on the team found Jobs impossible to work with. “Jobs seems to introduce

　　tension, politics, and hassles rather than enjoying a buffer from those

　　distractions,” one engineer wrote in a memo to Raskin in December 1980. “I

　　thoroughly enjoy talking with him, and I admire his ideas, practical

　　perspective, and energy. But I just don’t feel that he provides the trusting,

　　supportive, relaxed environment that I need.”

　　But many others realized that despite his temperamental failings, Jobs had the

　　charisma and corporate clout that would lead them to “make a dent in the

　　universe.” Jobs told the staff that Raskin was just a dreamer, whereas he was a

　　doer and would get the Mac done in a year. It was clear he wanted vindication

　　for having been ousted from the Lisa group, and he was energized by competition.

　　He publicly bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. “We

　　can make a computer that’s cheaper and better than the Lisa, and get it out

　　first,” he told the team.

　　Jobs asserted his control of the group by canceling a brown-bag lunch seminar

　　that Raskin was scheduled to give to the whole company in February 1981. Raskin

　　happened to go by the room anyway and discovered that there were a hundred

　　people there waiting to hear him; Jobs had not bothered to notify anyone else

　　about his cancellation order. So Raskin went ahead and gave a talk.

　　That incident led Raskin to write a blistering memo to Mike Scott, who once

　　again found himself in the difficult position of being a president trying to

　　manage a company’s temperamental cofounder and major stockholder. It was titled

　　“Working for/with Steve Jobs,” and in it Raskin asserted:

　　He is a dreadful manager. . . . I have always liked Steve, but I have found it

　　impossible to work for him. . . . Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is

　　so well-known as to be almost a running joke. . . . He acts without thinking

　　and with bad judgment. . . . He does not give credit where due. . . . Very

　　often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it

　　is worthless or even stupid, and tell you that it was a waste of time to work

　　on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea is a good one he will

　　soon be telling people about it as though it was his own.

　　That afternoon Scott called in Jobs and Raskin for a showdown in front of

　　Markkula. Jobs started crying. He and Raskin agreed on only one thing: Neither

　　could work for the other one. On the Lisa project, Scott had sided with Couch.

　　This time he decided it was best to let Jobs win. After all, the Mac was a minor

　　development project housed in a distant building that could keep Jobs occupied

　　away from the main campus. Raskin was told to take a leave of absence. “They

　　wanted to humor me and give me something to do, which was fine,” Jobs recalled.

　　“It was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was

　　in control.”

　　Raskin’s ouster may not have seemed fair, but it ended up being good for the

　　Macintosh. Raskin wanted an appliance with little memory, an anemic processor, a

　　cassette tape, no mouse, and minimal graphics. Unlike Jobs, he might have been

　　able to keep the price down to close to $1,000, and that may have helped Apple

　　win market share. But he could not have pulled off what Jobs did, which was to

　　create and market a machine that would transform personal computing. In fact we

　　can see where the road not taken led. Raskin was hired by Canon to build the

　　machine he wanted. “It was the Canon Cat, and it was a total flop,” Atkinson

　　said. “Nobody wanted it. When Steve turned the Mac into a compact version of the

　　Lisa, it made it into a computing platform instead of a consumer electronic

　　device.”1

　　Texaco Towers

　　A few days after Raskin left, Jobs appeared at the cubicle of Andy Hertzfeld, a

　　young engineer on the Apple II team, who had a cherubic face and impish demeanor

　　similar to his pal Burrell Smith’s. Hertzfeld recalled that most of his

　　colleagues were afraid of Jobs “because of his spontaneous temper tantrums and

　　his proclivity to tell everyone exactly what he thought, which often wasn’t very

　　favorable.” But Hertzfeld was excited by him. “Are you any good?” Jobs asked the

　　moment he walked in. “We only want really good people working on the Mac, and

　　I’m not sure you’re good enough.” Hertzfeld knew how to answer. “I told him that

　　yes, I thought that I was pretty good.”

　　Jobs left, and Hertzfeld went back to his work. Later that afternoon he looked

　　up to see Jobs peering over the wall of his cubicle. “I’ve got good news for

　　you,” he said. “You’re working on the Mac team now. Come with me.”

　　Hertzfeld replied that he needed a couple more days to finish the Apple II

　　product he was in the middle of. “What’s more important than working on the

　　Macintosh?” Jobs demanded. Hertzfeld explained that he needed to get his Apple

　　II DOS program in good enough shape to hand it over to someone. “You’re just

　　wasting your time with that!” Jobs replied. “Who cares about the Apple II? The

　　Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and

　　you’re going to start on it now!” With that, Jobs yanked out the power cord to

　　Hertzfeld’s Apple II, causing the code he was working on to vanish. “Come with

　　me,” Jobs said. “I’m going to take you to your new desk.” Jobs drove Hertzfeld,

　　computer and all, in his silver Mercedes to the Macintosh offices. “Here’s your

　　new desk,” he said, plopping him in a space next to Burrell Smith. “Welcome to

　　the Mac team!” The desk had been Raskin’s. In fact Raskin had left so hastily

　　that some of the drawers were still filled with his flotsam and jetsam,

　　including model airplanes.

　　Jobs’s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be part of

　　his merry band of pirates was making sure they had a passion for the product. He

　　would sometimes bring candidates into a room where a prototype of the Mac was

　　covered by a cloth, dramatically unveil it, and watch. “If their eyes lit up, if

　　they went right for the mouse and started pointing and clicking, Steve would

　　smile and hire them,” recalled Andrea Cunningham. “He wanted them to say ‘Wow!’”

　　Bruce Horn was one of the programmers at Xerox PARC. When some of his friends,

　　such as Larry Tesler, decided to join the Macintosh group, Horn considered going

　　there as well. But he got a good offer, and a $15,000 signing bonus, to join

　　another company. Jobs called him on a Friday night. “You have to come into Apple

　　tomorrow morning,” he said. “I have a lot of stuff to show you.” Horn did, and

　　Jobs hooked him. “Steve was so passionate about building this amazing device

　　that would change the world,” Horn recalled. “By sheer force of his personality,

　　he changed my mind.” Jobs showed Horn exactly how the plastic would be molded

　　and would fit together at perfect angles, and how good the board was going to

　　look inside. “He wanted me to see that this whole thing was going to happen and

　　it was thought out from end to end. Wow, I said, I don’t see that kind of

　　passion every day. So I signed up.”

　　Jobs even tried to reengage Wozniak. “I resented the fact that he had not been

　　doing much, but then I thought, hell, I wouldn’t be here without his

　　brilliance,” Jobs later told me. But as soon as Jobs was starting to get him

　　interested in the Mac, Wozniak crashed his new single-engine Beechcraft while

　　attempting a takeoff near Santa Cruz. He barely survived and ended up with

　　partial amnesia. Jobs spent time at the hospital, but when Wozniak recovered he

　　decided it was time to take a break from Apple. Ten years after dropping out of

　　Berkeley, he decided to return there to finally get his degree, enrolling under

　　the name of Rocky Raccoon Clark.

　　In order to make the project his own, Jobs decided it should no longer be

　　code-named after Raskin’s favorite apple. In various interviews, Jobs had been

　　referring to computers as a bicycle for the mind; the ability of humans to

　　create a bicycle allowed them to move more efficiently than even a condor, and

　　likewise the ability to create computers would multiply the efficiency of their

　　minds. So one day Jobs decreed that henceforth the Macintosh should be known

　　instead as the Bicycle. This did not go over well. “Burrell and I thought this

　　was the silliest thing we ever heard, and we simply refused to use the new

　　name,” recalled Hertzfeld. Within a month the idea was dropped.

　　By early 1981 the Mac team had grown to about twenty, and Jobs decided that they

　　should have bigger quarters. So he moved everyone to the second floor of a

　　brown-shingled, two-story building about three blocks from Apple’s main offices.

　　It was next to a Texaco station and thus became known as Texaco Towers. In order

　　to make the office more lively, he told the team to buy a stereo system.

　　“Burrell and I ran out and bought a silver, cassette-based boom box right away,

　　before he could change his mind,” recalled Hertzfeld.

　　Jobs’s triumph was soon complete. A few weeks after winning his power struggle

　　with Raskin to run the Mac division, he helped push out Mike Scott as Apple’s

　　president. Scotty had become more and more erratic, alternately bullying and

　　nurturing. He finally lost most of his support among the employees when he

　　surprised them by imposing a round of layoffs that he handled with atypical

　　ruthlessness. In addition, he had begun to suffer a variety of afflictions,

　　ranging from eye infections to narcolepsy. When Scott was on vacation in Hawaii,

　　Markkula called together the top managers to ask if he should be replaced. Most

　　of them, including Jobs and John Couch, said yes. So Markkula took over as an

　　interim and rather passive president, and Jobs found that he now had full rein

　　to do what he wanted with the Mac division.UnknownTHE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD

　　Playing by His Own Set of Rules

　　The original Mac team in 1984: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy

　　Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and Jerry Manock

　　When Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team, he got a briefing from Bud

　　Tribble, the other software designer, about the huge amount of work that still

　　needed to be done. Jobs wanted it finished by January 1982, less than a year

　　away. “That’s crazy,” Hertzfeld said. “There’s no way.” Tribble said that Jobs

　　would not accept any contrary facts. “The best way to describe the situation is

　　a term from Star Trek,” Tribble explained. “Steve has a reality distortion

　　field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence,

　　reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears

　　off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

　　Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from the “Menagerie” episodes of

　　Star Trek, “in which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental

　　force.” He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution: “It was

　　dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to

　　actually be able to change reality.”

　　At first Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of

　　working with Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The reality

　　distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style,

　　indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” he

　　said.

　　There was little that could shield you from the force, Hertzfeld discovered.

　　“Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were

　　acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding

　　it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.”

　　After Jobs decreed that the sodas in the office refrigerator be replaced by

　　Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices, someone on the team had T-shirts made.

　　“Reality Distortion Field,” they said on the front, and on the back, “It’s in

　　the juice!”

　　To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to

　　say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of

　　dissembling. He would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a

　　recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without even considering the

　　truth. It came from willfully defying reality, not only to others but to

　　himself. “He can deceive himself,” said Bill Atkinson. “It allowed him to con

　　people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and

　　internalized it.”

　　A lot of people distort reality, of course. When Jobs did so, it was often a

　　tactic for accomplishing something. Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest as

　　Jobs was tactical, marveled at how effective it could be. “His reality

　　distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future, such as telling me

　　that I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realize that it

　　can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.”

　　When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they

　　were almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He

　　laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving

　　purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality

　　distortion field was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change

　　the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM.

　　“It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible,

　　because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

　　At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t

　　apply to him. He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been

　　able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were

　　ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one,

　　an enlightened one. “He thinks there are a few people who are special—people

　　like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India—and he’s one of them,”

　　said Hertzfeld. “He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was

　　enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the

　　philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman

　　came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The spirit

　　now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the

　　world.” If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had

　　done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first

　　diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a

　　license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he

　　were not subject to the strictures around him.

　　Another key aspect of Jobs’s worldview was his binary way of categorizing

　　things. People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either

　　“the best” or “totally shitty.” Bill Atkinson, the Mac designer who fell on the

　　good side of these dichotomies, described what it was like:

　　It was difficult working under Steve, because there was a great polarity

　　between gods and shitheads. If you were a god, you were up on a pedestal and

　　could do no wrong. Those of us who were considered to be gods, as I was, knew

　　that we were actually mortal and made bad engineering decisions and farted

　　like any person, so we were always afraid that we would get knocked off our

　　pedestal. The ones who were shitheads, who were brilliant engineers working

　　very hard, felt there was no way they could get appreciated and rise above

　　their status.

　　But these categories were not immutable, for Jobs could rapidly reverse himself.

　　When briefing Hertzfeld about the reality distortion field, Tribble specifically

　　warned him about Jobs’s tendency to resemble high-voltage alternating current.

　　“Just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn’t

　　necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow,” Tribble explained. “If you tell

　　him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if

　　he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose

　　your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”

　　The audacity of this pirouette technique would have dazzled Diaghilev. “If one

　　line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another,”

　　Hertzfeld said. “Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting

　　your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought

　　differently.” That happened repeatedly to Bruce Horn, the programmer who, with

　　Tesler, had been lured from Xerox PARC. “One week I’d tell him about an idea

　　that I had, and he would say it was crazy,” recalled Horn. “The next week, he’d

　　come and say, ‘Hey I have this great idea’—and it would be my idea! You’d call

　　him on it and say, ‘Steve, I told you that a week ago,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah,

　　yeah, yeah’ and just move right along.”

　　It was as if Jobs’s brain circuits were missing a device that would modulate the

　　extreme spikes of impulsive opinions that popped into his mind. So in dealing

　　with him, the Mac team adopted an audio concept called a “low pass filter.” In

　　processing his input, they learned to reduce the amplitude of his high-frequency

　　signals. That served to smooth out the data set and provide a less jittery

　　moving average of his evolving attitudes. “After a few cycles of him taking

　　alternating extreme positions,” said Hertzfeld, “we would learn to low pass

　　filter his signals and not react to the extremes.”

　　Was Jobs’s unfiltered behavior caused by a lack of emotional sensitivity? No.

　　Almost the opposite. He was very emotionally attuned, able to read people and

　　know their psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. He could stun an

　　unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He

　　intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something. This made

　　him masterful at cajoling, stroking, persuading, flattering, and intimidating

　　people. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is,

　　know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” Joanna Hoffman said.

　　“It’s a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate

　　people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his

　　approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.”

　　Ann Bowers became an expert at dealing with Jobs’s perfectionism, petulance, and

　　prickliness. She had been the human resources director at Intel, but had stepped

　　aside after she married its cofounder Bob Noyce. She joined Apple in 1980 and

　　served as a calming mother figure who would step in after one of Jobs’s

　　tantrums. She would go to his office, shut the door, and gently lecture him. “I

　　know, I know,” he would say. “Well, then, please stop doing it,” she would

　　insist. Bowers recalled, “He would be good for a while, and then a week or so

　　later I would get a call again.” She realized that he could barely contain

　　himself. “He had these huge expectations, and if people didn’t deliver, he

　　couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t control himself. I could understand why Steve

　　would get upset, and he was usually right, but it had a hurtful effect. It

　　created a fear factor. He was self-aware, but that didn’t always modify his

　　behavior.”

　　Jobs became close to Bowers and her husband, and he would drop in at their Los

　　Gatos Hills home unannounced. She would hear his motorcycle in the distance and

　　say, “I guess we have Steve for dinner again.” For a while she and Noyce were

　　like a surrogate family. “He was so bright and also so needy. He needed a

　　grown-up, a father figure, which Bob became, and I became like a mother figure.”

　　There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who

　　were not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear

　　and an eagerness to please. “His behavior can be emotionally draining, but if

　　you survive, it works,” Hoffman said. You could also push back—sometimes—and not

　　only survive but thrive. That didn’t always work; Raskin tried it, succeeded for

　　a while, and then was destroyed. But if you were calmly confident, if Jobs sized

　　you up and decided that you knew what you were doing, he would respect you. In

　　both his personal and his professional life over the years, his inner circle

　　tended to include many more strong people than toadies.

　　The Mac team knew that. Every year, beginning in 1981, it gave out an award to

　　the person who did the best job of standing up to him. The award was partly a

　　joke, but also partly real, and Jobs knew about it and liked it. Joanna Hoffman

　　won the first year. From an Eastern European refugee family, she had a strong

　　temper and will. One day, for example, she discovered that Jobs had changed her

　　marketing projections in a way she found totally reality-distorting. Furious,

　　she marched to his office. “As I’m climbing the stairs, I told his assistant I

　　am going to take a knife and stab it into his heart,” she recounted. Al

　　Eisenstat, the corporate counsel, came running out to restrain her. “But Steve

　　heard me out and backed down.”

　　Hoffman won the award again in 1982. “I remember being envious of Joanna,

　　because she would stand up to Steve and I didn’t have the nerve yet,” said Debi

　　Coleman, who joined the Mac team that year. “Then, in 1983, I got the award. I

　　had learned you had to stand up for what you believe, which Steve respected. I

　　started getting promoted by him after that.” Eventually she rose to become head

　　of manufacturing.

　　One day Jobs barged into the cubicle of one of Atkinson’s engineers and uttered

　　his usual “This is shit.” As Atkinson recalled, “The guy said, ‘No it’s not,

　　it’s actually the best way,’ and he explained to Steve the engineering

　　trade-offs he’d made.” Jobs backed down. Atkinson taught his team to put Jobs’s

　　words through a translator. “We learned to interpret ‘This is shit’ to actually

　　be a question that means, ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do it.’” But the

　　story had a coda, which Atkinson also found instructive. Eventually the engineer

　　found an even better way to perform the function that Jobs had criticized. “He

　　did it better because Steve had challenged him,” said Atkinson, “which shows you

　　can push back on him but should also listen, for he’s usually right.”

　　Jobs’s prickly behavior was partly driven by his perfectionism and his

　　impatience with those who made compromises in order to get a product out on time

　　and on budget. “He could not make trade-offs well,” said Atkinson. “If someone

　　didn’t care to make their product perfect, they were a bozo.” At the West Coast

　　Computer Faire in April 1981, for example, Adam Osborne released the first truly

　　portable personal computer. It was not great—it had a five-inch screen and not

　　much memory—but it worked well enough. As Osborne famously declared, “Adequacy

　　is sufficient. All else is superfluous.” Jobs found that approach to be morally

　　appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. “This guy just doesn’t get

　　it,” Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. “He’s not making

　　art, he’s making shit.”

　　One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working

　　on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to

　　boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a

　　person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he

　　asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and

　　showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten

　　seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or

　　so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least

　　one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few

　　weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson

　　recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”

　　The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a

　　great product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist,

　　and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said

　　Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of

　　money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.” He

　　once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum

　　in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example

　　of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We

　　said to ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as

　　well make them beautiful.’”

　　Was all of his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not, nor was it

　　justified. There were other ways to have motivated his team. Even though the

　　Macintosh would turn out to be great, it was way behind schedule and way over

　　budget because of Jobs’s impetuous interventions. There was also a cost in

　　brutalized human feelings, which caused much of the team to burn out. “Steve’s

　　contributions could have been made without so many stories about him terrorizing

　　folks,” Wozniak said. “I like being more patient and not having so many

　　conflicts. I think a company can be a good family. If the Macintosh project had

　　been run my way, things probably would have been a mess. But I think if it had

　　been a mix of both our styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve

　　did it.”

　　But even though Jobs’s style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly

　　inspiring. It infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create

　　groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed

　　impossible. They had T-shirts made that read “90 hours a week and loving it!”

　　Out of a fear of Jobs mixed with an incredibly strong urge to impress him, they

　　exceeded their own expectations. “I’ve learned over the years that when you have

　　really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By

　　expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The

　　original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they

　　don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will

　　tell you it was worth the pain.”

　　Most of them agree. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do

　　anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet

　　I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with

　　him.”UnknownTHE DESIGN

　　Real Artists Simplify

　　A Bauhaus Aesthetic

　　Unlike most kids who grew up in Eichler homes, Jobs knew what they were and why

　　they were so wonderful. He liked the notion of simple and clean modernism

　　produced for the masses. He also loved listening to his father describe the

　　styling intricacies of various cars. So from the beginning at Apple, he believed

　　that great industrial design—a colorfully simple logo, a sleek case for the

　　Apple II—would set the company apart and make its products distinctive.

　　The company’s first office, after it moved out of his family garage, was in a

　　small building it shared with a Sony sales office. Sony was famous for its

　　signature style and memorable product designs, so Jobs would drop by to study

　　the marketing material. “He would come in looking scruffy and fondle the product

　　brochures and point out design features,” said Dan’l Lewin, who worked there.

　　“Every now and then, he would ask, ‘Can I take this brochure?’” By 1980, he had

　　hired Lewin.

　　His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony receded around June 1981,

　　when he began attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen. The

　　meeting that year focused on Italian style, and it featured the

　　architect-designer Mario Bellini, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the car

　　maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna Agnelli.

　　“I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like the kid in Breaking Away

　　reveres the Italian bikers,” recalled Jobs, “so it was an amazing inspiration.”

　　In Aspen he was exposed to the spare and functional design philosophy of the

　　Bauhaus movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in the buildings, living

　　suites, sans serif font typography, and furniture on the Aspen Institute campus.

　　Like his mentors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bayer believed

　　that there should be no distinction between fine art and applied industrial

　　design. The modernist International Style championed by the Bauhaus taught that

　　design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit. It emphasized

　　rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms. Among the

　　maxims preached by Mies and Gropius were “God is in the details” and “Less is

　　more.” As with Eichler homes, the artistic sensibility was combined with the

　　capability for mass production.

　　Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at

　　the 1983 design conference, the theme of which was “The Future Isn’t What It

　　Used to Be.” He predicted the passing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus

　　simplicity. “The current wave of industrial design is Sony’s high-tech look,

　　which is gunmetal gray, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it,” he said.

　　“It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” He proposed an alternative, born of

　　the Bauhaus, that was more true to the function and nature of the products.

　　“What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to

　　package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a

　　small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun

　　does with its electronics.”

　　He repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products would be clean and simple. “We

　　will make them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a

　　heavy industrial look of black, black, black, black, like Sony,” he preached.

　　“So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of

　　Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the

　　advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”

　　Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure:

　　“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

　　Jobs felt that design simplicity should be linked to making products easy to

　　use. Those goals do not always go together. Sometimes a design can be so sleek

　　and simple that a user finds it intimidating or unfriendly to navigate. “The

　　main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious,”

　　Jobs told the crowd of design mavens. For example, he extolled the desktop

　　metaphor he was creating for the Macintosh. “People know how to deal with a

　　desktop intuitively. If you walk into an office, there are papers on the desk.

　　The one on the top is the most important. People know how to switch priority.

　　Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that

　　we can leverage this experience people already have.”

　　Speaking at the same time as Jobs that Wednesday afternoon, but in a smaller

　　seminar room, was Maya Lin, twenty-three, who had been catapulted into fame the

　　previous November when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in

　　Washington, D.C. They struck up a close friendship, and Jobs invited her to

　　visit Apple. “I came to work with Steve for a week,” Lin recalled. “I asked him,

　　‘Why do computers look like clunky TV sets? Why don’t you make something thin?

　　Why not a flat laptop?’” Jobs replied that this was indeed his goal, as soon as

　　the technology was ready.

　　At that time there was not much exciting happening in the realm of industrial

　　design, Jobs felt. He had a Richard Sapper lamp, which he admired, and he also

　　liked the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and the Braun products of Dieter

　　Rams. But there were no towering figures energizing the world of industrial

　　design the way that Raymond Loewy and Herbert Bayer had done. “There really

　　wasn’t much going on in industrial design, particularly in Silicon Valley, and

　　Steve was very eager to change that,” said Lin. “His design sensibility is sleek

　　but not slick, and it’s playful. He embraced minimalism, which came from his Zen

　　devotion to simplicity, but he avoided allowing that to make his products cold.

　　They stayed fun. He’s passionate and super-serious about design, but at the same

　　time there’s a sense of play.”

　　As Jobs’s design sensibilities evolved, he became particularly attracted to the

　　Japanese style and began hanging out with its stars, such as Issey Miyake and I.

　　M. Pei. His Buddhist training was a big influence. “I have always found

　　Buddhism, Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular, to be aesthetically sublime,” he

　　said. “The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto. I’m

　　deeply moved by what that culture has produced, and it’s directly from Zen

　　Buddhism.”

　　Like a Porsche

　　Jef Raskin’s vision for the Macintosh was that it would be like a boxy carry-on

　　suitcase, which would be closed by flipping up the keyboard over the front

　　screen. When Jobs took over the project, he decided to sacrifice portability for

　　a distinctive design that wouldn’t take up much space on a desk. He plopped down

　　a phone book and declared, to the horror of the engineers, that it shouldn’t

　　have a footprint larger than that. So his design team of Jerry Manock and Terry

　　Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen above the computer box, with a

　　keyboard that was detachable.

　　One day in March 1981, Andy Hertzfeld came back to the office from dinner to

　　find Jobs hovering over their one Mac prototype in intense discussion with the

　　creative services director, James Ferris. “We need it to have a classic look

　　that won’t go out of style, like the Volkswagen Beetle,” Jobs said. From his

　　father he had developed an appreciation for the contours of classic cars.

　　“No, that’s not right,” Ferris replied. “The lines should be voluptuous, like a

　　Ferrari.”

　　“Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs countered. “It should be more

　　like a Porsche!” Jobs owned a Porsche 928 at the time. When Bill Atkinson was

　　over one weekend, Jobs brought him outside to admire the car. “Great art

　　stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes,” he told Atkinson. He also

　　admired the design of the Mercedes. “Over the years, they’ve made the lines

　　softer but the details starker,” he said one day as he walked around the parking

　　lot. “That’s what we have to do with the Macintosh.”

　　Oyama drafted a preliminary design and had a plaster model made. The Mac team

　　gathered around for the unveiling and expressed their thoughts. Hertzfeld called

　　it “cute.” Others also seemed satisfied. Then Jobs let loose a blistering burst

　　of criticism. “It’s way too boxy, it’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of

　　the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bevel.”

　　With his new fluency in industrial design lingo, Jobs was referring to the

　　angular or curved edge connecting the sides of the computer. But then he gave a

　　resounding compliment. “It’s a start,” he said.

　　Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on

　　Jobs’s previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically

　　unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not

　　only helped them gauge the design’s evolution, but it prevented Jobs from

　　insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored. “By the fourth model, I

　　could barely distinguish it from the third one,” said Hertzfeld, “but Steve was

　　always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that I could

　　barely perceive.”

　　One weekend Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto and again spent time studying

　　appliances, especially the Cuisinart. He came bounding into the Mac office that

　　Monday, asked the design team to go buy one, and made a raft of new suggestions

　　based on its lines, curves, and bevels.

　　Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look friendly. As a result, it

　　evolved to resemble a human face. With the disk drive built in below the screen,

　　the unit was taller and narrower than most computers, suggesting a head. The

　　recess near the base evoked a gentle chin, and Jobs narrowed the strip of

　　plastic at the top so that it avoided the Neanderthal forehead that made the

　　Lisa subtly unattractive. The patent for the design of the Apple case was issued

　　in the name of Steve Jobs as well as Manock and Oyama. “Even though Steve didn’t

　　draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,”

　　Oyama later said. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to

　　be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”

　　Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what would appear on the

　　screen. One day Bill Atkinson burst into Texaco Towers all excited. He had just

　　come up with a brilliant algorithm that could draw circles and ovals onscreen

　　quickly. The math for making circles usually required calculating square roots,

　　which the 68000 microprocessor didn’t support. But Atkinson did a workaround

　　based on the fact that the sum of a sequence of odd numbers produces a sequence

　　of perfect squares (for example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3 + 5 = 9, etc.). Hertzfeld

　　recalled that when Atkinson fired up his demo, everyone was impressed except

　　Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good,” he said, “but how about drawing

　　rectangles with rounded corners?”

　　“I don’t think we really need it,” said Atkinson, who explained that it would be

　　almost impossible to do. “I wanted to keep the graphics routines lean and limit

　　them to the primitives that truly needed to be done,” he recalled.

　　“Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!” Jobs said, jumping up and

　　getting more intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out the

　　whiteboard and the tabletop and other objects that were rectangular with rounded

　　corners. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!”

　　He dragged Atkinson out for a walk, pointing out car windows and billboards and

　　street signs. “Within three blocks, we found seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I

　　started pointing them out everywhere until he was completely convinced.”

　　“When he finally got to a No Parking sign, I said, ‘Okay, you’re right, I give

　　up. We need to have a rounded-corner rectangle as a primitive!’” Hertzfeld

　　recalled, “Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big

　　smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded

　　corners blisteringly fast.” The dialogue boxes and windows on the Lisa and the

　　Mac, and almost every other subsequent computer, ended up being rendered with

　　rounded corners.

　　At the calligraphy class he had audited at Reed, Jobs learned to love typefaces,

　　with all of their serif and sans serif variations, proportional spacing, and

　　leading. “When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back

　　to me,” he later said of that class. Because the Mac was bitmapped, it was

　　possible to devise an endless array of fonts, ranging from the elegant to the

　　wacky, and render them pixel by pixel on the screen.

　　To design these fonts, Hertzfeld recruited a high school friend from suburban

　　Philadelphia, Susan Kare. They named the fonts after the stops on Philadelphia’s

　　Main Line commuter train: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. Jobs found

　　the process fascinating. Late one afternoon he stopped by and started brooding

　　about the font names. They were “little cities that nobody’s ever heard of,” he

　　complained. “They ought to be world-class cities!” The fonts were renamed

　　Chicago, New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco, Toronto, and Venice.

　　Markkula and some others could never quite appreciate Jobs’s obsession with

　　typography. “His knowledge of fonts was remarkable, and he kept insisting on

　　having great ones,” Markkula recalled. “I kept saying, ‘Fonts?!? Don’t we have

　　more important things to do?’” In fact the delightful assortment of Macintosh

　　fonts, when combined with laser-writer printing and great graphics capabilities,

　　would help launch the desktop publishing industry and be a boon for Apple’s

　　bottom line. It also introduced all sorts of regular folks, ranging from high

　　school journalists to moms who edited PTA newsletters, to the quirky joy of

　　knowing about fonts, which was once reserved for printers, grizzled editors, and

　　other ink-stained wretches.

　　Kare also developed the icons, such as the trash can for discarding files, that

　　helped define graphical interfaces. She and Jobs hit it off because they shared

　　an instinct for simplicity along with a desire to make the Mac whimsical. “He

　　usually came in at the end of every day,” she said. “He’d always want to know

　　what was new, and he’s always had good taste and a good sense for visual

　　details.” Sometimes he came in on Sunday morning, so Kare made it a point to be

　　there working. Every now and then, she would run into a problem. He rejected one

　　of her renderings of a rabbit, an icon for speeding up the mouse-click rate,

　　saying that the furry creature looked “too gay.”

　　Jobs lavished similar attention on the title bars atop windows and documents. He

　　had Atkinson and Kare do them over and over again as he agonized over their

　　look. He did not like the ones on the Lisa because they were too black and

　　harsh. He wanted the ones on the Mac to be smoother, to have pinstripes. “We

　　must have gone through twenty different title bar designs before he was happy,”

　　Atkinson recalled. At one point Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making

　　them spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title bar when they had

　　bigger things to do. Jobs erupted. “Can you imagine looking at that every day?”

　　he shouted. “It’s not just a little thing, it’s something we have to do right.”

　　Chris Espinosa found one way to satisfy Jobs’s design demands and control-freak

　　tendencies. One of Wozniak’s youthful acolytes from the days in the garage,

　　Espinosa had been convinced to drop out of Berkeley by Jobs, who argued that he

　　would always have a chance to study, but only one chance to work on the Mac. On

　　his own, he decided to design a calculator for the computer. “We all gathered

　　around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting

　　for Steve’s reaction,” Hertzfeld recalled.

　　“Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color

　　is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.”

　　Espinosa kept refining it in response to Jobs’s critiques, day after day, but

　　with each iteration came new criticisms. So finally one afternoon, when Jobs

　　came by, Espinosa unveiled his inspired solution: “The Steve Jobs Roll Your Own

　　Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the user to tweak and personalize the

　　look of the calculator by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the

　　buttons, the shading, the background, and other attributes. Instead of just

　　laughing, Jobs plunged in and started to play around with the look to suit his

　　tastes. After about ten minutes he got it the way he liked. His design, not

　　surprisingly, was the one that shipped on the Mac and remained the standard for

　　fifteen years.

　　Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent

　　design language for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a

　　world-class designer who would be for Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The

　　project was code-named Snow White, not because of his preference for the color

　　but because the products to be designed were code-named after the seven dwarfs.

　　The winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was responsible for the

　　look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs flew to the Black Forest region of

　　Bavaria to meet him and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s passion but also

　　his spirited way of driving his Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per

　　hour.

　　Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a

　　“born-in-America gene for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global”

　　look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex

　　appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion,” a play on the

　　familiar maxim that form follows function. He produced forty models of products

　　to demonstrate the concept, and when Jobs saw them he proclaimed, “Yes, this is

　　it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted immediately for the Apple IIc,

　　featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin grooves for both

　　ventilation and decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the condition

　　that he move to California. They shook hands and, in Esslinger’s not-so-modest

　　words, “that handshake launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the

　　history of industrial design.” Esslinger’s firm, frogdesign,2 opened in Palo

　　Alto in mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract to work for Apple, and from

　　then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration “Designed in

　　California.”

　　From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is

　　making sure that even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully.

　　One of the most extreme—and telling—implementations of that philosophy came when

　　he scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other

　　components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs

　　began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said.

　　“But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.”

　　One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing

　　that’s important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”

　　Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s

　　inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of

　　a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” In an interview a few years

　　later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his

　　father: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not

　　going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and

　　nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a

　　beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the

　　aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

　　From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of packaging and presentation.

　　People do judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose

　　a full-color design and kept trying to make it look better. “He got the guys to

　　redo it fifty times,” recalled Alain Rossmann, a member of the Mac team who

　　married Joanna Hoffman. “It was going to be thrown in the trash as soon as the

　　consumer opened it, but he was obsessed by how it looked.” To Rossmann, this

　　showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on expensive packaging while

　　they were trying to save money on the memory chips. But for Jobs, each detail

　　was essential to making the Macintosh amazing.

　　When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together

　　for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet

　　of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The

　　signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but

　　the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they

　　knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called

　　them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until

　　last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center

　　of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then

　　he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this, he got us seeing our

　　work as art,” said Atkinson.UnknownBUILDING THE MAC

　　The Journey Is the Reward

　　Competition

　　When IBM introduced its personal computer in August 1981, Jobs had his team buy

　　one and dissect it. Their consensus was that it sucked. Chris Espinosa called it

　　“a half-assed, hackneyed attempt,” and there was some truth to that. It used

　　old-fashioned command-line prompts and didn’t support bitmapped graphical

　　displays. Apple became cocky, not realizing that corporate technology managers

　　might feel more comfortable buying from an established company like IBM rather

　　than one named after a piece of fruit. Bill Gates happened to be visiting Apple

　　headquarters for a meeting on the day the IBM PC was announced. “They didn’t

　　seem to care,” he said. “It took them a year to realize what had happened.”

　　Reflecting its cheeky confidence, Apple took out a full-page ad in the Wall

　　Street Journal with the headline “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” It cleverly

　　positioned the upcoming computer battle as a two-way contest between the spunky

　　and rebellious Apple and the establishment Goliath IBM, conveniently relegating

　　to irrelevance companies such as Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne that were doing

　　just as well as Apple.

　　Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted

　　against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of

　　darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as

　　a mere business competition, but as a spiritual struggle. “If, for some reason,

　　we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are

　　going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years,” he told an

　　interviewer. “Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop

　　innovation.” Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs

　　cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They

　　were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT

　　or Microsoft or Google is.”

　　Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs also took aim at another perceived competitor to

　　his Macintosh: the company’s own Lisa. Partly it was psychological. He had been

　　ousted from that group, and now he wanted to beat it. He also saw healthy

　　rivalry as a way to motivate his troops. That’s why he bet John Couch $5,000

　　that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. The problem was that the rivalry became

　　unhealthy. Jobs repeatedly portrayed his band of engineers as the cool kids on

　　the block, in contrast to the plodding HP engineer types working on the Lisa.

　　More substantively, when he moved away from Jef Raskin’s plan for an inexpensive

　　and underpowered portable appliance and reconceived the Mac as a desktop machine

　　with a graphical user interface, it became a scaled-down version of the Lisa

　　that would likely undercut it in the marketplace.

　　Larry Tesler, who managed application software for the Lisa, realized that it

　　would be important to design both machines to use many of the same software

　　programs. So to broker peace, he arranged for Smith and Hertzfeld to come to the

　　Lisa work space and demonstrate the Mac prototype. Twenty-five engineers showed

　　up and were listening politely when, halfway into the presentation, the door

　　burst open. It was Rich Page, a volatile engineer who was responsible for much

　　of the Lisa’s design. “The Macintosh is going to destroy the Lisa!” he shouted.

　　“The Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!” Neither Smith nor Hertzfeld responded,

　　so Page continued his rant. “Jobs wants to destroy Lisa because we wouldn’t let

　　him control it,” he said, looking as if he were about to cry. “Nobody’s going to

　　buy a Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you don’t care!” He stormed

　　out of the room and slammed the door, but a moment later he barged back in

　　briefly. “I know it’s not your fault,” he said to Smith and Hertzfeld. “Steve

　　Jobs is the problem. Tell Steve that he’s destroying Apple!”

　　Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one

　　with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was

　　compatible with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was

　　no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.

　　End-to-end Control

　　Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible with the architecture of the Lisa

　　was motivated by more than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical

　　component, one that was related to his penchant for control. He believed that

　　for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be

　　tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on

　　other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best

　　products, he believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed end-to-end, with

　　the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would

　　distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its

　　own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its

　　operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies.

　　“Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t want his creations mutated

　　inauspiciously by unworthy programmers,” explained ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber.

　　“It would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso

　　painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” In later years Jobs’s

　　whole-widget approach would distinguish the iPhone, iPod, and iPad from their

　　competitors. It resulted in awesome products. But it was not always the best

　　strategy for dominating a market. “From the first Mac to the latest iPhone,

　　Jobs’s systems have always been sealed shut to prevent consumers from meddling

　　and modifying them,” noted Leander Kahney, author of Cult of the Mac.

　　Jobs’s desire to control the user experience had been at the heart of his debate

　　with Wozniak over whether the Apple II would have slots that allow a user to

　　plug expansion cards into a computer’s motherboard and thus add some new

　　functionality. Wozniak won that argument: The Apple II had eight slots. But this

　　time around it would be Jobs’s machine, not Wozniak’s, and the Macintosh would

　　have limited slots. You wouldn’t even be able to open the case and get to the

　　motherboard. For a hobbyist or hacker, that was uncool. But for Jobs, the

　　Macintosh was for the masses. He wanted to give them a controlled experience.

　　“It reflects his personality, which is to want control,” said Berry Cash, who

　　was hired by Jobs in 1982 to be a market strategist at Texaco Towers. “Steve

　　would talk about the Apple II and complain, ‘We don’t have control, and look at

　　all these crazy things people are trying to do to it. That’s a mistake I’ll

　　never make again.’” He went so far as to design special tools so that the

　　Macintosh case could not be opened with a regular screwdriver. “We’re going to

　　design this thing so nobody but Apple employees can get inside this box,” he

　　told Cash.

　　Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard.

　　The only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing

　　old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t

　　want to. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was

　　always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.

　　There was one other advantage, he believed, to eliminating the cursor keys: It

　　forced outside software developers to write programs specially for the Mac

　　operating system, rather than merely writing generic software that could be

　　ported to a variety of computers. That made for the type of tight vertical

　　integration between application software, operating systems, and hardware

　　devices that Jobs liked.

　　Jobs’s desire for end-to-end control also made him allergic to proposals that

　　Apple license the Macintosh operating system to other office equipment

　　manufacturers and allow them to make Macintosh clones. The new and energetic

　　Macintosh marketing director Mike Murray proposed a licensing program in a

　　confidential memo to Jobs in May 1982. “We would like the Macintosh user

　　environment to become an industry standard,” he wrote. “The hitch, of course, is

　　that now one must buy Mac hardware in order to get this user environment. Rarely

　　(if ever) has one company been able to create and maintain an industry-wide

　　standard that cannot be shared with other manufacturers.” His proposal was to

　　license the Macintosh operating system to Tandy. Because Tandy’s Radio Shack

　　stores went after a different type of customer, Murray argued, it would not

　　severely cannibalize Apple sales. But Jobs was congenitally averse to such a

　　plan. His approach meant that the Macintosh remained a controlled environment

　　that met his standards, but it also meant that, as Murray feared, it would have

　　trouble securing its place as an industry standard in a world of IBM clones.

　　Machines of the Year

　　As 1982 drew to a close, Jobs came to believe that he was going to be Time’s Man

　　of the Year. He arrived at Texaco Towers one day with the magazine’s San

　　Francisco bureau chief, Michael Moritz, and encouraged colleagues to give Moritz

　　interviews. But Jobs did not end up on the cover. Instead the magazine chose

　　“the Computer” as the topic for the year-end issue and called it “the Machine of

　　the Year.”

　　Accompanying the main story was a profile of Jobs, which was based on the

　　reporting done by Moritz and written by Jay Cocks, an editor who usually handled

　　rock music for the magazine. “With his smooth sales pitch and a blind faith that

　　would have been the envy of the early Christian martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more

　　than anyone, who kicked open the door and let the personal computer move in,”

　　the story proclaimed. It was a richly reported piece, but also harsh at times—so

　　harsh that Moritz (after he wrote a book about Apple and went on to be a partner

　　in the venture firm Sequoia Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated it by

　　complaining that his reporting had been “siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with

　　gossipy benzene by an editor in New York whose regular task was to chronicle the

　　wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article quoted Bud Tribble on Jobs’s

　　“reality distortion field” and noted that he “would occasionally burst into

　　tears at meetings.” Perhaps the best quote came from Jef Raskin. Jobs, he

　　declared, “would have made an excellent King of France.”

　　To Jobs’s dismay, the magazine made public the existence of the daughter he had

　　forsaken, Lisa Brennan. He knew that Kottke had been the one to tell the

　　magazine about Lisa, and he berated him in the Mac group work space in front of

　　a half dozen people. “When the Time reporter asked me if Steve had a daughter

　　named Lisa, I said ‘Of course,’” Kottke recalled. “Friends don’t let friends

　　deny that they’re the father of a child. I’m not going to let my friend be a

　　jerk and deny paternity. He was really angry and felt violated and told me in

　　front of everyone that I had betrayed him.”

　　But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was not, after all, chosen as the Man

　　of the Year. As he later told me:

　　Time decided they were going to make me Man of the Year, and I was

　　twenty-seven, so I actually cared about stuff like that. I thought it was

　　pretty cool. They sent out Mike Moritz to write a story. We’re the same age,

　　and I had been very successful, and I could tell he was jealous and there was

　　an edge to him. He wrote this terrible hatchet job. So the editors in New York

　　get this story and say, “We can’t make this guy Man of the Year.” That really

　　hurt. But it was a good lesson. It taught me to never get too excited about

　　things like that, since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me the

　　magazine, and I remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my

　　mug on the cover, and it was this computer sculpture thing. I thought, “Huh?”

　　And then I read the article, and it was so awful that I actually cried.

　　In fact there’s no reason to believe that Moritz was jealous or that he intended

　　his reporting to be unfair. Nor was Jobs ever slated to be Man of the Year,

　　despite what he thought. That year the top editors (I was then a junior editor

　　there) decided early on to go with the computer rather than a person, and they

　　commissioned, months in advance, a piece of art from the famous sculptor George

　　Segal to be a gatefold cover image. Ray Cave was then the magazine’s editor. “We

　　never considered Jobs,” he said. “You couldn’t personify the computer, so that

　　was the first time we decided to go with an inanimate object. We never searched

　　around for a face to be put on the cover.”

　　Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983—a full year before the Mac was ready—and

　　Jobs paid his $5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of the Lisa

　　team, Jobs went to New York to do publicity for it in his role as Apple’s

　　chairman and poster boy.

　　He had learned from his public relations consultant Regis McKenna how to dole

　　out exclusive interviews in a dramatic manner. Reporters from anointed

　　publications were ushered in sequentially for their hour with him in his Carlyle

　　Hotel suite, where a Lisa computer was set on a table and surrounded by cut

　　flowers. The publicity plan called for Jobs to focus on the Lisa and not mention

　　the Macintosh, because speculation about it could undermine the Lisa. But Jobs

　　couldn’t help himself. In most of the stories based on his interviews that

　　day—in Time, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune—the Macintosh

　　was mentioned. “Later this year Apple will introduce a less powerful, less

　　expensive version of Lisa, the Macintosh,” Fortune reported. “Jobs himself has

　　directed that project.” Business Week quoted him as saying, “When it comes out,

　　Mac is going to be the most incredible computer in the world.” He also admitted

　　that the Mac and the Lisa would not be compatible. It was like launching the

　　Lisa with the kiss of death.

　　The Lisa did indeed die a slow death. Within two years it would be discontinued.

　　“It was too expensive, and we were trying to sell it to big companies when our

　　expertise was selling to consumers,” Jobs later said. But there was a silver

　　lining for Jobs: Within months of Lisa’s launch, it became clear that Apple had

　　to pin its hopes on the Macintosh instead.

　　Let’s Be Pirates!

　　As the Macintosh team grew, it moved from Texaco Towers to the main Apple

　　buildings on Bandley Drive, finally settling in mid-1983 into Bandley 3. It had

　　a modern atrium lobby with video games, which Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld

　　chose, and a Toshiba compact disc stereo system with MartinLogan speakers and a

　　hundred CDs. The software team was visible from the lobby in a fishbowl-like

　　glass enclosure, and the kitchen was stocked daily with Odwalla juices. Over

　　time the atrium attracted even more toys, most notably a Bösendorfer piano and a

　　BMW motorcycle that Jobs felt would inspire an obsession with lapidary

　　craftsmanship.

　　Jobs kept a tight rein on the hiring process. The goal was to get people who

　　were creative, wickedly smart, and slightly rebellious. The software team would

　　make applicants play Defender, Smith’s favorite video game. Jobs would ask his

　　usual offbeat questions to see how well the applicant could think in unexpected

　　situations. One day he, Hertzfeld, and Smith interviewed a candidate for

　　software manager who, it became clear as soon as he walked in the room, was too

　　uptight and conventional to manage the wizards in the fishbowl. Jobs began to

　　toy with him mercilessly. “How old were you when you lost your virginity?” he

　　asked.

　　The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?”

　　“Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs

　　changed the subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled,

　　“The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the

　　subject and asked a straightforward technical question.” But when the candidate

　　droned on in his response, Jobs broke in. “Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,” he

　　said, cracking up Smith and Hertzfeld.

　　“I guess I’m not the right guy,” the poor man said as he got up to leave.

　　For all of his obnoxious behavior, Jobs also had the ability to instill in his

　　team an esprit de corps. After tearing people down, he would find ways to lift

　　them up and make them feel that being part of the Macintosh project was an

　　amazing mission. Every six months he would take most of his team on a two-day

　　retreat at a nearby resort.

　　The retreat in September 1982 was at the Pajaro Dunes near Monterey. Fifty or so

　　members of the Mac division sat in the lodge facing a fireplace. Jobs sat on top

　　of a table in front of them. He spoke quietly for a while, then walked to an

　　easel and began posting his thoughts.

　　The first was “Don’t compromise.” It was an injunction that would, over time, be

　　both helpful and harmful. Most technology teams made trade-offs. The Mac, on the

　　other hand, would end up being as “insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes

　　could possibly make it—but it would not ship for another sixteen months, way

　　behind schedule. After mentioning a scheduled completion date, he told them, “It

　　would be better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.” A different type of

　　project manager, willing to make some trade-offs, might try to lock in dates

　　after which no changes could be made. Not Jobs. He displayed another maxim:

　　“It’s not done until it ships.”

　　Another chart contained a koōan-like phrase that he later told me was his

　　favorite maxim: “The journey is the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to

　　emphasize, was a special corps with an exalted mission. Someday they would all

　　look back on their journey together and, forgetting or laughing off the painful

　　moments, would regard it as a magical high point in their lives.

　　At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do

　　some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because

　　customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out

　　a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something

　　neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that

　　could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a

　　notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid-to late

　　eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.

　　For the next two days there were presentations by various team leaders and the

　　influential computer industry analyst Ben Rosen, with a lot of time in the

　　evenings for pool parties and dancing. At the end, Jobs stood in front of the

　　assemblage and gave a soliloquy. “As every day passes, the work fifty people are

　　doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe,” he said. “I

　　know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing

　　I’ve done in my life.” Years later most of those in the audience would be able

　　to laugh about the “little hard to get along with” episodes and agree with him

　　that creating that giant ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.

　　The next retreat was at the end of January 1983, the same month the Lisa

　　launched, and there was a shift in tone. Four months earlier Jobs had written on

　　his flip chart: “Don’t compromise.” This time one of the maxims was “Real

　　artists ship.” Nerves were frayed. Atkinson had been left out of the publicity

　　interviews for the Lisa launch, and he marched into Jobs’s hotel room and

　　threatened to quit. Jobs tried to minimize the slight, but Atkinson refused to

　　be mollified. Jobs got annoyed. “I don’t have time to deal with this now,” he

　　said. “I have sixty other people out there who are pouring their hearts into the

　　Macintosh, and they’re waiting for me to start the meeting.” With that he

　　brushed past Atkinson to go address the faithful.

　　Jobs proceeded to give a rousing speech in which he claimed that he had resolved

　　the dispute with McIntosh audio labs to use the Macintosh name. (In fact the

　　issue was still being negotiated, but the moment called for a bit of the old

　　reality distortion field.) He pulled out a bottle of mineral water and

　　symbolically christened the prototype onstage. Down the hall, Atkinson heard the

　　loud cheer, and with a sigh joined the group. The ensuing party featured

　　skinny-dipping in the pool, a bonfire on the beach, and loud music that lasted

　　all night, which caused the hotel, La Playa in Carmel, to ask them never to come

　　back.

　　Another of Jobs’s maxims at the retreat was “It’s better to be a pirate than to

　　join the navy.” He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them

　　behave like swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing to commandeer

　　from others. As Susan Kare put it, “He meant, ‘Let’s have a renegade feeling to

　　our group. We can move fast. We can get things done.’” To celebrate Jobs’s

　　birthday a few weeks later, the team paid for a billboard on the road to Apple

　　headquarters. It read: “Happy 28th Steve. The Journey is the Reward.—The

　　Pirates.”

　　One of the Mac team’s programmers, Steve Capps, decided this new spirit

　　warranted hoisting a Jolly Roger. He cut a patch of black cloth and had Kare

　　paint a skull and crossbones on it. The eye patch she put on the skull was an

　　Apple logo. Late one Sunday night Capps climbed to the roof of their newly built

　　Bandley 3 building and hoisted the flag on a scaffolding pole that the

　　construction workers had left behind. It waved proudly for a few weeks, until

　　members of the Lisa team, in a late-night foray, stole the flag and sent their

　　Mac rivals a ransom note. Capps led a raid to recover it and was able to wrestle

　　it from a secretary who was guarding it for the Lisa team. Some of the grown-ups

　　overseeing Apple worried that Jobs’s buccaneer spirit was getting out of hand.

　　“Flying that flag was really stupid,” said Arthur Rock. “It was telling the rest

　　of the company they were no good.” But Jobs loved it, and he made sure it waved

　　proudly all the way through to the completion of the Mac project. “We were the

　　renegades, and we wanted people to know it,” he recalled.

　　Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they could stand up to Jobs. If they

　　knew what they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire

　　it. By 1983 those most familiar with his reality distortion field had discovered

　　something further: They could, if necessary, just quietly disregard what he

　　decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would appreciate their renegade

　　attitude and willingness to ignore authority. After all, that’s what he did.

　　By far the most important example of this involved the choice of a disk drive

　　for the Macintosh. Apple had a corporate division that built mass-storage

　　devices, and it had developed a disk-drive system, code-named Twiggy, that could

　　read and write onto those thin, delicate 5¼-inch floppy disks that older readers

　　(who also remember Twiggy the model) will recall. But by the time the Lisa was

　　ready to ship in the spring of 1983, it was clear that the Twiggy was buggy.

　　Because the Lisa also came with a hard-disk drive, this was not a complete

　　disaster. But the Mac had no hard disk, so it faced a crisis. “The Mac team was

　　beginning to panic,” said Hertzfeld. “We were using a single Twiggy drive, and

　　we didn’t have a hard disk to fall back on.”

　　The team discussed the problem at the January 1983 retreat, and Debi Coleman

　　gave Jobs data about the Twiggy failure rate. A few days later he drove to

　　Apple’s factory in San Jose to see the Twiggy being made. More than half were

　　rejected. Jobs erupted. With his face flushed, he began shouting and sputtering

　　about firing everyone who worked there. Bob Belleville, the head of the Mac

　　engineering team, gently guided him to the parking lot, where they could take a

　　walk and talk about alternatives.

　　One possibility that Belleville had been exploring was to use a new 3½-inch disk

　　drive that Sony had developed. The disk was cased in sturdier plastic and could

　　fit into a shirt pocket. Another option was to have a clone of Sony’s 3½-inch

　　disk drive manufactured by a smaller Japanese supplier, the Alps Electronics

　　Co., which had been supplying disk drives for the Apple II. Alps had already

　　licensed the technology from Sony, and if they could build their own version in

　　time it would be much cheaper.

　　Jobs and Belleville, along with Apple veteran Rod Holt (the guy Jobs enlisted to

　　design the first power supply for the Apple II), flew to Japan to figure out

　　what to do. They took the bullet train from Tokyo to visit the Alps facility.

　　The engineers there didn’t even have a working prototype, just a crude model.

　　Jobs thought it was great, but Belleville was appalled. There was no way, he

　　thought, that Alps could have it ready for the Mac within a year.

　　As they proceeded to visit other Japanese companies, Jobs was on his worst

　　behavior. He wore jeans and sneakers to meetings with Japanese managers in dark

　　suits. When they formally handed him little gifts, as was the custom, he often

　　left them behind, and he never reciprocated with gifts of his own. He would

　　sneer when rows of engineers lined up to greet him, bow, and politely offer

　　their products for inspection. Jobs hated both the devices and the

　　obsequiousness. “What are you showing me this for?” he snapped at one stop.

　　“This is a piece of crap! Anybody could build a better drive than this.”

　　Although most of his hosts were appalled, some seemed amused. They had heard

　　tales of his obnoxious style and brash behavior, and now they were getting to

　　see it in full display.

　　The final stop was the Sony factory, located in a drab suburb of Tokyo. To Jobs,

　　it looked messy and inelegant. A lot of the work was done by hand. He hated it.

　　Back at the hotel, Belleville argued for going with the Sony disk drive. It was

　　ready to use. Jobs disagreed. He decided that they would work with Alps to

　　produce their own drive, and he ordered Belleville to cease all work with Sony.

　　Belleville decided it was best to partially ignore Jobs, and he asked a Sony

　　executive to get its disk drive ready for use in the Macintosh. If and when it

　　became clear that Alps could not deliver on time, Apple would switch to Sony. So

　　Sony sent over the engineer who had developed the drive, Hidetoshi Komoto, a

　　Purdue graduate who fortunately possessed a good sense of humor about his

　　clandestine task.

　　Whenever Jobs would come from his corporate office to visit the Mac team’s

　　engineers—which was almost every afternoon—they would hurriedly find somewhere

　　for Komoto to hide. At one point Jobs ran into him at a newsstand in Cupertino

　　and recognized him from the meeting in Japan, but he didn’t suspect anything.

　　The closest call was when Jobs came bustling onto the Mac work space

　　unexpectedly one day while Komoto was sitting in one of the cubicles. A Mac

　　engineer grabbed him and pointed him to a janitorial closet. “Quick, hide in

　　this closet. Please! Now!” Komoto looked confused, Hertzfeld recalled, but he

　　jumped up and did as told. He had to stay in the closet for five minutes, until

　　Jobs left. The Mac engineers apologized. “No problem,” he replied. “But American

　　business practices, they are very strange. Very strange.”

　　Belleville’s prediction came true. In May 1983 the folks at Alps admitted it

　　would take them at least eighteen more months to get their clone of the Sony

　　drive into production. At a retreat in Pajaro Dunes, Markkula grilled Jobs on

　　what he was going to do. Finally, Belleville interrupted and said that he might

　　have an alternative to the Alps drive ready soon. Jobs looked baffled for just a

　　moment, and then it became clear to him why he’d glimpsed Sony’s top disk

　　designer in Cupertino. “You son of a bitch!” Jobs said. But it was not in anger.

　　There was a big grin on his face. As soon as he realized what Belleville and the

　　other engineers had done behind his back, said Hertzfeld, “Steve swallowed his

　　pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right thing.” It was,

　　after all, what he would have done in their situation.UnknownENTER SCULLEY

　　The Pepsi Challenge

　　With John Sculley, 1984

　　The Courtship

　　Mike Markkula had never wanted to be Apple’s president. He liked designing his

　　new houses, flying his private plane, and living high off his stock options; he

　　did not relish adjudicating conflict or curating high-maintenance egos. He had

　　stepped into the role reluctantly, after he felt compelled to ease out Mike

　　Scott, and he promised his wife the gig would be temporary. By the end of 1982,

　　after almost two years, she gave him an order: Find a replacement right away.

　　Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there

　　was a part of him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be

　　self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told Jobs that he was still a bit too

　　rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s president. So they launched a search for

　　someone from the outside.

　　The person they most wanted was Don Estridge, who had built IBM’s personal

　　computer division from scratch and launched a PC that, even though Jobs and his

　　team disparaged it, was now outselling Apple’s. Estridge had sheltered his

　　division in Boca Raton, Florida, safely removed from the corporate mentality of

　　Armonk, New York. Like Jobs, he was driven and inspiring, but unlike Jobs, he

　　had the ability to allow others to think that his brilliant ideas were their

　　own. Jobs flew to Boca Raton with the offer of a $1 million salary and a $1

　　million signing bonus, but Estridge turned him down. He was not the type who

　　would jump ship to join the enemy. He also enjoyed being part of the

　　establishment, a member of the Navy rather than a pirate. He was discomforted by

　　Jobs’s tales of ripping off the phone company. When asked where he worked, he

　　loved to be able to answer “IBM.”

　　So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to

　　find someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they

　　needed was a consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish

　　that would play well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest

　　consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John Sculley, president of the

　　Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had been an

　　advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a talk to Stanford business

　　students, he heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class

　　earlier. So he told Roche he would be happy to meet him.

　　Sculley’s background was very different from Jobs’s. His mother was an Upper

　　East Side Manhattan matron who wore white gloves when she went out, and his

　　father was a proper Wall Street lawyer. Sculley was sent off to St. Mark’s

　　School, then got his undergraduate degree from Brown and a business degree from

　　Wharton. He had risen through the ranks at PepsiCo as an innovative marketer and

　　advertiser, with little passion for product development or information

　　technology.

　　Sculley flew to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his two teenage children

　　from a previous marriage. He took them to visit a computer store, where he was

　　struck by how poorly the products were marketed. When his kids asked why he was

　　so interested, he said he was planning to go up to Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs.

　　They were totally blown away. They had grown up among movie stars, but to them

　　Jobs was a true celebrity. It made Sculley take more seriously the prospect of

　　being hired as his boss.

　　When he arrived at Apple headquarters, Sculley was startled by the unassuming

　　offices and casual atmosphere. “Most people were less formally dressed than

　　PepsiCo’s maintenance staff,” he noted. Over lunch Jobs picked quietly at his

　　salad, but when Sculley declared that most executives found computers more

　　trouble than they were worth, Jobs clicked into evangelical mode. “We want to

　　change the way people use computers,” he said.

　　On the flight home Sculley outlined his thoughts. The result was an eight-page

　　memo on marketing computers to consumers and business executives. It was a bit

　　sophomoric in parts, filled with underlined phrases, diagrams, and boxes, but it

　　revealed his newfound enthusiasm for figuring out ways to sell something more

　　interesting than soda. Among his recommendations: “Invest in in-store

　　merchandizing that romances the consumer with Apple’s potential to enrich their

　　life!” He was still reluctant to leave Pepsi, but Jobs intrigued him. “I was

　　taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know

　　him a little better,” he recalled.

　　So Sculley agreed to meet again when Jobs next came to New York, which happened

　　to be for the January 1983 Lisa introduction at the Carlyle Hotel. After the

　　full day of press sessions, the Apple team was surprised to see an unscheduled

　　visitor come into the suite. Jobs loosened his tie and introduced Sculley as the

　　president of Pepsi and a potential big corporate customer. As John Couch

　　demonstrated the Lisa, Jobs chimed in with bursts of commentary, sprinkled with

　　his favorite words, “revolutionary” and “incredible,” claiming it would change

　　the nature of human interaction with computers.

　　They then headed off to the Four Seasons restaurant, a shimmering haven of

　　elegance and power. As Jobs ate a special vegan meal, Sculley described Pepsi’s

　　marketing successes. The Pepsi Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product

　　but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook. “I think Apple’s got a chance to

　　create an Apple Generation.” Jobs enthusiastically agreed. The Pepsi Challenge

　　campaign, in contrast, focused on the product; it combined ads, events, and

　　public relations to stir up buzz. The ability to turn the introduction of a new

　　product into a moment of national excitement was, Jobs noted, what he and Regis

　　McKenna wanted to do at Apple.

　　When they finished talking, it was close to midnight. “This has been one of the

　　most exciting evenings in my whole life,” Jobs said as Sculley walked him back

　　to the Carlyle. “I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve had.” When he finally got

　　home to Greenwich, Connecticut, that night, Sculley had trouble sleeping.

　　Engaging with Jobs was a lot more fun than negotiating with bottlers. “It

　　stimulated me, roused my long-held desire to be an architect of ideas,” he later

　　noted. The next morning Roche called Sculley. “I don’t know what you guys did

　　last night, but let me tell you, Steve Jobs is ecstatic,” he said.

　　And so the courtship continued, with Sculley playing hard but not impossible to

　　get. Jobs flew east for a visit one Saturday in February and took a limo up to

　　Greenwich. He found Sculley’s newly built mansion ostentatious, with its

　　floor-to-ceiling windows, but he admired the three hundred-pound custom-made oak

　　doors that were so carefully hung and balanced that they swung open with the

　　touch of a finger. “Steve was fascinated by that because he is, as I am, a

　　perfectionist,” Sculley recalled. Thus began the somewhat unhealthy process of a

　　star-struck Sculley perceiving in Jobs qualities that he fancied in himself.

　　Sculley usually drove a Cadillac, but, sensing his guest’s taste, he borrowed

　　his wife’s Mercedes 450SL convertible to take Jobs to see Pepsi’s 144-acre

　　corporate headquarters, which was as lavish as Apple’s was austere. To Jobs, it

　　epitomized the difference between the feisty new digital economy and the Fortune

　　500 corporate establishment. A winding drive led through manicured fields and a

　　sculpture garden (including pieces by Rodin, Moore, Calder, and Giacometti) to a

　　concrete-and-glass building designed by Edward Durell Stone. Sculley’s huge

　　office had a Persian rug, nine windows, a small private garden, a hideaway

　　study, and its own bathroom. When Jobs saw the corporate fitness center, he was

　　astonished that executives had an area, with its own whirlpool, separate from

　　that of the regular employees. “That’s weird,” he said. Sculley hastened to

　　agree. “As a matter of fact, I was against it, and I go over and work out

　　sometimes in the employees’ area,” he said.

　　Their next meeting was a few weeks later in Cupertino, when Sculley stopped on

　　his way back from a Pepsi bottlers’ convention in Hawaii. Mike Murray, the

　　Macintosh marketing manager, took charge of preparing the team for the visit,

　　but he was not clued in on the real agenda. “PepsiCo could end up purchasing

　　literally thousands of Macs over the next few years,” he exulted in a memo to

　　the Macintosh staff. “During the past year, Mr. Sculley and a certain Mr. Jobs

　　have become friends. Mr. Sculley is considered to be one of the best marketing

　　heads in the big leagues; as such, let’s give him a good time here.”

　　Jobs wanted Sculley to share his excitement about the Macintosh. “This product

　　means more to me than anything I’ve done,” he said. “I want you to be the first

　　person outside of Apple to see it.” He dramatically pulled the prototype out of

　　a vinyl bag and gave a demonstration. Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his

　　machine. “He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed

　　calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.”

　　Jobs had asked Hertzfeld and the gang to prepare a special screen display for

　　Sculley’s amusement. “He’s really smart,” Jobs said. “You wouldn’t believe how

　　smart he is.” The explanation that Sculley might buy a lot of Macintoshes for

　　Pepsi “sounded a little bit fishy to me,” Hertzfeld recalled, but he and Susan

　　Kare created a screen of Pepsi caps and cans that danced around with the Apple

　　logo. Hertzfeld was so excited he began waving his arms around during the demo,

　　but Sculley seemed underwhelmed. “He asked a few questions, but he didn’t seem

　　all that interested,” Hertzfeld recalled. He never ended up warming to Sculley.

　　“He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur,” he later said. “He pretended to be

　　interested in technology, but he wasn’t. He was a marketing guy, and that is

　　what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.”

　　Matters came to a head when Jobs visited New York in March 1983 and was able to

　　convert the courtship into a blind and blinding romance. “I really think you’re

　　the guy,” Jobs said as they walked through Central Park. “I want you to come and

　　work with me. I can learn so much from you.” Jobs, who had cultivated father

　　figures in the past, knew just how to play to Sculley’s ego and insecurities. It

　　worked. “I was smitten by him,” Sculley later admitted. “Steve was one of the

　　brightest people I’d ever met. I shared with him a passion for ideas.”

　　Sculley, who was interested in art history, steered them toward the Metropolitan

　　Museum for a little test of whether Jobs was really willing to learn from

　　others. “I wanted to see how well he could take coaching in a subject where he

　　had no background,” he recalled. As they strolled through the Greek and Roman

　　antiquities, Sculley expounded on the difference between the Archaic sculpture

　　of the sixth century B.C. and the Periclean sculptures a century later. Jobs,

　　who loved to pick up historical nuggets he never learned in college, seemed to

　　soak it in. “I gained a sense that I could be a teacher to a brilliant student,”

　　Sculley recalled. Once again he indulged the conceit that they were alike: “I

　　saw in him a mirror image of my younger self. I, too, was impatient, stubborn,

　　arrogant, impetuous. My mind exploded with ideas, often to the exclusion of

　　everything else. I, too, was intolerant of those who couldn’t live up to my

　　demands.”

　　As they continued their long walk, Sculley confided that on vacations he went to

　　the Left Bank in Paris to draw in his sketchbook; if he hadn’t become a

　　businessman, he would be an artist. Jobs replied that if he weren’t working with

　　computers, he could see himself as a poet in Paris. They continued down Broadway

　　to Colony Records on Forty-ninth Street, where Jobs showed Sculley the music he

　　liked, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Windham Hill

　　jazz artists. Then they walked all the way back up to the San Remo on Central

　　Park West and Seventy-fourth, where Jobs was planning to buy a two-story tower

　　penthouse apartment.

　　The consummation occurred outside the penthouse on one of the terraces, with

　　Sculley sticking close to the wall because he was afraid of heights. First they

　　discussed money. “I told him I needed $1 million in salary, $1 million for a

　　sign-up bonus,” said Sculley. Jobs claimed that would be doable. “Even if I have

　　to pay for it out of my own pocket,” he said. “We’ll have to solve those

　　problems, because you’re the best person I’ve ever met. I know you’re perfect

　　for Apple, and Apple deserves the best.” He added that never before had he

　　worked for someone he really respected, but he knew that Sculley was the person

　　who could teach him the most. Jobs gave him his unblinking stare.

　　Sculley uttered one last demurral, a token suggestion that maybe they should

　　just be friends and he could offer Jobs advice from the sidelines. “Any time

　　you’re in New York, I’d love to spend time with you.” He later recounted the

　　climactic moment: “Steve’s head dropped as he stared at his feet. After a

　　weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for

　　days. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do

　　you want a chance to change the world?’”

　　Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response

　　possible other than to acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get what

　　he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person,”

　　Sculley recalled. “I realized for the first time in four months that I couldn’t

　　say no.” The winter sun was beginning to set. They left the apartment and walked

　　back across the park to the Carlyle.

　　The Honeymoon

　　Sculley arrived in California just in time for the May 1983 Apple management

　　retreat at Pajaro Dunes. Even though he had left all but one of his dark suits

　　back in Greenwich, he was still having trouble adjusting to the casual

　　atmosphere. In the front of the meeting room, Jobs sat on the floor in the lotus

　　position absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet. Sculley tried to

　　impose an agenda; he wanted to discuss how to differentiate their products—the

　　Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize the

　　company around product lines or markets or functions. But the discussion

　　descended into a free-for-all of random ideas, complaints, and debates.

　　At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for producing an unsuccessful product.

　　“Well,” someone shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why don’t you

　　wait until you get a product out before you start being critical?” Sculley was

　　astonished. At Pepsi no one would have challenged the chairman like that. “Yet

　　here, everyone began pig-piling on Steve.” It reminded him of an old joke he had

　　heard from one of the Apple ad salesmen: “What’s the difference between Apple

　　and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”

　　In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake began to rumble the room.

　　“Head for the beach,” someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to the

　　water. Then someone else shouted that the previous earthquake had produced a

　　tidal wave, so they all turned and ran the other way. “The indecision, the

　　contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster, only foreshadowed what

　　was to come,” Sculley later wrote.

　　One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and his wife, Leezy, over for

　　breakfast. He was then living in a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in

　　Los Gatos with his girlfriend, Barbara Jasinski, a smart and reserved beauty who

　　worked for Regis McKenna. Leezy had brought a pan and made vegetarian omelets.

　　(Jobs had edged away from his strict vegan diet for the time being.) “I’m sorry

　　I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around to

　　it.” It was one of his enduring quirks: His exacting standards of craftsmanship

　　combined with a Spartan streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he

　　wasn’t passionate about. He had a Tiffany lamp, an antique dining table, and a

　　laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam cushions on the floor

　　rather than sofas and chairs. Sculley smiled and mistakenly thought that it was

　　similar to his own “frantic and Spartan life in a cluttered New York City

　　apartment” early in his own career.

　　Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he

　　needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon

　　Valley history. “We all have a short period of time on this earth,” he told the

　　Sculleys as they sat around the table that morning. “We probably only have the

　　opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any

　　idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to

　　accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”

　　Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day in the early months of their

　　relationship. “Steve and I became soul mates, near constant companions,” Sculley

　　said. “We tended to speak in half sentences and phrases.” Jobs flattered

　　Sculley. When he dropped by to hash something out, he would say something like

　　“You’re the only one who will understand.” They would tell each other

　　repeatedly, indeed so often that it should have been worrying, how happy they

　　were to be with each other and working in tandem. And at every opportunity

　　Sculley would find similarities with Jobs and point them out:

　　We could complete each other’s sentences because we were on the same

　　wavelength. Steve would rouse me from sleep at 2 a.m. with a phone call to

　　chat about an idea that suddenly crossed his mind. “Hi! It’s me,” he’d

　　harmlessly say to the dazed listener, totally unaware of the time. I curiously

　　had done the same in my Pepsi days. Steve would rip apart a presentation he

　　had to give the next morning, throwing out slides and text. So had I as I

　　struggled to turn public speaking into an important management tool during my

　　early days at Pepsi. As a young executive, I was always impatient to get

　　things done and often felt I could do them better myself. So did Steve.

　　Sometimes I felt as if I was watching Steve playing me in a movie. The

　　similarities were uncanny, and they were behind the amazing symbiosis we

　　developed.

　　This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for disaster. Jobs began to sense it

　　early on. “We had different ways of looking at the world, different views on

　　people, different values,” Jobs recalled. “I began to realize this a few months

　　after he arrived. He didn’t learn things very quickly, and the people he wanted

　　to promote were usually bozos.”

　　Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley by encouraging his belief that

　　they were so alike. And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous

　　of him he became. Canny observers in the Mac group, such as Joanna Hoffman, soon

　　realized what was happening and knew that it would make the inevitable breakup

　　more explosive. “Steve made Sculley feel like he was exceptional,” she said.

　　“Sculley had never felt that. Sculley became infatuated, because Steve projected

　　on him a whole bunch of attributes that he didn’t really have. When it became

　　clear that Sculley didn’t match all of these projections, Steve’s distortion of

　　reality had created an explosive situation.”

　　The ardor eventually began to cool on Sculley’s side as well. Part of his

　　weakness in trying to manage a dysfunctional company was his desire to please

　　other people, one of many traits that he did not share with Jobs. He was a

　　polite person; this caused him to recoil at Jobs’s rudeness to their fellow

　　workers. “We would go to the Mac building at eleven at night,” he recalled, “and

　　they would bring him code to show. In some cases he wouldn’t even look at it. He

　　would just take it and throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can you turn it

　　down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they can do better.’” Sculley tried to coach

　　him. “You’ve got to learn to hold things back,” he told him at one point. Jobs

　　would agree, but it was not in his nature to filter his feelings through a

　　gauze.

　　Sculley began to believe that Jobs’s mercurial personality and erratic treatment

　　of people were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection

　　of a mild bipolarity. There were big mood swings; sometimes he would be

　　ecstatic, at other times he was depressed. At times he would launch into brutal

　　tirades without warning, and Sculley would have to calm him down. “Twenty

　　minutes later, I would get another call and be told to come over because Steve

　　is losing it again,” he said.

　　Their first substantive disagreement was over how to price the Macintosh. It had

　　been conceived as a $1,000 machine, but Jobs’s design changes had pushed up the

　　cost so that the plan was to sell it at $1,995. However, when Jobs and Sculley

　　began making plans for a huge launch and marketing push, Sculley decided that

　　they needed to charge $500 more. To him, the marketing costs were like any other

　　production cost and needed to be factored into the price. Jobs resisted,

　　furiously. “It will destroy everything we stand for,” he said. “I want to make

　　this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.” Sculley said it was a

　　simple choice: He could have the $1,995 price or he could have the marketing

　　budget for a big launch, but not both.

　　“You’re not going to like this,” Jobs told Hertzfeld and the other engineers,

　　“but Sculley is insisting that we charge $2,495 for the Mac instead of $1,995.”

　　Indeed the engineers were horrified. Hertzfeld pointed out that they were

　　designing the Mac for people like themselves, and overpricing it would be a

　　“betrayal” of what they stood for. So Jobs promised them, “Don’t worry, I’m not

　　going to let him get away with it!” But in the end, Sculley prevailed. Even

　　twenty-five years later Jobs seethed when recalling the decision: “It’s the main

　　reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the market.” The

　　decision made him feel that he was losing control of his product and company,

　　and this was as dangerous as making a tiger feel cornered.UnknownTHE LAUNCH

　　A Dent in the Universe

　　The “1984” ad

　　Real Artists Ship

　　The high point of the October 1983 Apple sales conference in Hawaii was a skit

　　based on a TV show called The Dating Game. Jobs played emcee, and his three

　　contestants, whom he had convinced to fly to Hawaii, were Bill Gates and two

　　other software executives, Mitch Kapor and Fred Gibbons. As the show’s jingly

　　theme song played, the three took their stools. Gates, looking like a high

　　school sophomore, got wild applause from the 750 Apple salesmen when he said,

　　“During 1984, Microsoft expects to get half of its revenues from software for

　　the Macintosh.” Jobs, clean-shaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked if

　　he thought that the Macintosh’s new operating system would become one of the

　　industry’s new standards. Gates answered, “To create a new standard takes not

　　just making something that’s a little bit different, it takes something that’s

　　really new and captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh, of all the

　　machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”

　　But even as Gates was speaking, Microsoft was edging away from being primarily a

　　collaborator with Apple to being more of a competitor. It would continue to make

　　application software, like Microsoft Word, for Apple, but a rapidly increasing

　　share of its revenue would come from the operating system it had written for the

　　IBM personal computer. The year before, 279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to

　　240,000 IBM PCs and its clones. But the figures for 1983 were coming in starkly

　　different: 420,000 Apple IIs versus 1.3 million IBMs and its clones. And both

　　the Apple III and the Lisa were dead in the water.

　　Just when the Apple sales force was arriving in Hawaii, this shift was hammered

　　home on the cover of Business Week. Its headline: “Personal Computers: And the

　　Winner Is . . . IBM.” The story inside detailed the rise of the IBM PC. “The

　　battle for market supremacy is already over,” the magazine declared. “In a

　　stunning blitz, IBM has taken more than 26% of the market in two years, and is

　　expected to account for half the world market by 1985. An additional 25% of the

　　market will be turning out IBM-compatible machines.”

　　That put all the more pressure on the Macintosh, due out in January 1984, three

　　months away, to save the day against IBM. At the sales conference Jobs decided

　　to play the showdown to the hilt. He took the stage and chronicled all the

　　missteps made by IBM since 1958, and then in ominous tones described how it was

　　now trying to take over the market for personal computers: “Will Big Blue

　　dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George

　　Orwell right about 1984?” At that moment a screen came down from the ceiling and

　　showed a preview of an upcoming sixty-second television ad for the Macintosh. In

　　a few months it was destined to make advertising history, but in the meantime it

　　served its purpose of rallying Apple’s demoralized sales force. Jobs had always

　　been able to draw energy by imagining himself as a rebel pitted against the

　　forces of darkness. Now he was able to energize his troops with the same vision.

　　There was one more hurdle: Hertzfeld and the other wizards had to finish writing

　　the code for the Macintosh. It was due to start shipping on Monday, January 16.

　　One week before that, the engineers concluded they could not make that deadline.

　　Jobs was at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, preparing for the press previews, so a

　　Sunday morning conference call was scheduled. The software manager calmly

　　explained the situation to Jobs, while Hertzfeld and the others huddled around

　　the speakerphone holding their breath. All they needed was an extra two weeks.

　　The initial shipments to the dealers could have a version of the software

　　labeled “demo,” and these could be replaced as soon as the new code was finished

　　at the end of the month. There was a pause. Jobs did not get angry; instead he

　　spoke in cold, somber tones. He told them they were really great. So great, in

　　fact, that he knew they could get this done. “There’s no way we’re slipping!” he

　　declared. There was a collective gasp in the Bandley building work space. “You

　　guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t

　　going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. I’m

　　going to ship the code a week from Monday, with your names on it.”

　　“Well, we’ve got to finish it,” Steve Capps said. And so they did. Once again,

　　Jobs’s reality distortion field pushed them to do what they had thought

　　impossible. On Friday Randy Wigginton brought in a huge bag of chocolate-covered

　　espresso beans for the final three all-nighters. When Jobs arrived at work at

　　8:30 a.m. that Monday, he found Hertzfeld sprawled nearly comatose on the couch.

　　They talked for a few minutes about a remaining tiny glitch, and Jobs decreed

　　that it wasn’t a problem. Hertzfeld dragged himself to his blue Volkswagen

　　Rabbit (license plate: MACWIZ) and drove home to bed. A short while later

　　Apple’s Fremont factory began to roll out boxes emblazoned with the colorful

　　line drawings of the Macintosh. Real artists ship, Jobs had declared, and now

　　the Macintosh team had.

　　The “1984” Ad

　　In the spring of 1983, when Jobs had begun to plan for the Macintosh launch, he

　　asked for a commercial that was as revolutionary and astonishing as the product

　　they had created. “I want something that will stop people in their tracks,” he

　　said. “I want a thunderclap.” The task fell to the Chiat/Day advertising agency,

　　which had acquired the Apple account when it bought the advertising side of

　　Regis McKenna’s business. The person put in charge was a lanky beach bum with a

　　bushy beard, wild hair, goofy grin, and twinkling eyes named Lee Clow, who was

　　the creative director of the agency’s office in the Venice Beach section of Los

　　Angeles. Clow was savvy and fun, in a laid-back yet focused way, and he forged a

　　bond with Jobs that would last three decades.

　　Clow and two of his team, the copywriter Steve Hayden and the art director Brent

　　Thomas, had been toying with a tagline that played off the George Orwell novel:

　　“Why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” Jobs loved it, and asked them to develop it for

　　the Macintosh launch. So they put together a storyboard for a sixty-second ad

　　that would look like a scene from a sci-fi movie. It featured a rebellious young

　　woman outrunning the Orwellian thought police and throwing a sledgehammer into a

　　screen showing a mind-controlling speech by Big Brother.

　　The concept captured the zeitgeist of the personal computer revolution. Many

　　young people, especially those in the counterculture, had viewed computers as

　　instruments that could be used by Orwellian governments and giant corporations

　　to sap individuality. But by the end of the 1970s, they were also being seen as

　　potential tools for personal empowerment. The ad cast Macintosh as a warrior for

　　the latter cause—a cool, rebellious, and heroic company that was the only thing

　　standing in the way of the big evil corporation’s plan for world domination and

　　total mind control.

　　Jobs liked that. Indeed the concept for the ad had a special resonance for him.

　　He fancied himself a rebel, and he liked to associate himself with the values of

　　the ragtag band of hackers and pirates he recruited to the Macintosh group. Even

　　though he had left the apple commune in Oregon to start the Apple corporation,

　　he still wanted to be viewed as a denizen of the counterculture rather than the

　　corporate culture.

　　But he also realized, deep inside, that he had increasingly abandoned the hacker

　　spirit. Some might even accuse him of selling out. When Wozniak held true to the

　　Homebrew ethic by sharing his design for the Apple I for free, it was Jobs who

　　insisted that they sell the boards instead. He was also the one who, despite

　　Wozniak’s reluctance, wanted to turn Apple into a corporation and not freely

　　distribute stock options to the friends who had been in the garage with them.

　　Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the

　　principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots,

　　which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack

　　into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools

　　just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like

　　something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.

　　So the “1984” ad was a way of reaffirming, to himself and to the world, his

　　desired self-image. The heroine, with a drawing of a Macintosh emblazoned on her

　　pure white tank top, was a renegade out to foil the establishment. By hiring

　　Ridley Scott, fresh off the success of Blade Runner, as the director, Jobs could

　　attach himself and Apple to the cyberpunk ethos of the time. With the ad, Apple

　　could identify itself with the rebels and hackers who thought differently, and

　　Jobs could reclaim his right to identify with them as well.

　　Sculley was initially skeptical when he saw the storyboards, but Jobs insisted

　　that they needed something revolutionary. He was able to get an unprecedented

　　budget of $750,000 just to film the ad, which they planned to premiere during

　　the Super Bowl. Ridley Scott made it in London using dozens of real skinheads

　　among the enthralled masses listening to Big Brother on the screen. A female

　　discus thrower was chosen to play the heroine. Using a cold industrial setting

　　dominated by metallic gray hues, Scott evoked the dystopian aura of Blade

　　Runner. Just at the moment when Big Brother announces “We shall prevail!” the

　　heroine’s hammer smashes the screen and it vaporizes in a flash of light and

　　smoke.

　　When Jobs previewed the ad for the Apple sales force at the meeting in Hawaii,

　　they were thrilled. So he screened it for the board at its December 1983

　　meeting. When the lights came back on in the boardroom, everyone was mute.

　　Philip Schlein, the CEO of Macy’s California, had his head on the table. Mike

　　Markkula stared silently; at first it seemed he was overwhelmed by the power of

　　the ad. Then he spoke: “Who wants to move to find a new agency?” Sculley

　　recalled, “Most of them thought it was the worst commercial they had ever seen.”

　　Sculley himself got cold feet. He asked Chiat/Day to sell off the two commercial

　　spots—one sixty seconds, the other thirty—that they had purchased.

　　Jobs was beside himself. One evening Wozniak, who had been floating into and out

　　of Apple for the previous two years, wandered into the Macintosh building. Jobs

　　grabbed him and said, “Come over here and look at this.” He pulled out a VCR and

　　played the ad. “I was astounded,” Woz recalled. “I thought it was the most

　　incredible thing.” When Jobs said the board had decided not to run it during the

　　Super Bowl, Wozniak asked what the cost of the time slot was. Jobs told him

　　$800,000. With his usual impulsive goodness, Wozniak immediately offered, “Well,

　　I’ll pay half if you will.”

　　He ended up not needing to. The agency was able to sell off the thirty-second

　　time slot, but in an act of passive defiance it didn’t sell the longer one. “We

　　told them that we couldn’t sell the sixty-second slot, though in truth we didn’t

　　try,” recalled Lee Clow. Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the

　　board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out

　　what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb.

　　“I think we ought to go for it,” he told his team.

　　Early in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, the dominant Raiders scored a

　　touchdown against the Redskins and, instead of an instant replay, television

　　screens across the nation went black for an ominous two full seconds. Then an

　　eerie black-and-white image of drones marching to spooky music began to fill the

　　screen. More than ninety-six million people watched an ad that was unlike any

　　they’d seen before. At its end, as the drones watched in horror the vaporizing

　　of Big Brother, an announcer calmly intoned, “On January 24th, Apple Computer

　　will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”

　　It was a sensation. That evening all three networks and fifty local stations

　　aired news stories about the ad, giving it a viral life unprecedented in the

　　pre–YouTube era. It would eventually be selected by both TV Guide and

　　Advertising Age as the greatest commercial of all time.

　　Publicity Blast

　　Over the years Steve Jobs would become the grand master of product launches. In

　　the case of the Macintosh, the astonishing Ridley Scott ad was just one of the

　　ingredients. Another part of the recipe was media coverage. Jobs found ways to

　　ignite blasts of publicity that were so powerful the frenzy would feed on

　　itself, like a chain reaction. It was a phenomenon that he would be able to

　　replicate whenever there was a big product launch, from the Macintosh in 1984 to

　　the iPad in 2010. Like a conjurer, he could pull the trick off over and over

　　again, even after journalists had seen it happen a dozen times and knew how it

　　was done. Some of the moves he had learned from Regis McKenna, who was a pro at

　　cultivating and stroking prideful reporters. But Jobs had his own intuitive

　　sense of how to stoke the excitement, manipulate the competitive instincts of

　　journalists, and trade exclusive access for lavish treatment.

　　In December 1983 he took his elfin engineering wizards, Andy Hertzfeld and

　　Burrell Smith, to New York to visit Newsweek to pitch a story on “the kids who

　　created the Mac.” After giving a demo of the Macintosh, they were taken upstairs

　　to meet Katharine Graham, the legendary proprietor, who had an insatiable

　　interest in whatever was new. Afterward the magazine sent its technology

　　columnist and a photographer to spend time in Palo Alto with Hertzfeld and

　　Smith. The result was a flattering and smart four-page profile of the two of

　　them, with pictures that made them look like cherubim of a new age. The article

　　quoted Smith saying what he wanted to do next: “I want to build the computer of

　　the 90’s. Only I want to do it tomorrow.” The article also described the mix of

　　volatility and charisma displayed by his boss: “Jobs sometimes defends his ideas

　　with highly vocal displays of temper that aren’t always bluster; rumor has it

　　that he has threatened to fire employees for insisting that his computers should

　　have cursor keys, a feature that Jobs considers obsolete. But when he is on his

　　best behavior, Jobs is a curious blend of charm and impatience, oscillating

　　between shrewd reserve and his favorite expression of enthusiasm: ‘Insanely

　　great.’”

　　The technology writer Steven Levy, who was then working for Rolling Stone, came

　　to interview Jobs, who urged him to convince the magazine’s publisher to put the

　　Macintosh team on the cover of the magazine. “The chances of Jann Wenner

　　agreeing to displace Sting in favor of a bunch of computer nerds were

　　approximately one in a googolplex,” Levy thought, correctly. Jobs took Levy to a

　　pizza joint and pressed the case: Rolling Stone was “on the ropes, running

　　crummy articles, looking desperately for new topics and new audiences. The Mac

　　could be its salvation!” Levy pushed back. Rolling Stone was actually good, he

　　said, and he asked Jobs if he had read it recently. Jobs said that he had, an

　　article about MTV that was “a piece of shit.” Levy replied that he had written

　　that article. Jobs, to his credit, didn’t back away from the assessment. Instead

　　he turned philosophical as he talked about the Macintosh. We are constantly

　　benefiting from advances that went before us and taking things that people

　　before us developed, he said. “It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create

　　something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.”

　　Levy’s story didn’t make it to the cover. But in the future, every major product

　　launch that Jobs was involved in—at NeXT, at Pixar, and years later when he

　　returned to Apple—would end up on the cover of either Time, Newsweek, or

　　Business Week.

　　January 24, 1984

　　On the morning that he and his teammates completed the software for the

　　Macintosh, Andy Hertzfeld had gone home exhausted and expected to stay in bed

　　for at least a day. But that afternoon, after only six hours of sleep, he drove

　　back to the office. He wanted to check in to see if there had been any problems,

　　and most of his colleagues had done the same. They were lounging around, dazed

　　but excited, when Jobs walked in. “Hey, pick yourselves up off the floor, you’re

　　not done yet!” he announced. “We need a demo for the intro!” His plan was to

　　dramatically unveil the Macintosh in front of a large audience and have it show

　　off some of its features to the inspirational theme from Chariots of Fire. “It

　　needs to be done by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals,” he added. They

　　all groaned, Hertzfeld recalled, “but as we talked we realized that it would be

　　fun to cook up something impressive.”

　　The launch event was scheduled for the Apple annual stockholders’ meeting on

　　January 24—eight days away—at the Flint Auditorium of De Anza Community College.

　　The television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two

　　components in what would become the Steve Jobs playbook for making the

　　introduction of a new product seem like an epochal moment in world history. The

　　third component was the public unveiling of the product itself, amid fanfare and

　　flourishes, in front of an audience of adoring faithful mixed with journalists

　　who were primed to be swept up in the excitement.

　　Hertzfeld pulled off the remarkable feat of writing a music player in two days

　　so that the computer could play the Chariots of Fire theme. But when Jobs heard

　　it, he judged it lousy, so they decided to use a recording instead. At the same

　　time, Jobs was thrilled with a speech generator that turned text into spoken

　　words with a charming electronic accent, and he decided to make it part of the

　　demo. “I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to introduce itself!” he

　　insisted.

　　At the rehearsal the night before the launch, nothing was working well. Jobs

　　hated the way the animation scrolled across the Macintosh screen, and he kept

　　ordering tweaks. He also was dissatisfied with the stage lighting, and he

　　directed Sculley to move from seat to seat to give his opinion as various

　　adjustments were made. Sculley had never thought much about variations of stage

　　lighting and gave the type of tentative answers a patient might give an eye

　　doctor when asked which lens made the letters clearer. The rehearsals and

　　changes went on for five hours, well into the night. “He was driving people

　　insane, getting mad at the stagehands for every glitch in the presentation,”

　　Sculley recalled. “I thought there was no way we were going to get it done for

　　the show the next morning.”

　　Most of all, Jobs fretted about his presentation. Sculley fancied himself a good

　　writer, so he suggested changes in Jobs’s script. Jobs recalled being slightly

　　annoyed, but their relationship was still in the phase when he was lathering on

　　flattery and stroking Sculley’s ego. “I think of you just like Woz and

　　Markkula,” he told Sculley. “You’re like one of the founders of the company.

　　They founded the company, but you and I are founding the future.” Sculley lapped

　　it up.

　　The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was mobbed. Jobs arrived in a

　　double-breasted blue blazer, a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie.

　　“This is the most important moment in my entire life,” he told Sculley as they

　　waited backstage for the program to begin. “I’m really nervous. You’re probably

　　the only person who knows how I feel about this.” Sculley grasped his hand, held

　　it for a moment, and whispered “Good luck.”

　　As chairman of the company, Jobs went onstage first to start the shareholders’

　　meeting. He did so with his own form of an invocation. “I’d like to open the

　　meeting,” he said, “with a twenty-year-old poem by Dylan—that’s Bob Dylan.” He

　　broke into a little smile, then looked down to read from the second verse of

　　“The Times They Are a-Changin’.” His voice was high-pitched as he raced through

　　the ten lines, ending with “For the loser now / Will be later to win / For the

　　times they are a-changin’.” That song was the anthem that kept the

　　multimillionaire board chairman in touch with his counterculture self-image. He

　　had a bootleg copy of his favorite version, which was from the live concert

　　Dylan performed, with Joan Baez, on Halloween 1964 at Lincoln Center’s

　　Philharmonic Hall.

　　Sculley came onstage to report on the company’s earnings, and the audience

　　started to become restless as he droned on. Finally, he ended with a personal

　　note. “The most important thing that has happened to me in the last nine months

　　at Apple has been a chance to develop a friendship with Steve Jobs,” he said.

　　“For me, the rapport we have developed means an awful lot.”

　　The lights dimmed as Jobs reappeared onstage and launched into a dramatic

　　version of the battle cry he had delivered at the Hawaii sales conference. “It

　　is 1958,” he began. “IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company

　　that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was

　　born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.” The crowd laughed.

　　Hertzfeld had heard versions of the speech both in Hawaii and elsewhere, but he

　　was struck by how this time it was pulsing with more passion. After recounting

　　other IBM missteps, Jobs picked up the pace and the emotion as he built toward

　　the present:

　　It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the

　　only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming

　　IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated and-controlled future and are

　　turning back to Apple as the only force who can ensure their future freedom.

　　IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry

　　control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The

　　entire information age? Was George Orwell right?

　　As he built to the climax, the audience went from murmuring to applauding to a

　　frenzy of cheering and chanting. But before they could answer the Orwell

　　question, the auditorium went black and the “1984” commercial appeared on the

　　screen. When it was over, the entire audience was on its feet cheering.

　　With a flair for the dramatic, Jobs walked across the dark stage to a small

　　table with a cloth bag on it. “Now I’d like to show you Macintosh in person,” he

　　said. He took out the computer, keyboard, and mouse, hooked them together

　　deftly, then pulled one of the new 3½-inch floppies from his shirt pocket. The

　　theme from Chariots of Fire began to play. Jobs held his breath for a moment,

　　because the demo had not worked well the night before. But this time it ran

　　flawlessly. The word “MACINTOSH” scrolled horizontally onscreen, then underneath

　　it the words “Insanely great” appeared in script, as if being slowly written by

　　hand. Not used to such beautiful graphic displays, the audience quieted for a

　　moment. A few gasps could be heard. And then, in rapid succession, came a series

　　of screen shots: Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw graphics package followed by displays

　　of different fonts, documents, charts, drawings, a chess game, a spreadsheet,

　　and a rendering of Steve Jobs with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh.

　　When it was over, Jobs smiled and offered a treat. “We’ve done a lot of talking

　　about Macintosh recently,” he said. “But today, for the first time ever, I’d

　　like to let Macintosh speak for itself.” With that, he strolled back over to the

　　computer, pressed the button on the mouse, and in a vibrato but endearing

　　electronic deep voice, Macintosh became the first computer to introduce itself.

　　“Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag,” it began. The

　　only thing it didn’t seem to know how to do was to wait for the wild cheering

　　and shrieks that erupted. Instead of basking for a moment, it barreled ahead.

　　“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I

　　thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you

　　can’t lift.” Once again the roar almost drowned out its final lines. “Obviously,

　　I can talk. But right now I’d like to sit back and listen. So it is with

　　considerable pride that I introduce a man who’s been like a father to me, Steve

　　Jobs.”

　　Pandemonium erupted, with people in the crowd jumping up and down and pumping

　　their fists in a frenzy. Jobs nodded slowly, a tight-lipped but broad smile on

　　his face, then looked down and started to choke up. The ovation continued for

　　five minutes.

　　After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3 that afternoon, a truck pulled

　　into the parking lot and Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a

　　hundred new Macintosh computers, each personalized with a plaque. “Steve

　　presented them one at a time to each team member, with a handshake and a smile,

　　as the rest of us stood around cheering,” Hertzfeld recalled. It had been a

　　grueling ride, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough

　　management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at

　　the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it

　　likely have emerged from focus groups and committees. On the day he unveiled the

　　Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market

　　research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do

　　any market research before he invented the telephone?”UnknownGATES AND JOBS

　　When Orbits Intersect

　　Jobs and Gates, 1991

　　The Macintosh Partnership

　　In astronomy, a binary system occurs when the orbits of two stars are linked

　　because of their gravitational interaction. There have been analogous situations

　　in history, when an era is shaped by the relationship and rivalry of two

　　orbiting superstars: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in twentieth-century

　　physics, for example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in early

　　American governance. For the first thirty years of the personal computer age,

　　beginning in the late 1970s, the defining binary star system was composed of two

　　high-energy college dropouts both born in 1955.

　　Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, despite their similar ambitions at the confluence of

　　technology and business, had very different personalities and backgrounds.

　　Gates’s father was a prominent Seattle lawyer, his mother a civic leader on a

　　variety of prestigious boards. He became a tech geek at the area’s finest

　　private school, Lakeside High, but he was never a rebel, hippie, spiritual

　　seeker, or member of the counterculture. Instead of a Blue Box to rip off the

　　phone company, Gates created for his school a program for scheduling classes,

　　which helped him get into ones with the right girls, and a car-counting program

　　for local traffic engineers. He went to Harvard, and when he decided to drop out

　　it was not to find enlightenment with an Indian guru but to start a computer

　　software company.

　　Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical,

　　disciplined, and abundant in analytic processing power. Jobs was more intuitive

　　and romantic and had a greater instinct for making technology usable, design

　　delightful, and interfaces friendly. He had a passion for perfection, which made

　　him fiercely demanding, and he managed by charisma and scattershot intensity.

　　Gates was more methodical; he held tightly scheduled product review meetings

　　where he would cut to the heart of issues with lapidary skill. Both could be

　　rude, but with Gates—who early in his career seemed to have a typical geek’s

　　flirtation with the fringes of the Asperger’s scale—the cutting behavior tended

　　to be less personal, based more on intellectual incisiveness than emotional

　　callousness. Jobs would stare at people with a burning, wounding intensity;

　　Gates sometimes had trouble making eye contact, but he was fundamentally humane.

　　“Each one thought he was smarter than the other one, but Steve generally treated

　　Bill as someone who was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and

　　style,” said Andy Hertzfeld. “Bill looked down on Steve because he couldn’t

　　actually program.” From the beginning of their relationship, Gates was

　　fascinated by Jobs and slightly envious of his mesmerizing effect on people. But

　　he also found him “fundamentally odd” and “weirdly flawed as a human being,” and

　　he was put off by Jobs’s rudeness and his tendency to be “either in the mode of

　　saying you were shit or trying to seduce you.” For his part, Jobs found Gates

　　unnervingly narrow. “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone

　　off to an ashram when he was younger,” Jobs once declared.

　　Their differences in personality and character would lead them to opposite sides

　　of what would become the fundamental divide in the digital age. Jobs was a

　　perfectionist who craved control and indulged in the uncompromising temperament

　　of an artist; he and Apple became the exemplars of a digital strategy that

　　tightly integrated hardware, software, and content into a seamless package.

　　Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst of business and

　　technology; he was open to licensing Microsoft’s operating system and software

　　to a variety of manufacturers.

　　After thirty years Gates would develop a grudging respect for Jobs. “He really

　　never knew much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what

　　works,” he said. But Jobs never reciprocated by fully appreciating Gates’s real

　　strengths. “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything,

　　which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology,”

　　Jobs said, unfairly. “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

　　When the Macintosh was first being developed, Jobs went up to visit Gates at his

　　office near Seattle. Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple II,

　　including a spreadsheet program called Multiplan, and Jobs wanted to excite

　　Gates and Co. about doing even more for the forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in

　　Gates’s conference room, Jobs spun an enticing vision of a computer for the

　　masses, with a friendly interface, which would be churned out by the millions in

　　an automated California factory. His description of the dream factory sucking in

　　the California silicon components and turning out finished Macintoshes caused

　　the Microsoft team to code-name the project “Sand.” They even reverse-engineered

　　it into an acronym, for “Steve’s amazing new device.”

　　Gates had launched Microsoft by writing a version of BASIC, a programming

　　language, for the Altair. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for

　　the Macintosh, because Wozniak—despite much prodding by Jobs—had never enhanced

　　his version of the Apple II’s BASIC to handle floating-point numbers. In

　　addition, Jobs wanted Microsoft to write application software—such as word

　　processing and spreadsheet programs—for the Macintosh. At the time, Jobs was a

　　king and Gates still a courtier: In 1982 Apple’s annual sales were $1 billion,

　　while Microsoft’s were a mere $32 million. Gates signed on to do graphical

　　versions of a new spreadsheet called Excel, a word-processing program called

　　Word, and BASIC.

　　Gates frequently went to Cupertino for demonstrations of the Macintosh operating

　　system, and he was not very impressed. “I remember the first time we went down,

　　Steve had this app where it was just things bouncing around on the screen,” he

　　said. “That was the only app that ran.” Gates was also put off by Jobs’s

　　attitude. “It was kind of a weird seduction visit, where Steve was saying, ‘We

　　don’t really need you and we’re doing this great thing, and it’s under the

　　cover.’ He’s in his Steve Jobs sales mode, but kind of the sales mode that also

　　says, ‘I don’t need you, but I might let you be involved.’”

　　The Macintosh pirates found Gates hard to take. “You could tell that Bill Gates

　　was not a very good listener. He couldn’t bear to have anyone explain how

　　something worked to him—he had to leap ahead instead and guess about how he

　　thought it would work,” Hertzfeld recalled. They showed him how the Macintosh’s

　　cursor moved smoothly across the screen without flickering. “What kind of

　　hardware do you use to draw the cursor?” Gates asked. Hertzfeld, who took great

　　pride that they could achieve their functionality solely using software,

　　replied, “We don’t have any special hardware for it!” Gates insisted that it was

　　necessary to have special hardware to move the cursor that way. “So what do you

　　say to somebody like that?” Bruce Horn, one of the Macintosh engineers, later

　　said. “It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would

　　understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.”

　　Despite their mutual wariness, both teams were excited by the prospect that

　　Microsoft would create graphical software for the Macintosh that would take

　　personal computing into a new realm, and they went to dinner at a fancy

　　restaurant to celebrate. Microsoft soon dedicated a large team to the task. “We

　　had more people working on the Mac than he did,” Gates said. “He had about

　　fourteen or fifteen people. We had like twenty people. We really bet our life on

　　it.” And even though Jobs thought that they didn’t exhibit much taste, the

　　Microsoft programmers were persistent. “They came out with applications that

　　were terrible,” Jobs recalled, “but they kept at it and they made them better.”

　　Eventually Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret bargain with

　　Gates: If Microsoft would make Excel exclusively for the Macintosh for two

　　years, and not make a version for IBM PCs, then Jobs would shut down his team

　　working on a version of BASIC for the Macintosh and instead indefinitely license

　　Microsoft’s BASIC. Gates smartly took the deal, which infuriated the Apple team

　　whose project got canceled and gave Microsoft a lever in future negotiations.

　　For the time being, Gates and Jobs forged a bond. That summer they went to a

　　conference hosted by the industry analyst Ben Rosen at a Playboy Club retreat in

　　Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where nobody knew about the graphical interfaces that

　　Apple was developing. “Everybody was acting like the IBM PC was everything,

　　which was nice, but Steve and I were kind of smiling that, hey, we’ve got

　　something,” Gates recalled. “And he’s kind of leaking, but nobody actually

　　caught on.” Gates became a regular at Apple retreats. “I went to every luau,”

　　said Gates. “I was part of the crew.”

　　Gates enjoyed his frequent visits to Cupertino, where he got to watch Jobs

　　interact erratically with his employees and display his obsessions. “Steve was

　　in his ultimate pied piper mode, proclaiming how the Mac will change the world

　　and overworking people like mad, with incredible tensions and complex personal

　　relationships.” Sometimes Jobs would begin on a high, then lapse into sharing

　　his fears with Gates. “We’d go down Friday night, have dinner, and Steve would

　　just be promoting that everything is great. Then the second day, without fail,

　　he’d be kind of, ‘Oh shit, is this thing going to sell, oh God, I have to raise

　　the price, I’m sorry I did that to you, and my team is a bunch of idiots.’”

　　Gates saw Jobs’s reality distortion field at play when the Xerox Star was

　　launched. At a joint team dinner one Friday night, Jobs asked Gates how many

　　Stars had been sold thus far. Gates said six hundred. The next day, in front of

　　Gates and the whole team, Jobs said that three hundred Stars had been sold,

　　forgetting that Gates had just told everyone it was actually six hundred. “So

　　his whole team starts looking at me like, ‘Are you going to tell him that he’s

　　full of shit?’” Gates recalled. “And in that case I didn’t take the bait.” On

　　another occasion Jobs and his team were visiting Microsoft and having dinner at

　　the Seattle Tennis Club. Jobs launched into a sermon about how the Macintosh and

　　its software would be so easy to use that there would be no manuals. “It was

　　like anybody who ever thought that there would be a manual for any Mac

　　application was the greatest idiot,” said Gates. “And we were like, ‘Does he

　　really mean it? Should we not tell him that we have people who are actually

　　working on manuals?’”

　　After a while the relationship became bumpier. The original plan was to have

　　some of the Microsoft applications—such as Excel, Chart, and File—carry the

　　Apple logo and come bundled with the purchase of a Macintosh. “We were going to

　　get $10 per app, per machine,” said Gates. But this arrangement upset competing

　　software makers. In addition, it seemed that some of Microsoft’s programs might

　　be late. So Jobs invoked a provision in his deal with Microsoft and decided not

　　to bundle its software; Microsoft would have to scramble to distribute its

　　software as products sold directly to consumers.

　　Gates went along without much complaint. He was already getting used to the fact

　　that, as he put it, Jobs could “play fast and loose,” and he suspected that the

　　unbundling would actually help Microsoft. “We could make more money selling our

　　software separately,” Gates said. “It works better that way if you’re willing to

　　think you’re going to have reasonable market share.” Microsoft ended up making

　　its software for various other platforms, and it began to give priority to the

　　IBM PC version of Microsoft Word rather than the Macintosh version. In the end,

　　Jobs’s decision to back out of the bundling deal hurt Apple more than it did

　　Microsoft.

　　When Excel for the Macintosh was released, Jobs and Gates unveiled it together

　　at a press dinner at New York’s Tavern on the Green. Asked if Microsoft would

　　make a version of it for IBM PCs, Gates did not reveal the bargain he had made

　　with Jobs but merely answered that “in time” that might happen. Jobs took the

　　microphone. “I’m sure ‘in time’ we’ll all be dead,” he joked.

　　The Battle of the GUI

　　At that time, Microsoft was producing an operating system, known as DOS, which

　　it licensed to IBM and compatible computers. It was based on an old-fashioned

　　command line interface that confronted users with surly little prompts such as

　　C:\>. As Jobs and his team began to work closely with Microsoft, they grew

　　worried that it would copy Macintosh’s graphical user interface. Andy Hertzfeld

　　noticed that his contact at Microsoft was asking detailed questions about how

　　the Macintosh operating system worked. “I told Steve that I suspected that

　　Microsoft was going to clone the Mac,” he recalled.

　　They were right to worry. Gates believed that graphical interfaces were the

　　future, and that Microsoft had just as much right as Apple did to copy what had

　　been developed at Xerox PARC. As he freely admitted later, “We sort of say,

　　‘Hey, we believe in graphics interfaces, we saw the Xerox Alto too.’”

　　In their original deal, Jobs had convinced Gates to agree that Microsoft would

　　not create graphical software for anyone other than Apple until a year after the

　　Macintosh shipped in January 1983. Unfortunately for Apple, it did not provide

　　for the possibility that the Macintosh launch would be delayed for a year. So

　　Gates was within his rights when, in November 1983, he revealed that Microsoft

　　planned to develop a new operating system for IBM PCs featuring a graphical

　　interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for point-and-click navigation. It

　　would be called Windows. Gates hosted a Jobs-like product announcement, the most

　　lavish thus far in Microsoft’s history, at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New

　　York.

　　Jobs was furious. He knew there was little he could do about it—Microsoft’s deal

　　with Apple not to do competing graphical software was running out—but he lashed

　　out nonetheless. “Get Gates down here immediately,” he ordered Mike Boich, who

　　was Apple’s evangelist to other software companies. Gates arrived, alone and

　　willing to discuss things with Jobs. “He called me down to get pissed off at

　　me,” Gates recalled. “I went down to Cupertino, like a command performance. I

　　told him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said to him, ‘We’re betting our company on

　　graphical interfaces.’”

　　They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten

　　Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t

　　disappoint his troops. “You’re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and

　　now you’re stealing from us!” Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there

　　coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice,

　　what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of

　　looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox

　　and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had

　　already stolen it.”

　　Gates’s two-day visit provoked the full range of Jobs’s emotional responses and

　　manipulation techniques. It also made clear that the Apple-Microsoft symbiosis

　　had become a scorpion dance, with both sides circling warily, knowing that a

　　sting by either could cause problems for both. After the confrontation in the

　　conference room, Gates quietly gave Jobs a private demo of what was being

　　planned for Windows. “Steve didn’t know what to say,” Gates recalled. “He could

　　either say, ‘Oh, this is a violation of something,’ but he didn’t. He chose to

　　say, ‘Oh, it’s actually really a piece of shit.’” Gates was thrilled, because it

　　gave him a chance to calm Jobs down for a moment. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s a nice

　　little piece of shit.’” So Jobs went through a gamut of other emotions. “During

　　the course of this meeting, he’s just ruder than shit,” Gates said. “And then

　　there’s a part where he’s almost crying, like, ‘Oh, just give me a chance to get

　　this thing off.’” Gates responded by becoming very calm. “I’m good at when

　　people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.”

　　As he often did when he wanted to have a serious conversation, Jobs suggested

　　they go on a long walk. They trekked the streets of Cupertino, back and forth to

　　De Anza college, stopping at a diner and then walking some more. “We had to take

　　a walk, which is not one of my management techniques,” Gates said. “That was

　　when he began saying things like, ‘Okay, okay, but don’t make it too much like

　　what we’re doing.’”

　　As it turned out, Microsoft wasn’t able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping

　　until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the

　　elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the

　　magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised.

　　Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the

　　case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and

　　then dominant.

　　Jobs never got over his anger. “They just ripped us off completely, because

　　Gates has no shame,” Jobs told me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this,

　　Gates responded, “If he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own

　　reality distortion fields.” In a legal sense, Gates was right, as courts over

　　the years have subsequently ruled. And on a practical level, he had a strong

　　case as well. Even though Apple made a deal for the right to use what it saw at

　　Xerox PARC, it was inevitable that other companies would develop similar

　　graphical interfaces. As Apple found out, the “look and feel” of a computer

　　interface design is a hard thing to protect.

　　And yet Jobs’s dismay was understandable. Apple had been more innovative,

　　imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. But even though

　　Microsoft created a crudely copied series of products, it would end up winning

　　the war of operating systems. This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe

　　worked: The best and most innovative products don’t always win. A decade later,

　　this truism caused Jobs to let loose a rant that was somewhat arrogant and

　　over-the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. “The only problem with

　　Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he said.

　　“I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that

　　they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their

　　product.”UnknownICARUS

　　What Goes Up . . .

　　Flying High

　　The launch of the Macintosh in January 1984 propelled Jobs into an even higher

　　orbit of celebrity, as was evident during a trip to Manhattan he took at the

　　time. He went to a party that Yoko Ono threw for her son, Sean Lennon, and gave

　　the nine-year-old a Macintosh. The boy loved it. The artists Andy Warhol and

　　Keith Haring were there, and they were so enthralled by what they could create

　　with the machine that the contemporary art world almost took an ominous turn. “I

　　drew a circle,” Warhol exclaimed proudly after using QuickDraw. Warhol insisted

　　that Jobs take a computer to Mick Jagger. When Jobs arrived at the rock star’s

　　townhouse, Jagger seemed baffled. He didn’t quite know who Jobs was. Later Jobs

　　told his team, “I think he was on drugs. Either that or he’s brain-damaged.”

　　Jagger’s daughter Jade, however, took to the computer immediately and started

　　drawing with MacPaint, so Jobs gave it to her instead.

　　He bought the top-floor duplex apartment that he’d shown Sculley in the San Remo

　　on Manhattan’s Central Park West and hired James Freed of I. M. Pei’s firm to

　　renovate it, but he never moved in. (He would later sell it to Bono for $15

　　million.) He also bought an old Spanish colonial–style fourteen-bedroom mansion

　　in Woodside, in the hills above Palo Alto, that had been built by a copper

　　baron, which he moved into but never got around to furnishing.

　　At Apple his status revived. Instead of seeking ways to curtail Jobs’s

　　authority, Sculley gave him more: The Lisa and Macintosh divisions were folded

　　together, with Jobs in charge. He was flying high, but this did not serve to

　　make him more mellow. Indeed there was a memorable display of his brutal honesty

　　when he stood in front of the combined Lisa and Macintosh teams to describe how

　　they would be merged. His Macintosh group leaders would get all of the top

　　positions, he said, and a quarter of the Lisa staff would be laid off. “You guys

　　failed,” he said, looking directly at those who had worked on the Lisa. “You’re

　　a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are

　　releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies

　　here in the valley.”

　　Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams, thought it was not only callous,

　　but unfair. “These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers,”

　　he said. But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson

　　from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a

　　team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B

　　players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have

　　some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players

　　like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B

　　players.”

　　For the time being, Jobs and Sculley were able to convince themselves that their

　　friendship was still strong. They professed their fondness so effusively and

　　often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display.

　　The first anniversary of Sculley’s arrival came in May 1984, and to celebrate

　　Jobs lured him to a dinner party at Le Mouton Noir, an elegant restaurant in the

　　hills southwest of Cupertino. To Sculley’s surprise, Jobs had gathered the Apple

　　board, its top managers, and even some East Coast investors. As they all

　　congratulated him during cocktails, Sculley recalled, “a beaming Steve stood in

　　the background, nodding his head up and down and wearing a Cheshire Cat smile on

　　his face.” Jobs began the dinner with a fulsome toast. “The happiest two days

　　for me were when Macintosh shipped and when John Sculley agreed to join Apple,”

　　he said. “This has been the greatest year I’ve ever had in my whole life,

　　because I’ve learned so much from John.” He then presented Sculley with a

　　montage of memorabilia from the year.

　　In response, Sculley effused about the joys of being Jobs’s partner for the past

　　year, and he concluded with a line that, for different reasons, everyone at the

　　table found memorable. “Apple has one leader,” he said, “Steve and me.” He

　　looked across the room, caught Jobs’s eye, and watched him smile. “It was as if

　　we were communicating with each other,” Sculley recalled. But he also noticed

　　that Arthur Rock and some of the others were looking quizzical, perhaps even

　　skeptical. They were worried that Jobs was completely rolling him. They had

　　hired Sculley to control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in

　　control. “Sculley was so eager for Steve’s approval that he was unable to stand

　　up to him,” Rock recalled.

　　Keeping Jobs happy and deferring to his expertise may have seemed like a smart

　　strategy to Sculley. But he failed to realize that it was not in Jobs’s nature

　　to share control. Deference did not come naturally to him. He began to become

　　more vocal about how he thought the company should be run. At the 1984 business

　　strategy meeting, for example, he pushed to make the company’s centralized sales

　　and marketing staffs bid on the right to provide their services to the various

　　product divisions. (This would have meant, for example, that the Macintosh group

　　could decide not to use Apple’s marketing team and instead create one of its

　　own.) No one else was in favor, but Jobs kept trying to ram it through. “People

　　were looking to me to take control, to get him to sit down and shut up, but I

　　didn’t,” Sculley recalled. As the meeting broke up, he heard someone whisper,

　　“Why doesn’t Sculley shut him up?”

　　When Jobs decided to build a state-of-the-art factory in Fremont to manufacture

　　the Macintosh, his aesthetic passions and controlling nature kicked into high

　　gear. He wanted the machinery to be painted in bright hues, like the Apple logo,

　　but he spent so much time going over paint chips that Apple’s manufacturing

　　director, Matt Carter, finally just installed them in their usual beige and

　　gray. When Jobs took a tour, he ordered that the machines be repainted in the

　　bright colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision equipment, and

　　repainting the machines could cause problems. He turned out to be right. One of

　　the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended up not working

　　properly and was dubbed “Steve’s folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much

　　energy to fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally

　　I had enough,” he recalled.

　　Jobs tapped as a replacement Debi Coleman, the spunky but good-natured Macintosh

　　financial officer who had once won the team’s annual award for the person who

　　best stood up to Jobs. But she knew how to cater to his whims when necessary.

　　When Apple’s art director, Clement Mok, informed her that Jobs wanted the walls

　　to be pure white, she protested, “You can’t paint a factory pure white. There’s

　　going to be dust and stuff all over.” Mok replied, “There’s no white that’s too

　　white for Steve.” She ended up going along. With its pure white walls and its

　　bright blue, yellow, and red machines, the factory floor “looked like an

　　Alexander Calder showcase,” said Coleman.

　　When asked about his obsessive concern over the look of the factory, Jobs said

　　it was a way to ensure a passion for perfection:

　　I’d go out to the factory, and I’d put on a white glove to check for dust. I’d

　　find it everywhere—on machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And

　　I’d ask Debi to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat

　　off the floor of the factory. Well, this drove Debi up the wall. She didn’t

　　understand why. And I couldn’t articulate it back then. See, I’d been very

　　influenced by what I’d seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there—and

　　part of what we were lacking in our factory—was a sense of teamwork and

　　discipline. If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then

　　we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.

　　One Sunday morning Jobs brought his father to see the factory. Paul Jobs had

　　always been fastidious about making sure that his craftsmanship was exacting and

　　his tools in order, and his son was proud to show that he could do the same.

　　Coleman came along to give the tour. “Steve was, like, beaming,” she recalled.

　　“He was so proud to show his father this creation.” Jobs explained how

　　everything worked, and his father seemed truly admiring. “He kept looking at his

　　father, who touched everything and loved how clean and perfect everything

　　looked.”

　　Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle Mitterrand toured the factory. The

　　Cuba-admiring wife of France’s socialist president François Mitterrand asked a

　　lot of questions, through her translator, about the working conditions, while

　　Jobs, who had grabbed Alain Rossmann to serve as his translator, kept trying to

　　explain the advanced robotics and technology. After Jobs talked about the

　　just-in-time production schedules, she asked about overtime pay. He was annoyed,

　　so he described how automation helped him keep down labor costs, a subject he

　　knew would not delight her. “Is it hard work?” she asked. “How much vacation

　　time do they get?” Jobs couldn’t contain himself. “If she’s so interested in

　　their welfare,” he said to her translator, “tell her she can come work here any

　　time.” The translator turned pale and said nothing. After a moment Rossmann

　　stepped in to say, in French, “M. Jobs says he thanks you for your visit and

　　your interest in the factory.” Neither Jobs nor Madame Mitterrand knew what

　　happened, Rossmann recalled, but her translator looked very relieved.

　　Afterward, as he sped his Mercedes down the freeway toward Cupertino, Jobs fumed

　　to Rossmann about Madame Mitterrand’s attitude. At one point he was going just

　　over 100 miles per hour when a policeman stopped him and began writing a ticket.

　　After a few minutes, as the officer scribbled away, Jobs honked. “Excuse me?”

　　the policeman said. Jobs replied, “I’m in a hurry.” Amazingly, the officer

　　didn’t get mad. He simply finished writing the ticket and warned that if Jobs

　　was caught going over 55 again he would be sent to jail. As soon as the

　　policeman left, Jobs got back on the road and accelerated to 100. “He absolutely

　　believed that the normal rules didn’t apply to him,” Rossmann marveled.

　　His wife, Joanna Hoffman, saw the same thing when she accompanied Jobs to Europe

　　a few months after the Macintosh was launched. “He was just completely obnoxious

　　and thinking he could get away with anything,” she recalled. In Paris she had

　　arranged a formal dinner with French software developers, but Jobs suddenly

　　decided he didn’t want to go. Instead he shut the car door on Hoffman and told

　　her he was going to see the poster artist Folon instead. “The developers were so

　　pissed off they wouldn’t shake our hands,” she said.

　　In Italy, he took an instant dislike to Apple’s general manager, a soft rotund

　　guy who had come from a conventional business. Jobs told him bluntly that he was

　　not impressed with his team or his sales strategy. “You don’t deserve to be able

　　to sell the Mac,” Jobs said coldly. But that was mild compared to his reaction

　　to the restaurant the hapless manager had chosen. Jobs demanded a vegan meal,

　　but the waiter very elaborately proceeded to dish out a sauce filled with sour

　　cream. Jobs got so nasty that Hoffman had to threaten him. She whispered that if

　　he didn’t calm down, she was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap.

　　The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales

　　forecasts. Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team

　　to come up with higher projections. He kept threatening the European managers

　　that he wouldn’t give them any allocations unless they projected bigger

　　forecasts. They insisted on being realistic, and Hoffmann had to referee. “By

　　the end of the trip, my whole body was shaking uncontrollably,” Hoffman

　　recalled.

　　It was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s

　　manager in France. Gassée was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on

　　the trip. “He has his own way with the truth,” Gassée later remarked. “The only

　　way to deal with him was to out-bully him.” When Jobs made his usual threat

　　about cutting down on France’s allocations if Gassée didn’t jack up sales

　　projections, Gassée got angry. “I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to

　　stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a

　　recovering assaholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.”

　　Gassée was impressed, however, at how Jobs could turn on the charm when he

　　wanted to. François Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of informatique

　　pour tous—computing for all—and various academic experts in technology, such as

　　Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte, came over to sing in the choir. Jobs gave

　　a talk to the group at the Hotel Bristol and painted a picture of how France

　　could move ahead if it put computers in all of its schools. Paris also brought

　　out the romantic in him. Both Gassée and Negroponte tell tales of him pining

　　over women while there.

　　Falling

　　After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its

　　sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a

　　fundamental one: It was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer,

　　and no amount of hoopla could mask that. Its beauty was that its user interface

　　looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green

　　pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest

　　weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code,

　　whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you

　　wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by

　　shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.

　　Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called

　　Joanna Hoffman a “Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He

　　insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to

　　copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap

　　floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a

　　fan, another example of Jobs’s dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted

　　from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the

　　Macintosh the nickname “the beige toaster,” which did not enhance its

　　popularity. It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few

　　months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As

　　Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but

　　then reality itself hits.”

　　At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales

　　falling below ten thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision

　　out of desperation. He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a

　　Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the “Macintosh XL.”

　　Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted, it was an

　　unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in. “I was

　　furious because the Mac XL wasn’t real,” said Hoffman. “It was just to blow the

　　excess Lisas out the door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the

　　horrible hoax, so I resigned.”

　　The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which

　　was supposed to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant “1984” ad.

　　Unfortunately there was a fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a

　　heroic, optimistic note, but the storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat

　　for the new ad, titled “Lemmings,” showed dark-suited, blindfolded corporate

　　managers marching off a cliff to their death. From the beginning both Jobs and

　　Sculley were uneasy. It didn’t seem as if it would convey a positive or glorious

　　image of Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who had bought an

　　IBM.

　　Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. “You

　　guys didn’t want to run ‘1984’ last year,” one of them said. According to

　　Sculley, Lee Clow added, “I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this

　　commercial.” When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony, came

　　in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff

　　were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song “Heigh-ho,

　　Heigh-ho,” and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the

　　storyboards portended. “I can’t believe you’re going to insult businesspeople

　　across America by running that,” Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the

　　ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she

　　hated it. “I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my

　　Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning

　　to get a toehold with desktop publishing.”

　　Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency’s entreaties and ran the

　　commercial during the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford

　　Stadium with Sculley’s wife, Leezy (who couldn’t stand Jobs), and Jobs’s new

　　girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the commercial was shown near the end of the fourth

　　quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the overhead screen and had little

　　reaction. Across the country, most of the response was negative. “It insulted

　　the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the president of a market research

　　firm told Fortune. Apple’s marketing manager suggested afterward that the

　　company might want to buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal apologizing. Jay

　　Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page and

　　apologize for the apology.

　　Jobs’s discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was

　　on display when he traveled to New York in January to do another round of

　　one-on-one press interviews. Andy Cunningham, from Regis McKenna’s firm, was in

　　charge of hand-holding and logistics at the Carlyle. When Jobs arrived, he told

　　her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though it was 10 p.m.

　　and the meetings were to begin the next day. The piano was not in the right

　　place; the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that

　　he didn’t like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. “We got into a big fight on

　　what a calla lily is,” Cunningham recalled. “I know what they are, because I had

　　them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type of lily and said

　　I was ‘stupid’ because I didn’t know what a real calla lily was.” So Cunningham

　　went out and, this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight

　　where she could get the lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room

　　rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was wearing. “That suit’s

　　disgusting,” he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with

　　undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. “Look, I know you’re angry, and

　　I know how you feel,” she said.

　　“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot back, “no fucking idea what it’s

　　like to be me.”

　　Thirty Years Old

　　Turning thirty is a milestone for most people, especially those of the

　　generation that proclaimed it would never trust anyone over that age. To

　　celebrate his own thirtieth, in February 1985, Jobs threw a lavishly formal but

　　also playful—black tie and tennis shoes—party for one thousand in the ballroom

　　of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read, “There’s an old

　　Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your

　　habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me

　　celebrate mine.”

　　One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor.

　　Another had old friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a

　　woman dressed in a tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and

　　wore floppy tennis shoes, which made it all the more memorable when they danced

　　to the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

　　Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob Dylan had declined. She sang

　　mainly from her standard repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like

　　“The Girl from Ipanema” to be about the boy from Cupertino. When she asked for

　　some requests, Jobs called out a few. She concluded with a slow rendition of

　　“Happy Birthday.”

　　Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to “technology’s foremost

　　visionary.” Wozniak also came up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the

　　Zaltair hoax from the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple II had

　　been introduced. The venture capitalist Don Valentine marveled at the change in

　　the decade since that time. “He went from being a Ho Chi Minh look-alike, who

　　said never trust anyone over thirty, to a person who gives himself a fabulous

　　thirtieth birthday with Ella Fitzgerald,” he said.

　　Many people had picked out special gifts for a person who was not easy to shop

　　for. Debi Coleman, for example, found a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

　　The Last Tycoon. But Jobs, in an act that was odd yet not out of character, left

　　all of the gifts in a hotel room. Wozniak and some of the Apple veterans, who

　　did not take to the goat cheese and salmon mousse that was served, met after the

　　party and went out to eat at a Denny’s.

　　“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute

　　something amazing,” Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published

　　a long and intimate interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. “Of course,

　　there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe

　　of life, but they’re rare.” The interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs’s

　　most poignant ruminations were about growing old and facing the future:

　　Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really

　　etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns,

　　just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

　　I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll

　　sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of

　　each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but

　　I’ll always come back. . . .

　　If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not

　　look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and

　　whoever you were and throw them away.

　　The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it

　　is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to

　　say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And

　　they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little

　　differently.

　　With each of those statements, Jobs seemed to have a premonition that his life

　　would soon be changing. Perhaps the thread of his life would indeed weave in and

　　out of the thread of Apple’s. Perhaps it was time to throw away some of what he

　　had been. Perhaps it was time to say “Bye, I have to go,” and then reemerge

　　later, thinking differently.

　　Exodus

　　Andy Hertzfeld had taken a leave of absence after the Macintosh came out in

　　1984. He needed to recharge his batteries and get away from his supervisor, Bob

　　Belleville, whom he didn’t like. One day he learned that Jobs had given out

　　bonuses of up to $50,000 to engineers on the Macintosh team. So he went to Jobs

　　to ask for one. Jobs responded that Belleville had decided not to give the

　　bonuses to people who were on leave. Hertzfeld later heard that the decision had

　　actually been made by Jobs, so he confronted him. At first Jobs equivocated,

　　then he said, “Well, let’s assume what you are saying is true. How does that

　　change things?” Hertzfeld said that if Jobs was withholding the bonus as a

　　reason for him to come back, then he wouldn’t come back as a matter of

　　principle. Jobs relented, but it left Hertzfeld with a bad taste.

　　When his leave was coming to an end, Hertzfeld made an appointment to have

　　dinner with Jobs, and they walked from his office to an Italian restaurant a few

　　blocks away. “I really want to return,” he told Jobs. “But things seem really

　　messed up right now.” Jobs was vaguely annoyed and distracted, but Hertzfeld

　　plunged ahead. “The software team is completely demoralized and has hardly done

　　a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated that he won’t last to the end

　　of the year.”

　　At that point Jobs cut him off. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” he

　　said. “The Macintosh team is doing great, and I’m having the best time of my

　　life right now. You’re just completely out of touch.” His stare was withering,

　　but he also tried to look amused at Hertzfeld’s assessment.

　　“If you really believe that, I don’t think there’s any way that I can come

　　back,” Hertzfeld replied glumly. “The Mac team that I want to come back to

　　doesn’t even exist anymore.”

　　“The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you,” Jobs replied. “I want you to come

　　back, but if you don’t want to, that’s up to you. You don’t matter as much as

　　you think you do, anyway.”

　　Hertzfeld didn’t come back.

　　By early 1985 Burrell Smith was also ready to leave. He had worried that it

　　would be hard to quit if Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality

　　distortion field was usually too strong for him to resist. So he plotted with

　　Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. “I’ve got it!” he told Hertzfeld one

　　day. “I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the reality distortion

　　field. I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants, and urinate on

　　his desk. What could he say to that? It’s guaranteed to work.” The betting on

　　the Mac team was that even brave Burrell Smith would not have the gumption to do

　　that. When he finally decided he had to make his break, around the time of

　　Jobs’s birthday bash, he made an appointment to see Jobs. He was surprised to

　　find Jobs smiling broadly when he walked in. “Are you gonna do it? Are you

　　really gonna do it?” Jobs asked. He had heard about the plan.

　　Smith looked at him. “Do I have to? I’ll do it if I have to.” Jobs gave him a

　　look, and Smith decided it wasn’t necessary. So he resigned less dramatically

　　and walked out on good terms.

　　He was quickly followed by another of the great Macintosh engineers, Bruce Horn.

　　When Horn went in to say good-bye, Jobs told him, “Everything that’s wrong with

　　the Mac is your fault.”

　　Horn responded, “Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the

　　Mac are my fault, and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in.”

　　“You’re right,” admitted Jobs. “I’ll give you 15,000 shares to stay.” When Horn

　　declined the offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. “Well, give me a hug,” he said.

　　And so they hugged.

　　But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its

　　cofounder, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel

　　engineer in the Apple II division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of

　　the company and staying as far away from management and corporate politics as he

　　could. He felt, with justification, that Jobs was not appreciative of the Apple

　　II, which remained the cash cow of the company and accounted for 70% of its

　　sales at Christmas 1984. “People in the Apple II group were being treated as

　　very unimportant by the rest of the company,” he later said. “This was despite

　　the fact that the Apple II was by far the largest-selling product in our company

　　for ages, and would be for years to come.” He even roused himself to do

　　something out of character; he picked up the phone one day and called Sculley,

　　berating him for lavishing so much attention on Jobs and the Macintosh division.

　　Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to start a new company that would

　　make a universal remote control device he had invented. It would control your

　　television, stereo, and other electronic devices with a simple set of buttons

　　that you could easily program. He informed the head of engineering at the Apple

　　II division, but he didn’t feel he was important enough to go out of channels

　　and tell Jobs or Markkula. So Jobs first heard about it when the news leaked in

　　the Wall Street Journal. In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly answered the

　　reporter’s questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been

　　giving short shrift to the Apple II division. “Apple’s direction has been

　　horrendously wrong for five years,” he said.

　　Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the White House,

　　where Ronald Reagan presented them with the first National Medal of Technology.

　　The president quoted what President Rutherford Hayes had said when first shown a

　　telephone—“An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?”—and then

　　quipped, “I thought at the time that he might be mistaken.” Because of the

　　awkward situation surrounding Wozniak’s departure, Apple did not throw a

　　celebratory dinner. So Jobs and Wozniak went for a walk afterward and ate at a

　　sandwich shop. They chatted amiably, Wozniak recalled, and avoided any

　　discussion of their disagreements.

　　Wozniak wanted to make the parting amicable. It was his style. So he agreed to

　　stay on as a part-time Apple employee at a $20,000 salary and represent the

　　company at events and trade shows. That could have been a graceful way to drift

　　apart. But Jobs could not leave well enough alone. One Saturday, a few weeks

　　after they had visited Washington together, Jobs went to the new Palo Alto

　　studios of Hartmut Esslinger, whose company frogdesign had moved there to handle

　　its design work for Apple. There he happened to see sketches that the firm had

　　made for Wozniak’s new remote control device, and he flew into a rage. Apple had

　　a clause in its contract that gave it the right to bar frogdesign from working

　　on other computer-related projects, and Jobs invoked it. “I informed them,” he

　　recalled, “that working with Woz wouldn’t be acceptable to us.”

　　When the Wall Street Journal heard what happened, it got in touch with Wozniak,

　　who, as usual, was open and honest. He said that Jobs was punishing him. “Steve

　　Jobs has a hate for me, probably because of the things I said about Apple,” he

　　told the reporter. Jobs’s action was remarkably petty, but it was also partly

　　caused by the fact that he understood, in ways that others did not, that the

　　look and style of a product served to brand it. A device that had Wozniak’s name

　　on it and used the same design language as Apple’s products might be mistaken

　　for something that Apple had produced. “It’s not personal,” Jobs told the

　　newspaper, explaining that he wanted to make sure that Wozniak’s remote wouldn’t

　　look like something made by Apple. “We don’t want to see our design language

　　used on other products. Woz has to find his own resources. He can’t leverage off

　　Apple’s resources; we can’t treat him specially.”

　　Jobs volunteered to pay for the work that frogdesign had already done for

　　Wozniak, but even so the executives at the firm were taken aback. When Jobs

　　demanded that they send him the drawings done for Wozniak or destroy them, they

　　refused. Jobs had to send them a letter invoking Apple’s contractual right.

　　Herbert Pfeifer, the design director of the firm, risked Jobs’s wrath by

　　publicly dismissing his claim that the dispute with Wozniak was not personal.

　　“It’s a power play,” Pfeifer told the Journal. “They have personal problems

　　between them.”

　　Hertzfeld was outraged when he heard what Jobs had done. He lived about twelve

　　blocks from Jobs, who sometimes would drop by on his walks. “I got so furious

　　about the Wozniak remote episode that when Steve next came over, I wouldn’t let

　　him in the house,” Hertzfeld recalled. “He knew he was wrong, but he tried to

　　rationalize, and maybe in his distorted reality he was able to.” Wozniak, always

　　a teddy bear even when annoyed, hired another design firm and even agreed to

　　stay on Apple’s retainer as a spokesman.

　　Showdown, Spring 1985

　　There were many reasons for the rift between Jobs and Sculley in the spring of

　　1985. Some were merely business disagreements, such as Sculley’s attempt to

　　maximize profits by keeping the Macintosh price high when Jobs wanted to make it

　　more affordable. Others were weirdly psychological and stemmed from the torrid

　　and unlikely infatuation they initially had with each other. Sculley had

　　painfully craved Jobs’s affection, Jobs had eagerly sought a father figure and

　　mentor, and when the ardor began to cool there was an emotional backwash. But at

　　its core, the growing breach had two fundamental causes, one on each side.

　　For Jobs, the problem was that Sculley never became a product person. He didn’t

　　make the effort, or show the capacity, to understand the fine points of what

　　they were making. On the contrary, he found Jobs’s passion for tiny technical

　　tweaks and design details to be obsessive and counterproductive. He had spent

　　his career selling sodas and snacks whose recipes were largely irrelevant to

　　him. He wasn’t naturally passionate about products, which was among the most

　　damning sins that Jobs could imagine. “I tried to educate him about the details

　　of engineering,” Jobs recalled, “but he had no idea how products are created,

　　and after a while it just turned into arguments. But I learned that my

　　perspective was right. Products are everything.” He came to see Sculley as

　　clueless, and his contempt was exacerbated by Sculley’s hunger for his affection

　　and delusions that they were very similar.

　　For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or

　　manipulative mode, was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other

　　people. He found Jobs’s boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s

　　lack of passion for product details. Sculley was kind, caring, and polite to a

　　fault. At one point they were planning to meet with Xerox’s vice chair Bill

　　Glavin, and Sculley begged Jobs to behave. But as soon as they sat down, Jobs

　　told Glavin, “You guys don’t have any clue what you’re doing,” and the meeting

　　broke up. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help myself,” Jobs told Sculley. It was one

　　of many such cases. As Atari’s Al Alcorn later observed, “Sculley believed in

　　keeping people happy and worrying about relationships. Steve didn’t give a shit

　　about that. But he did care about the product in a way that Sculley never could,

　　and he was able to avoid having too many bozos working at Apple by insulting

　　anyone who wasn’t an A player.”

　　The board became increasingly alarmed at the turmoil, and in early 1985 Arthur

　　Rock and some other disgruntled directors delivered a stern lecture to both.

　　They told Sculley that he was supposed to be running the company, and he should

　　start doing so with more authority and less eagerness to be pals with Jobs. They

　　told Jobs that he was supposed to be fixing the mess at the Macintosh division

　　and not telling other divisions how to do their job. Afterward Jobs retreated to

　　his office and typed on his Macintosh, “I will not criticize the rest of the

　　organization, I will not criticize the rest of the organization . . .”

　　As the Macintosh continued to disappoint—sales in March 1985 were only 10% of

　　the budget forecast—Jobs holed up in his office fuming or wandered the halls

　　berating everyone else for the problems. His mood swings became worse, and so

　　did his abuse of those around him. Middle-level managers began to rise up

　　against him. The marketing chief Mike Murray sought a private meeting with

　　Sculley at an industry conference. As they were going up to Sculley’s hotel

　　room, Jobs spotted them and asked to come along. Murray asked him not to. He

　　told Sculley that Jobs was wreaking havoc and had to be removed from managing

　　the Macintosh division. Sculley replied that he was not yet resigned to having a

　　showdown with Jobs. Murray later sent a memo directly to Jobs criticizing the

　　way he treated colleagues and denouncing “management by character

　　assassination.”

　　For a few weeks it seemed as if there might be a solution to the turmoil. Jobs

　　became fascinated by a flat-screen technology developed by a firm near Palo Alto

　　called Woodside Design, run by an eccentric engineer named Steve Kitchen. He

　　also was impressed by another startup that made a touchscreen display that could

　　be controlled by your finger, so you didn’t need a mouse. Together these might

　　help fulfill Jobs’s vision of creating a “Mac in a book.” On a walk with

　　Kitchen, Jobs spotted a building in nearby Menlo Park and declared that they

　　should open a skunkworks facility to work on these ideas. It could be called

　　AppleLabs and Jobs could run it, going back to the joy of having a small team

　　and developing a great new product.

　　Sculley was thrilled by the possibility. It would solve most of his management

　　issues, moving Jobs back to what he did best and getting rid of his disruptive

　　presence in Cupertino. Sculley also had a candidate to replace Jobs as manager

　　of the Macintosh division: Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s chief in France, who had

　　suffered through Jobs’s visit there. Gassée flew to Cupertino and said he would

　　take the job if he got a guarantee that he would run the division rather than

　　work under Jobs. One of the board members, Phil Schlein of Macy’s, tried to

　　convince Jobs that he would be better off thinking up new products and inspiring

　　a passionate little team.

　　But after some reflection, Jobs decided that was not the path he wanted. He

　　declined to cede control to Gassée, who wisely went back to Paris to avoid the

　　power clash that was becoming inevitable. For the rest of the spring, Jobs

　　vacillated. There were times when he wanted to assert himself as a corporate

　　manager, even writing a memo urging cost savings by eliminating free beverages

　　and first-class air travel, and other times when he agreed with those who were

　　encouraging him to go off and run a new AppleLabs R&D group.

　　In March Murray let loose with another memo that he marked “Do not circulate”

　　but gave to multiple colleagues. “In my three years at Apple, I’ve never

　　observed so much confusion, fear, and dysfunction as in the past 90 days,” he

　　began. “We are perceived by the rank and file as a boat without a rudder,

　　drifting away into foggy oblivion.” Murray had been on both sides of the fence;

　　at times he conspired with Jobs to undermine Sculley, but in this memo he laid

　　the blame on Jobs. “Whether the cause of or because of the dysfunction, Steve

　　Jobs now controls a seemingly impenetrable power base.”

　　At the end of that month, Sculley finally worked up the nerve to tell Jobs that

　　he should give up running the Macintosh division. He walked over to Jobs’s

　　office one evening and brought the human resources manager, Jay Elliot, to make

　　the confrontation more formal. “There is no one who admires your brilliance and

　　vision more than I do,” Sculley began. He had uttered such flatteries before,

　　but this time it was clear that there would be a brutal “but” punctuating the

　　thought. And there was. “But this is really not going to work,” he declared. The

　　flatteries punctured by “buts” continued. “We have developed a great friendship

　　with each other,” he said, “but I have lost confidence in your ability to run

　　the Macintosh division.” He also berated Jobs for badmouthing him as a bozo

　　behind his back.

　　Jobs looked stunned and countered with an odd challenge, that Sculley should

　　help and coach him more: “You’ve got to spend more time with me.” Then he lashed

　　back. He told Sculley he knew nothing about computers, was doing a terrible job

　　running the company, and had disappointed Jobs ever since coming to Apple. Then

　　he began to cry. Sculley sat there biting his fingernails.

　　“I’m going to bring this up with the board,” Sculley declared. “I’m going to

　　recommend that you step down from your operating position of running the

　　Macintosh division. I want you to know that.” He urged Jobs not to resist and to

　　agree instead to work on developing new technologies and products.

　　Jobs jumped from his seat and turned his intense stare on Sculley. “I don’t

　　believe you’re going to do that,” he said. “If you do that, you’re going to

　　destroy the company.”

　　Over the next few weeks Jobs’s behavior fluctuated wildly. At one moment he

　　would be talking about going off to run AppleLabs, but in the next moment he

　　would be enlisting support to have Sculley ousted. He would reach out to

　　Sculley, then lash out at him behind his back, sometimes on the same night. One

　　night at 9 he called Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat to say he was losing

　　confidence in Sculley and needed his help convincing the board to fire him; at

　　11 the same night, he phoned Sculley to say, “You’re terrific, and I just want

　　you to know I love working with you.”

　　At the board meeting on April 11, Sculley officially reported that he wanted to

　　ask Jobs to step down as the head of the Macintosh division and focus instead on

　　new product development. Arthur Rock, the most crusty and independent of the

　　board members, then spoke. He was fed up with both of them: with Sculley for not

　　having the guts to take command over the past year, and with Jobs for “acting

　　like a petulant brat.” The board needed to get this dispute behind them, and to

　　do so it should meet privately with each of them.

　　Sculley left the room so that Jobs could present first. Jobs insisted that

　　Sculley was the problem because he had no understanding of computers. Rock

　　responded by berating Jobs. In his growling voice, he said that Jobs had been

　　behaving foolishly for a year and had no right to be managing a division. Even

　　Jobs’s strongest supporter, Phil Schlein, tried to talk him into stepping aside

　　gracefully to run a research lab for the company.

　　When it was Sculley’s turn to meet privately with the board, he gave an

　　ultimatum: “You can back me, and then I take responsibility for running the

　　company, or we can do nothing, and you’re going to have to find yourselves a new

　　CEO.” If given the authority, he said, he would not move abruptly, but would

　　ease Jobs into the new role over the next few months. The board unanimously

　　sided with Sculley. He was given the authority to remove Jobs whenever he felt

　　the timing was right. As Jobs waited outside the boardroom, knowing full well

　　that he was losing, he saw Del Yocam, a longtime colleague, and hugged him.

　　After the board made its decision, Sculley tried to be conciliatory. Jobs asked

　　that the transition occur slowly, over the next few months, and Sculley agreed.

　　Later that evening Sculley’s executive assistant, Nanette Buckhout, called Jobs

　　to see how he was doing. He was still in his office, shell-shocked. Sculley had

　　already left, and Jobs came over to talk to her. Once again he began oscillating

　　wildly in his attitude toward Sculley. “Why did John do this to me?” he said.

　　“He betrayed me.” Then he swung the other way. Perhaps he should take some time

　　away to work on restoring his relationship with Sculley, he said. “John’s

　　friendship is more important than anything else, and I think maybe that’s what I

　　should do, concentrate on our friendship.”

　　Plotting a Coup

　　Jobs was not good at taking no for an answer. He went to Sculley’s office in

　　early May 1985 and asked for more time to show that he could manage the

　　Macintosh division. He would prove himself as an operations guy, he promised.

　　Sculley didn’t back down. Jobs next tried a direct challenge: He asked Sculley

　　to resign. “I think you really lost your stride,” Jobs told him. “You were

　　really great the first year, and everything went wonderful. But something

　　happened.” Sculley, who generally was even-tempered, lashed back, pointing out

　　that Jobs had been unable to get Macintosh software developed, come up with new

　　models, or win customers. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match about

　　who was the worse manager. After Jobs stalked out, Sculley turned away from the

　　glass wall of his office, where others had been looking in on the meeting, and

　　wept.

　　Matters began to come to a head on Tuesday, May 14, when the Macintosh team made

　　its quarterly review presentation to Sculley and other Apple corporate leaders.

　　Jobs still had not relinquished control of the division, and he was defiant when

　　he arrived in the corporate boardroom with his team. He and Sculley began by

　　clashing over what the division’s mission was. Jobs said it was to sell more

　　Macintosh machines. Sculley said it was to serve the interests of the Apple

　　company as a whole. As usual there was little cooperation among the divisions;

　　for one thing, the Macintosh team was planning new disk drives that were

　　different from those being developed by the Apple II division. The debate,

　　according to the minutes, took a full hour.

　　Jobs then described the projects under way: a more powerful Mac, which would

　　take the place of the discontinued Lisa; and software called FileServer, which

　　would allow Macintosh users to share files on a network. Sculley learned for the

　　first time that these projects were going to be late. He gave a cold critique of

　　Murray’s marketing record, Belleville’s missed engineering deadlines, and Jobs’s

　　overall management. Despite all this, Jobs ended the meeting with a plea to

　　Sculley, in front of all the others there, to be given one more chance to prove

　　he could run a division. Sculley refused.

　　That night Jobs took his Macintosh team out to dinner at Nina’s Café in

　　Woodside. Jean-Louis Gassée was in town because Sculley wanted him to prepare to

　　take over the Macintosh division, and Jobs invited him to join them. Belleville

　　proposed a toast “to those of us who really understand what the world according

　　to Steve Jobs is all about.” That phrase—“the world according to Steve”—had been

　　used dismissively by others at Apple who belittled the reality warp he created.

　　After the others left, Belleville sat with Jobs in his Mercedes and urged him to

　　organize a battle to the death with Sculley.

　　Months earlier, Apple had gotten the right to export computers to China, and

　　Jobs had been invited to sign a deal in the Great Hall of the People over the

　　1985 Memorial Day weekend. He had told Sculley, who decided he wanted to go

　　himself, which was just fine with Jobs. Jobs decided to use Sculley’s absence to

　　execute his coup. Throughout the week leading up to Memorial Day, he took a lot

　　of people on walks to share his plans. “I’m going to launch a coup while John is

　　in China,” he told Mike Murray.

　　Seven Days in May

　　Thursday, May 23: At his regular Thursday meeting with his top lieutenants in

　　the Macintosh division, Jobs told his inner circle about his plan to oust

　　Sculley. He also confided in the corporate human resources director, Jay Elliot,

　　who told him bluntly that the proposed rebellion wouldn’t work. Elliot had

　　talked to some board members and urged them to stand up for Jobs, but he

　　discovered that most of the board was with Sculley, as were most members of

　　Apple’s senior staff. Yet Jobs barreled ahead. He even revealed his plans to

　　Gassée on a walk around the parking lot, despite the fact that Gassée had come

　　from Paris to take his job. “I made the mistake of telling Gassée,” Jobs wryly

　　conceded years later.

　　That evening Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat had a small barbecue at his

　　home for Sculley, Gassée, and their wives. When Gassée told Eisenstat what Jobs

　　was plotting, he recommended that Gassée inform Sculley. “Steve was trying to

　　raise a cabal and have a coup to get rid of John,” Gassée recalled. “In the den

　　of Al Eisenstat’s house, I put my index finger lightly on John’s breastbone and

　　said, ‘If you leave tomorrow for China, you could be ousted. Steve’s plotting to

　　get rid of you.’”

　　Friday, May 24: Sculley canceled his trip and decided to confront Jobs at the

　　executive staff meeting on Friday morning. Jobs arrived late, and he saw that

　　his usual seat next to Sculley, who sat at the head of the table, was taken. He

　　sat instead at the far end. He was dressed in a well-tailored suit and looked

　　energized. Sculley looked pale. He announced that he was dispensing with the

　　agenda to confront the issue on everyone’s mind. “It’s come to my attention that

　　you’d like to throw me out of the company,” he said, looking directly at Jobs.

　　“I’d like to ask you if that’s true.”

　　Jobs was not expecting this. But he was never shy about indulging in brutal

　　honesty. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed Sculley with his unblinking stare. “I

　　think you’re bad for Apple, and I think you’re the wrong person to run the

　　company,” he replied, coldly and slowly. “You really should leave this company.

　　You don’t know how to operate and never have.” He accused Sculley of not

　　understanding the product development process, and then he added a self-centered

　　swipe: “I wanted you here to help me grow, and you’ve been ineffective in

　　helping me.”

　　As the rest of the room sat frozen, Sculley finally lost his temper. A childhood

　　stutter that had not afflicted him for twenty years started to return. “I don’t

　　trust you, and I won’t tolerate a lack of trust,” he stammered. When Jobs

　　claimed that he would be better than Sculley at running the company, Sculley

　　took a gamble. He decided to poll the room on that question. “He pulled off this

　　clever maneuver,” Jobs recalled, still smarting thirty-five years later. “It was

　　at the executive committee meeting, and he said, ‘It’s me or Steve, who do you

　　vote for?’ He set the whole thing up so that you’d kind of have to be an idiot

　　to vote for me.”

　　Suddenly the frozen onlookers began to squirm. Del Yocam had to go first. He

　　said he loved Jobs, wanted him to continue to play some role in the company, but

　　he worked up the nerve to conclude, with Jobs staring at him, that he

　　“respected” Sculley and would support him to run the company. Eisenstat faced

　　Jobs directly and said much the same thing: He liked Jobs but was supporting

　　Sculley. Regis McKenna, who sat in on senior staff meetings as an outside

　　consultant, was more direct. He looked at Jobs and told him he was not yet ready

　　to run the company, something he had told him before. Others sided with Sculley

　　as well. For Bill Campbell, it was particularly tough. He was fond of Jobs and

　　didn’t particularly like Sculley. His voice quavered a bit as he told Jobs he

　　had decided to support Sculley, and he urged the two of them to work it out and

　　find some role for Jobs to play in the company. “You can’t let Steve leave this

　　company,” he told Sculley.

　　Jobs looked shattered. “I guess I know where things stand,” he said, and bolted

　　out of the room. No one followed.

　　He went back to his office, gathered his longtime loyalists on the Macintosh

　　staff, and started to cry. He would have to leave Apple, he said. As he started

　　to walk out the door, Debi Coleman restrained him. She and the others urged him

　　to settle down and not do anything hasty. He should take the weekend to regroup.

　　Perhaps there was a way to prevent the company from being torn apart.

　　Sculley was devastated by his victory. Like a wounded warrior, he retreated to

　　Eisenstat’s office and asked the corporate counsel to go for a ride. When they

　　got into Eisenstat’s Porsche, Sculley lamented, “I don’t know whether I can go

　　through with this.” When Eisenstat asked what he meant, Sculley responded, “I

　　think I’m going to resign.”

　　“You can’t,” Eisenstat protested. “Apple will fall apart.”

　　“I’m going to resign,” Sculley declared. “I don’t think I’m right for the

　　company.”

　　“I think you’re copping out,” Eisenstat replied. “You’ve got to stand up to

　　him.” Then he drove Sculley home.

　　Sculley’s wife was surprised to see him back in the middle of the day. “I’ve

　　failed,” he said to her forlornly. She was a volatile woman who had never liked

　　Jobs or appreciated her husband’s infatuation with him. So when she heard what

　　had happened, she jumped into her car and sped over to Jobs’s office. Informed

　　that he had gone to the Good Earth restaurant, she marched over there and

　　confronted him in the parking lot as he was coming out with loyalists on his

　　Macintosh team.

　　“Steve, can I talk to you?” she said. His jaw dropped. “Do you have any idea

　　what a privilege it has been even to know someone as fine as John Sculley?” she

　　demanded. He averted his gaze. “Can’t you look me in the eyes when I’m talking

　　to you?” she asked. But when Jobs did so—giving her his practiced, unblinking

　　stare—she recoiled. “Never mind, don’t look at me,” she said. “When I look into

　　most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless

　　pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.” Then she walked away.

　　Saturday, May 25: Mike Murray drove to Jobs’s house in Woodside to offer some

　　advice: He should consider accepting the role of being a new product visionary,

　　starting AppleLabs, and getting away from headquarters. Jobs seemed willing to

　　consider it. But first he would have to restore peace with Sculley. So he picked

　　up the telephone and surprised Sculley with an olive branch. Could they meet the

　　following afternoon, Jobs asked, and take a walk together in the hills above

　　Stanford University. They had walked there in the past, in happier times, and

　　maybe on such a walk they could work things out.

　　Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then

　　it didn’t matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay.

　　Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So

　　he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

　　If Jobs was prepping for conciliation, it didn’t show in the choice of movie he

　　wanted to see with Murray that night. He picked Patton, the epic of the

　　never-surrender general. But he had lent his copy of the tape to his father, who

　　had once ferried troops for the general, so he drove to his childhood home with

　　Murray to retrieve it. His parents weren’t there, and he didn’t have a key. They

　　walked around the back, checked for unlocked doors or windows, and finally gave

　　up. The video store didn’t have a copy of Patton in stock, so in the end he had

　　to settle for watching the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.

　　Sunday, May 26: As planned, Jobs and Sculley met in back of the Stanford campus

　　on Sunday afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling hills and

　　horse pastures. Jobs reiterated his plea that he should have an operational role

　　at Apple. This time Sculley stood firm. It won’t work, he kept saying. Sculley

　　urged him to take the role of being a product visionary with a lab of his own,

　　but Jobs rejected this as making him into a mere “figurehead.” Defying all

　　connection to reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley give up

　　control of the entire company to him. “Why don’t you become chairman and I’ll

　　become president and chief executive officer?” he suggested. Sculley was struck

　　by how earnest he seemed.

　　“Steve, that doesn’t make any sense,” Sculley replied. Jobs then proposed that

　　they split the duties of running the company, with him handling the product side

　　and Sculley handling marketing and business. But the board had not only

　　emboldened Sculley, it had ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. “One person has

　　got to run the company,” he replied. “I’ve got the support and you don’t.”

　　On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike Markkula’s house. He wasn’t there, so Jobs

　　left a message asking him to come to dinner the following evening. He would also

　　invite the core of loyalists from his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could

　　persuade Markkula of the folly of siding with Sculley.

　　Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm. The Macintosh team

　　loyalists—Debi Coleman, Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Belleville—got to

　　Jobs’s Woodside home an hour before the scheduled dinner so they could plot

　　strategy. Sitting on the patio as the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should

　　accept Sculley’s offer to be a product visionary and help start up AppleLabs. Of

　　all the inner circle, Coleman was the most willing to be realistic. In the new

　　organization plan, Sculley had tapped her to run the manufacturing division

　　because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple and not just to Jobs. Some of the

　　others were more hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a

　　reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.

　　When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen with one proviso: Jobs had to keep

　　quiet. “I seriously wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not watch

　　Jobs enlist them in a rebellion,” he recalled. As it turned cooler, they went

　　inside the sparsely furnished mansion and sat by a fireplace. Instead of letting

　　it turn into a gripe session, Markkula made them focus on very specific

　　management issues, such as what had caused the problem in producing the

　　FileServer software and why the Macintosh distribution system had not responded

　　well to the change in demand. When they were finished, Markkula bluntly declined

　　to back Jobs. “I said I wouldn’t support his plan, and that was the end of

　　that,” Markkula recalled. “Sculley was the boss. They were mad and emotional and

　　putting together a revolt, but that’s not how you do things.”

　　Tuesday, May 28: His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the

　　previous evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs’s office on

　　Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He

　　wanted Jobs out. Then he drove to Markkula’s house, where he gave a presentation

　　of his reorganization plans. Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end

　　he gave Sculley his blessing. When he got back to his office, Sculley called the

　　other members of the board, just to make sure he still had their backing. He

　　did.

　　At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given

　　final approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week. Gassée

　　would take over control of Jobs’s beloved Macintosh as well as other products,

　　and there was no other division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still somewhat

　　conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay on with the title of board

　　chairman and be a product visionary with no operational duties. But by this

　　point, even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no longer on

　　the table.

　　It finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the

　　reality. He broke down in tears and started making phone calls—to Bill Campbell,

　　Jay Elliot, Mike Murray, and others. Murray’s wife, Joyce, was on an overseas

　　call when Jobs phoned, and the operator broke in saying it was an emergency. It

　　better be important, she told the operator. “It is,” she heard Jobs say. When

　　her husband got on the phone, Jobs was crying. “It’s over,” he said. Then he

　　hung up.

　　Murray was worried that Jobs was so despondent he might do something rash, so he

　　called back. There was no answer, so he drove to Woodside. No one came to the

　　door when he knocked, so he went around back and climbed up some exterior steps

　　and looked in the bedroom. Jobs was lying there on a mattress in his unfurnished

　　room. He let Murray in and they talked until almost dawn.

　　Wednesday, May 29: Jobs finally got hold of a tape of Patton, which he watched

　　Wednesday evening, but Murray prevented him from getting stoked up for another

　　battle. Instead he urged Jobs to come in on Friday for Sculley’s announcement of

　　the reorganization plan. There was no option left other than to play the good

　　soldier rather than the renegade commander.

　　Like a Rolling Stone

　　Jobs slipped quietly into the back row of the auditorium to listen to Sculley

　　explain to the troops the new order of battle. There were a lot of sideways

　　glances, but few people acknowledged him and none came over to provide public

　　displays of affection. He stared without blinking at Sculley, who would remember

　　“Steve’s look of contempt” years later. “It’s unyielding,” Sculley recalled,

　　“like an X-ray boring inside your bones, down to where you’re soft and

　　destructibly mortal.” For a moment, standing onstage while pretending not to

　　notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year

　　earlier to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land. He had

　　been dethroned from the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to

　　Sculley in disgust, “All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his

　　company away from him.” Now, Sculley reflected, he was taking Jobs’s company

　　away from him.

　　As Sculley went over the organizational chart, he introduced Gassée as the new

　　head of a combined Macintosh and Apple II product group. On the chart was a

　　small box labeled “chairman” with no lines connecting to it, not to Sculley or

　　to anyone else. Sculley briefly noted that in that role, Jobs would play the

　　part of “global visionary.” But he didn’t acknowledge Jobs’s presence. There was

　　a smattering of awkward applause.

　　Jobs stayed home for the next few days, blinds drawn, his answering machine on,

　　seeing only his girlfriend, Tina Redse. For hours on end he sat there playing

　　his Bob Dylan tapes, especially “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” He had recited

　　the second verse the day he unveiled the Macintosh to the Apple shareholders

　　sixteen months earlier. That verse ended nicely: “For the loser now / Will be

　　later to win. . . .”

　　A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse arrived to dispel the gloom on

　　Sunday night, led by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to

　　answer their knock, and then he led them to a room next to the kitchen that was

　　one of the few places with any furniture. With Redse’s help, he served some

　　vegetarian food he had ordered. “So what really happened?” Hertzfeld asked. “Is

　　it really as bad as it looks?”

　　“No, it’s worse.” Jobs grimaced. “It’s much worse than you can imagine.” He

　　blamed Sculley for betraying him, and said that Apple would not be able to

　　manage without him. His role as chairman, he complained, was completely

　　ceremonial. He was being ejected from his Bandley 3 office to a small and almost

　　empty building he nicknamed “Siberia.” Hertzfeld turned the topic to happier

　　days, and they began to reminisce about the past.

　　Earlier that week, Dylan had released a new album, Empire Burlesque, and

　　Hertzfeld brought a copy that they played on Jobs’s high-tech turntable. The

　　most notable track, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” with its

　　apocalyptic message, seemed appropriate for the evening, but Jobs didn’t like

　　it. It sounded almost disco, and he gloomily argued that Dylan had been going

　　downhill since Blood on the Tracks. So Hertzfeld moved the needle to the last

　　song on the album, “Dark Eyes,” which was a simple acoustic number featuring

　　Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica. It was slow and mournful and, Hertzfeld

　　hoped, would remind Jobs of the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved. But Jobs

　　didn’t like that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of the album.

　　Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father

　　figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had

　　abandoned him. “It gets back to the deep feeling of being rejected at an early

　　age,” his friend and lawyer George Riley later said. “It’s a deep part of his

　　own mythology, and it defines to himself who he is.” Jobs recalled years later,

　　“I felt like I’d been punched, the air knocked out of me and I couldn’t

　　breathe.”

　　Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially painful. “Arthur had been like

　　a father to me,” Jobs said. “He took me under his wing.” Rock had taught him

　　about opera, and he and his wife, Toni, had been his hosts in San Francisco and

　　Aspen. “I remember driving into San Francisco one time, and I said to him, ‘God,

　　that Bank of America building is ugly,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s the best,’ and he

　　proceeded to lecture me, and he was right of course.” Years later Jobs’s eyes

　　welled with tears as he recounted the story: “He chose Sculley over me. That

　　really threw me for a loop. I never thought he would abandon me.”

　　Making matters worse was that his beloved company was now in the hands of a man

　　he considered a bozo. “The board felt that I couldn’t run a company, and that

　　was their decision to make,” he said. “But they made one mistake. They should

　　have separated the decision of what to do with me and what to do with Sculley.

　　They should have fired Sculley, even if they didn’t think I was ready to run

　　Apple.” Even as his personal gloom slowly lifted, his anger at Sculley, his

　　feeling of betrayal, deepened.

　　The situation worsened when Sculley told a group of analysts that he considered

　　Jobs irrelevant to the company, despite his title as chairman. “From an

　　operations standpoint, there is no role either today or in the future for Steve

　　Jobs,” he said. “I don’t know what he’ll do.” The blunt comment shocked the

　　group, and a gasp went through the auditorium.

　　Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs thought. So in June he went to

　　Paris, where he spoke at an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice

　　President George H. W. Bush. From there he went to Italy, where he drove the

　　hills of Tuscany with Redse and bought a bike so he could spend time riding by

　　himself. In Florence he soaked in the architecture of the city and the texture

　　of the building materials. Particularly memorable were the paving stones, which

　　came from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. They were a

　　calming bluish gray. Twenty years later he would decide that the floors of most

　　major Apple stores would be made of this sandstone.

　　The Apple II was just going on sale in Russia, so Jobs headed off to Moscow,

　　where he met up with Al Eisenstat. Because there was a problem getting

　　Washington’s approval for some of the required export licenses, they visited the

　　commercial attaché at the American embassy in Moscow, Mike Merwin. He warned

　　them that there were strict laws against sharing technology with the Soviets.

　　Jobs was annoyed. At the Paris trade show, Vice President Bush had encouraged

　　him to get computers into Russia in order to “foment revolution from below.”

　　Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs

　　continued his rant. “How could you suggest this violates American law when it so

　　obviously benefits our interests?” he asked Merwin. “By putting Macs in the

　　hands of Russians, they could print all their newspapers.”

　　Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by insisting on talking about

　　Trotsky, the charismatic revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered

　　assassinated by Stalin. At one point the KGB agent assigned to him suggested he

　　tone down his fervor. “You don’t want to talk about Trotsky,” he said. “Our

　　historians have studied the situation, and we don’t believe he’s a great man

　　anymore.” That didn’t help. When they got to the state university in Moscow to

　　speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising Trotsky. He was a

　　revolutionary Jobs could identify with.

　　Jobs and Eisenstat attended the July Fourth party at the American embassy, and

　　in his thank-you letter to Ambassador Arthur Hartman, Eisenstat noted that Jobs

　　planned to pursue Apple’s ventures in Russia more vigorously in the coming year.

　　“We are tentatively planning on returning to Moscow in September.” For a moment

　　it looked as if Sculley’s hope that Jobs would turn into a “global visionary”

　　for the company might come to pass. But it was not to be. Something much

　　different was in store for September.UnknownNeXT

　　Prometheus Unbound

　　The Pirates Abandon Ship

　　Upon his return from Europe in August 1985, while he was casting about for what

　　to do next, Jobs called the Stanford biochemist Paul Berg to discuss the

　　advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg

　　described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it

　　could take weeks to nurture an experiment and get a result. “Why don’t you

　　simulate them on a computer?” Jobs asked. Berg replied that computers with such

　　capacities were too expensive for university labs. “Suddenly, he was excited

　　about the possibilities,” Berg recalled. “He had it in his mind to start a new

　　company. He was young and rich, and had to find something to do with the rest of

　　his life.”

　　Jobs had already been canvassing academics to ask what their workstation needs

　　were. It was something he had been interested in since 1983, when he had visited

　　the computer science department at Brown to show off the Macintosh, only to be

　　told that it would take a far more powerful machine to do anything useful in a

　　university lab. The dream of academic researchers was to have a workstation that

　　was both powerful and personal. As head of the Macintosh division, Jobs had

　　launched a project to build such a machine, which was dubbed the Big Mac. It

　　would have a UNIX operating system but with the friendly Macintosh interface.

　　But after Jobs was ousted from the Macintosh division, his replacement,

　　Jean-Louis Gassée, canceled the Big Mac.

　　When that happened, Jobs got a distressed call from Rich Page, who had been

　　engineering the Big Mac’s chip set. It was the latest in a series of

　　conversations that Jobs was having with disgruntled Apple employees urging him

　　to start a new company and rescue them. Plans to do so began to jell over Labor

　　Day weekend, when Jobs spoke to Bud Tribble, the original Macintosh software

　　chief, and floated the idea of starting a company to build a powerful but

　　personal workstation. He also enlisted two other Macintosh division employees

　　who had been talking about leaving, the engineer George Crow and the controller

　　Susan Barnes.

　　That left one key vacancy on the team: a person who could market the new product

　　to universities. The obvious candidate was Dan’l Lewin, who at Apple had

　　organized a consortium of universities to buy Macintosh computers in bulk.

　　Besides missing two letters in his first name, Lewin had the chiseled good looks

　　of Clark Kent and a Princetonian’s polish. He and Jobs shared a bond: Lewin had

　　written a Princeton thesis on Bob Dylan and charismatic leadership, and Jobs

　　knew something about both of those topics.

　　Lewin’s university consortium had been a godsend to the Macintosh group, but he

　　had become frustrated after Jobs left and Bill Campbell had reorganized

　　marketing in a way that reduced the role of direct sales to universities. He had

　　been meaning to call Jobs when, that Labor Day weekend, Jobs called first. He

　　drove to Jobs’s unfurnished mansion, and they walked the grounds while

　　discussing the possibility of creating a new company. Lewin was excited, but not

　　ready to commit. He was going to Austin with Campbell the following week, and he

　　wanted to wait until then to decide. Upon his return, he gave his answer: He was

　　in. The news came just in time for the September 13 Apple board meeting.

　　Although Jobs was still nominally the board’s chairman, he had not been to any

　　meetings since he lost power. He called Sculley, said he was going to attend,

　　and asked that an item be added to the end of the agenda for a “chairman’s

　　report.” He didn’t say what it was about, and Sculley assumed it would be a

　　criticism of the latest reorganization. Instead, when his turn came to speak,

　　Jobs described to the board his plans to start a new company. “I’ve been

　　thinking a lot, and it’s time for me to get on with my life,” he began. “It’s

　　obvious that I’ve got to do something. I’m thirty years old.” Then he referred

　　to some prepared notes to describe his plan to create a computer for the higher

　　education market. The new company would not be competitive with Apple, he

　　promised, and he would take with him only a handful of non-key personnel. He

　　offered to resign as chairman of Apple, but he expressed hope that they could

　　work together. Perhaps Apple would want to buy the distribution rights to his

　　product, he suggested, or license Macintosh software to it.

　　Mike Markkula rankled at the possibility that Jobs would hire anyone from Apple.

　　“Why would you take anyone at all?” he asked.

　　“Don’t get upset,” Jobs assured him and the rest of the board. “These are very

　　low-level people that you won’t miss, and they will be leaving anyway.”

　　The board initially seemed disposed to wish Jobs well in his venture. After a

　　private discussion, the directors even proposed that Apple take a 10% stake in

　　the new company and that Jobs remain on the board.

　　That night Jobs and his five renegades met again at his house for dinner. He was

　　in favor of taking the Apple investment, but the others convinced him it was

　　unwise. They also agreed that it would be best if they resigned all at once,

　　right away. Then they could make a clean break.

　　So Jobs wrote a formal letter telling Sculley the names of the five who would be

　　leaving, signed it in his spidery lowercase signature, and drove to Apple the

　　next morning to hand it to him before his 7:30 staff meeting.

　　“Steve, these are not low-level people,” Sculley said.

　　“Well, these people were going to resign anyway,” Jobs replied. “They are going

　　to be handing in their resignations by nine this morning.”

　　From Jobs’s perspective, he had been honest. The five were not division managers

　　or members of Sculley’s top team. They had all felt diminished, in fact, by the

　　company’s new organization. But from Sculley’s perspective, these were important

　　players; Page was an Apple Fellow, and Lewin was a key to the higher education

　　market. In addition, they knew about the plans for Big Mac; even though it had

　　been shelved, this was still proprietary information. Nevertheless Sculley was

　　sanguine. Instead of pushing the point, he asked Jobs to remain on the board.

　　Jobs replied that he would think about it.

　　But when Sculley walked into his 7:30 staff meeting and told his top lieutenants

　　who was leaving, there was an uproar. Most of them felt that Jobs had breached

　　his duties as chairman and displayed stunning disloyalty to the company. “We

　　should expose him for the fraud that he is so that people here stop regarding

　　him as a messiah,” Campbell shouted, according to Sculley.

　　Campbell admitted that, although he later became a great Jobs defender and

　　supportive board member, he was ballistic that morning. “I was fucking furious,

　　especially about him taking Dan’l Lewin,” he recalled. “Dan’l had built the

　　relationships with the universities. He was always muttering about how hard it

　　was to work with Steve, and then he left.” Campbell was so angry that he walked

　　out of the meeting to call Lewin at home. When his wife said he was in the

　　shower, Campbell said, “I’ll wait.” A few minutes later, when she said he was

　　still in the shower, Campbell again said, “I’ll wait.” When Lewin finally came

　　on the phone, Campbell asked him if it was true. Lewin acknowledged it was.

　　Campbell hung up without saying another word.

　　After hearing the fury of his senior staff, Sculley surveyed the members of the

　　board. They likewise felt that Jobs had misled them with his pledge that he

　　would not raid important employees. Arthur Rock was especially angry. Even

　　though he had sided with Sculley during the Memorial Day showdown, he had been

　　able to repair his paternal relationship with Jobs. Just the week before, he had

　　invited Jobs to bring his girlfriend up to San Francisco so that he and his wife

　　could meet her, and the four had a nice dinner in Rock’s Pacific Heights home.

　　Jobs had not mentioned the new company he was forming, so Rock felt betrayed

　　when he heard about it from Sculley. “He came to the board and lied to us,” Rock

　　growled later. “He told us he was thinking of forming a company when in fact he

　　had already formed it. He said he was going to take a few middle-level people.

　　It turned out to be five senior people.” Markkula, in his subdued way, was also

　　offended. “He took some top executives he had secretly lined up before he left.

　　That’s not the way you do things. It was ungentlemanly.”

　　Over the weekend both the board and the executive staff convinced Sculley that

　　Apple would have to declare war on its cofounder. Markkula issued a formal

　　statement accusing Jobs of acting “in direct contradiction to his statements

　　that he wouldn’t recruit any key Apple personnel for his company.” He added

　　ominously, “We are evaluating what possible actions should be taken.” Campbell

　　was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying he “was stunned and shocked” by

　　Jobs’s behavior.

　　Jobs had left his meeting with Sculley thinking that things might proceed

　　smoothly, so he had kept quiet. But after reading the newspapers, he felt that

　　he had to respond. He phoned a few favored reporters and invited them to his

　　home for private briefings the next day. Then he called Andy Cunningham, who had

　　handled his publicity at Regis McKenna. “I went over to his unfurnished mansiony

　　place in Woodside,” she recalled, “and I found him huddled in the kitchen with

　　his five colleagues and a few reporters hanging outside on the lawn.” Jobs told

　　her that he was going to do a full-fledged press conference and started spewing

　　some of the derogatory things he was going to say. Cunningham was appalled.

　　“This is going to reflect badly on you,” she told him. Finally he backed down.

　　He decided that he would give the reporters a copy of the resignation letter and

　　limit any on-the-record comments to a few bland statements.

　　Jobs had considered just mailing in his letter of resignation, but Susan Barnes

　　convinced him that this would be too contemptuous. Instead he drove it to

　　Markkula’s house, where he also found Al Eisenstat. There was a tense

　　conversation for about fifteen minutes; then Barnes, who had been waiting

　　outside, came to the door to retrieve him before he said anything he would

　　regret. He left behind the letter, which he had composed on a Macintosh and

　　printed on the new LaserWriter:

　　September 17, 1985

　　Dear Mike:

　　This morning’s papers carried suggestions that Apple is considering removing

　　me as Chairman. I don’t know the source of these reports but they are both

　　misleading to the public and unfair to me.

　　You will recall that at last Thursday’s Board meeting I stated I had decided

　　to start a new venture and I tendered my resignation as Chairman.

　　The Board declined to accept my resignation and asked me to defer it for a

　　week. I agreed to do so in light of the encouragement the Board offered with

　　regard to the proposed new venture and the indications that Apple would invest

　　in it. On Friday, after I told John Sculley who would be joining me, he

　　confirmed Apple’s willingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration

　　between Apple and my new venture.

　　Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture toward me

　　and the new venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate acceptance

　　of my resignation. . . .

　　As you know, the company’s recent reorganization left me with no work to do

　　and no access even to regular management reports. I am but 30 and want still

　　to contribute and achieve.

　　After what we have accomplished together, I would wish our parting to be both

　　amicable and dignified.

　　Yours sincerely, steven p. jobs

　　When a guy from the facilities team went to Jobs’s office to pack up his

　　belongings, he saw a picture frame on the floor. It contained a photograph of

　　Jobs and Sculley in warm conversation, with an inscription from seven months

　　earlier: “Here’s to Great Ideas, Great Experiences, and a Great Friendship!

　　John.” The glass frame was shattered. Jobs had hurled it across the room before

　　leaving. From that day, he never spoke to Sculley again.

　　Apple’s stock went up a full point, or almost 7%, when Jobs’s resignation was

　　announced. “East Coast stockholders always worried about California flakes

　　running the company,” explained the editor of a tech stock newsletter. “Now with

　　both Wozniak and Jobs out, those shareholders are relieved.” But Nolan Bushnell,

　　the Atari founder who had been an amused mentor ten years earlier, told Time

　　that Jobs would be badly missed. “Where is Apple’s inspiration going to come

　　from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new brand of Pepsi?”

　　After a few days of failed efforts to reach a settlement with Jobs, Sculley and

　　the Apple board decided to sue him “for breaches of fiduciary obligations.” The

　　suit spelled out his alleged transgressions:

　　Notwithstanding his fiduciary obligations to Apple, Jobs, while serving as the

　　Chairman of Apple’s Board of Directors and an officer of Apple and pretending

　　loyalty to the interests of Apple . . .

　　(a) secretly planned the formation of an enterprise to compete with Apple;

　　(b) secretly schemed that his competing enterprise would wrongfully take

　　advantage of and utilize Apple’s plan to design, develop and market the Next

　　Generation Product . . .

　　(c) secretly lured away key employees of Apple.

　　At the time, Jobs owned 6.5 million shares of Apple stock, 11% of the company,

　　worth more than $100 million. He began to sell his shares, and within five

　　months had dumped them all, retaining only one share so he could attend

　　shareholder meetings if he wanted. He was furious, and that was reflected in his

　　passion to start what was, no matter how he spun it, a rival company. “He was

　　angry at Apple,” said Joanna Hoffman, who briefly went to work for the new

　　company. “Aiming at the educational market, where Apple was strong, was simply

　　Steve being vengeful. He was doing it for revenge.”

　　Jobs, of course, didn’t see it that way. “I haven’t got any sort of odd chip on

　　my shoulder,” he told Newsweek. Once again he invited his favorite reporters

　　over to his Woodside home, and this time he did not have Andy Cunningham there

　　urging him to be circumspect. He dismissed the allegation that he had improperly

　　lured the five colleagues from Apple. “These people all called me,” he told the

　　gaggle of journalists who were milling around in his unfurnished living room.

　　“They were thinking of leaving the company. Apple has a way of neglecting

　　people.”

　　He decided to cooperate with a Newsweek cover in order to get his version of the

　　story out, and the interview he gave was revealing. “What I’m best at doing is

　　finding a group of talented people and making things with them,” he told the

　　magazine. He said that he would always harbor affection for Apple. “I’ll always

　　remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he’s fallen in love with.”

　　But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. “When someone

　　calls you a thief in public, you have to respond.” Apple’s threat to sue him was

　　outrageous. It was also sad. It showed that Apple was no longer a confident,

　　rebellious company. “It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300

　　employees couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans.”

　　To try to counter Jobs’s spin, Sculley called Wozniak and urged him to speak

　　out. “Steve can be an insulting and hurtful guy,” he told Time that week. He

　　revealed that Jobs had asked him to join his new firm—it would have been a sly

　　way to land another blow against Apple’s current management—but he wanted no

　　part of such games and had not returned Jobs’s phone call. To the San Francisco

　　Chronicle, he recounted how Jobs had blocked frogdesign from working on his

　　remote control under the pretense that it might compete with Apple products. “I

　　look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I

　　cannot trust,” Wozniak said.

　　To Be on Your Own

　　“The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get

　　lost,” Arthur Rock later said. The theory, shared by many, is that the tough

　　love made him wiser and more mature. But it’s not that simple. At the company he

　　founded after being ousted from Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his

　　instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a series of

　　spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. This was the true learning

　　experience. What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was

　　not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II.

　　The first instinct that he indulged was his passion for design. The name he

　　chose for his new company was rather straightforward: Next. In order to make it

　　more distinctive, he decided he needed a world-class logo. So he courted the

　　dean of corporate logos, Paul Rand. At seventy-one, the Brooklyn-born graphic

　　designer had already created some of the best-known logos in business, including

　　those of Esquire, IBM, Westinghouse, ABC, and UPS. He was under contract to IBM,

　　and his supervisors there said that it would obviously be a conflict for him to

　　create a logo for another computer company. So Jobs picked up the phone and

　　called IBM’s CEO, John Akers. Akers was out of town, but Jobs was so persistent

　　that he was finally put through to Vice Chairman Paul Rizzo. After two days,

　　Rizzo concluded that it was futile to resist Jobs, and he gave permission for

　　Rand to do the work.

　　Rand flew out to Palo Alto and spent time walking with Jobs and listening to his

　　vision. The computer would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that shape. It

　　was perfect and simple. So Rand decided that the logo should be a cube as well,

　　one that was tilted at a 28° angle. When Jobs asked for a number of options to

　　consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I

　　will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I

　　produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.”

　　Jobs admired that kind of thinking, so he made what was quite a gamble. The

　　company would pay an astonishing $100,000 flat fee to get one design. “There was

　　a clarity in our relationship,” Jobs said. “He had a purity as an artist, but he

　　was astute at solving business problems. He had a tough exterior, and had

　　perfected the image of a curmudgeon, but he was a teddy bear inside.” It was one

　　of Jobs’s highest praises: purity as an artist.

　　It took Rand just two weeks. He flew back to deliver the result to Jobs at his

　　Woodside house. First they had dinner, then Rand handed him an elegant and

　　vibrant booklet that described his thought process. On the final spread, Rand

　　presented the logo he had chosen. “In its design, color arrangement, and

　　orientation, the logo is a study in contrasts,” his booklet proclaimed. “Tipped

　　at a jaunty angle, it brims with the informality, friendliness, and spontaneity

　　of a Christmas seal and the authority of a rubber stamp.” The word “next” was

　　split into two lines to fill the square face of the cube, with only the “e” in

　　lowercase. That letter stood out, Rand’s booklet explained, to connote

　　“education, excellence . . . e = mc2.”

　　It was often hard to predict how Jobs would react to a presentation. He could

　　label it shitty or brilliant; one never knew which way he might go. But with a

　　legendary designer such as Rand, the chances were that Jobs would embrace the

　　proposal. He stared at the final spread, looked up at Rand, and then hugged him.

　　They had one minor disagreement: Rand had used a dark yellow for the “e” in the

　　logo, and Jobs wanted him to change it to a brighter and more traditional

　　yellow. Rand banged his fist on the table and declared, “I’ve been doing this

　　for fifty years, and I know what I’m doing.” Jobs relented.

　　The company had not only a new logo, but a new name. No longer was it Next. It

　　was NeXT. Others might not have understood the need to obsess over a logo, much

　　less pay $100,000 for one. But for Jobs it meant that NeXT was starting life

　　with a world-class feel and identity, even if it hadn’t yet designed its first

　　product. As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able to impute its

　　values from the first impression it makes.

　　As a bonus, Rand agreed to design a personal calling card for Jobs. He came up

　　with a colorful type treatment, which Jobs liked, but they ended up having a

　　lengthy and heated disagreement about the placement of the period after the “P”

　　in Steven P. Jobs. Rand had placed the period to the right of the “P.”, as it

　　would appear if set in lead type. Steve preferred the period to be nudged to the

　　left, under the curve of the “P.”, as is possible with digital typography. “It

　　was a fairly large argument about something relatively small,” Susan Kare

　　recalled. On this one Jobs prevailed.

　　In order to translate the NeXT logo into the look of real products, Jobs needed

　　an industrial designer he trusted. He talked to a few possibilities, but none of

　　them impressed him as much as the wild Bavarian he had imported to Apple:

　　Hartmut Esslinger, whose frogdesign had set up shop in Silicon Valley and who,

　　thanks to Jobs, had a lucrative contract with Apple. Getting IBM to permit Paul

　　Rand to do work for NeXT was a small miracle willed into existence by Jobs’s

　　belief that reality can be distorted. But that was a snap compared to the

　　likelihood that he could convince Apple to permit Esslinger to work for NeXT.

　　This did not keep Jobs from trying. At the beginning of November 1985, just five

　　weeks after Apple filed suit against him, Jobs wrote to Eisenstat and asked for

　　a dispensation. “I spoke with Hartmut Esslinger this weekend and he suggested I

　　write you a note expressing why I wish to work with him and frogdesign on the

　　new products for NeXT,” he said. Astonishingly, Jobs’s argument was that he did

　　not know what Apple had in the works, but Esslinger did. “NeXT has no knowledge

　　as to the current or future directions of Apple’s product designs, nor do other

　　design firms we might deal with, so it is possible to inadvertently design

　　similar looking products. It is in both Apple’s and NeXT’s best interest to rely

　　on Hartmut’s professionalism to make sure this does not occur.” Eisenstat

　　recalled being flabbergasted by Jobs’s audacity, and he replied curtly. “I have

　　previously expressed my concern on behalf of Apple that you are engaged in a

　　business course which involves your utilization of Apple’s confidential business

　　information,” he wrote. “Your letter does not alleviate my concern in any way.

　　In fact it heightens my concern because it states that you have ‘no knowledge as

　　to the current or future directions of Apple’s product designs,’ a statement

　　which is not true.” What made the request all the more astonishing to Eisenstat

　　was that it was Jobs who, just a year earlier, had forced frogdesign to abandon

　　its work on Wozniak’s remote control device.

　　Jobs realized that in order to work with Esslinger (and for a variety of other

　　reasons), it would be necessary to resolve the lawsuit that Apple had filed.

　　Fortunately Sculley was willing. In January 1986 they reached an out-of-court

　　agreement involving no financial damages. In return for Apple’s dropping its

　　suit, NeXT agreed to a variety of restrictions: Its product would be marketed as

　　a high-end workstation, it would be sold directly to colleges and universities,

　　and it would not ship before March 1987. Apple also insisted that the NeXT

　　machine “not use an operating system compatible with the Macintosh,” though it

　　could be argued that Apple would have been better served by insisting on just

　　the opposite.

　　After the settlement Jobs continued to court Esslinger until the designer

　　decided to wind down his contract with Apple. That allowed frogdesign to work

　　with NeXT at the end of 1986. Esslinger insisted on having free rein, just as

　　Paul Rand had. “Sometimes you have to use a big stick with Steve,” he said. Like

　　Rand, Esslinger was an artist, so Jobs was willing to grant him indulgences he

　　denied other mortals.

　　Jobs decreed that the computer should be an absolutely perfect cube, with each

　　side exactly a foot long and every angle precisely 90 degrees. He liked cubes.

　　They had gravitas but also the slight whiff of a toy. But the NeXT cube was a

　　Jobsian example of design desires trumping engineering considerations. The

　　circuit boards, which fitted nicely into the traditional pizza-box shape, had to

　　be reconfigured and stacked in order to nestle into a cube.

　　Even worse, the perfection of the cube made it hard to manufacture. Most parts

　　that are cast in molds have angles that are slightly greater than pure 90

　　degrees, so that it’s easier to get them out of the mold (just as it is easier

　　to get a cake out of a pan that has angles slightly greater than 90 degrees).

　　But Esslinger dictated, and Jobs enthusiastically agreed, that there would be no

　　such “draft angles” that would ruin the purity and perfection of the cube. So

　　the sides had to be produced separately, using molds that cost $650,000, at a

　　specialty machine shop in Chicago. Jobs’s passion for perfection was out of

　　control. When he noticed a tiny line in the chassis caused by the molds,

　　something that any other computer maker would accept as unavoidable, he flew to

　　Chicago and convinced the die caster to start over and do it perfectly. “Not a

　　lot of die casters expect a celebrity to fly in,” noted one of the engineers.

　　Jobs also had the company buy a $150,000 sanding machine to remove all lines

　　where the mold faces met and insisted that the magnesium case be a matte black,

　　which made it more susceptible to showing blemishes.

　　Jobs had always indulged his obsession that the unseen parts of a product should

　　be crafted as beautifully as its façade, just as his father had taught him when

　　they were building a fence. This too he took to extremes when he found himself

　　unfettered at NeXT. He made sure that the screws inside the machine had

　　expensive plating. He even insisted that the matte black finish be coated onto

　　the inside of the cube’s case, even though only repairmen would see it.

　　Joe Nocera, then writing for Esquire, captured Jobs’s intensity at a NeXT staff

　　meeting:

　　It’s not quite right to say that he is sitting through this staff meeting,

　　because Jobs doesn’t sit through much of anything; one of the ways he

　　dominates is through sheer movement. One moment he’s kneeling in his chair;

　　the next minute he’s slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair

　　entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him. He is full

　　of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnerving earnestness at

　　whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow,

　　are in constant motion.

　　What particularly struck Nocera was Jobs’s “almost willful lack of tact.” It was

　　more than just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he

　　thought dumb; it was a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put

　　people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter. When Dan’l Lewin handed out an

　　organization chart, for example, Jobs rolled his eyes. “These charts are

　　bullshit,” he interjected. Yet his moods still swung wildly, as at Apple. A

　　finance person came into the meeting and Jobs lavished praise on him for a

　　“really, really great job on this”; the previous day Jobs had told him, “This

　　deal is crap.”

　　One of NeXT’s first ten employees was an interior designer for the company’s

　　first headquarters, in Palo Alto. Even though Jobs had leased a building that

　　was new and nicely designed, he had it completely gutted and rebuilt. Walls were

　　replaced by glass, the carpets were replaced by light hardwood flooring. The

　　process was repeated when NeXT moved to a bigger space in Redwood City in 1989.

　　Even though the building was brand-new, Jobs insisted that the elevators be

　　moved so that the entrance lobby would be more dramatic. As a centerpiece, Jobs

　　commissioned I. M. Pei to design a grand staircase that seemed to float in the

　　air. The contractor said it couldn’t be built. Jobs said it could, and it was.

　　Years later Jobs would make such staircases a feature at Apple’s signature

　　stores.

　　The Computer

　　During the early months of NeXT, Jobs and Dan’l Lewin went on the road, often

　　accompanied by a few colleagues, to visit campuses and solicit opinions. At

　　Harvard they met with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of Lotus software, over dinner

　　at Harvest restaurant. When Kapor began slathering butter on his bread, Jobs

　　asked him, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Kapor responded, “I’ll

　　make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will

　　stay away from the subject of your personality.” It was meant humorously, but as

　　Kapor later commented, “Human relationships were not his strong suit.” Lotus

　　agreed to write a spreadsheet program for the NeXT operating system.

　　Jobs wanted to bundle useful content with the machine, so Michael Hawley, one of

　　the engineers, developed a digital dictionary. He learned that a friend of his

　　at Oxford University Press had been involved in the typesetting of a new edition

　　of Shakespeare’s works. That meant that there was probably a computer tape he

　　could get his hands on and, if so, incorporate it into the NeXT’s memory. “So I

　　called up Steve, and he said that would be awesome, and we flew over to Oxford

　　together.” On a beautiful spring day in 1986, they met in the publishing house’s

　　grand building in the heart of Oxford, where Jobs made an offer of $2,000 plus

　　74 cents for every computer sold in order to have the rights to Oxford’s edition

　　of Shakespeare. “It will be all gravy to you,” he argued. “You will be ahead of

　　the parade. It’s never been done before.” They agreed in principle and then went

　　out to play skittles over beer at a nearby pub where Lord Byron used to drink.

　　By the time it launched, the NeXT would also include a dictionary, a thesaurus,

　　and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, making it one of the pioneers of the

　　concept of searchable electronic books.

　　Instead of using off-the-shelf chips for the NeXT, Jobs had his engineers design

　　custom ones that integrated a variety of functions on one chip. That would have

　　been hard enough, but Jobs made it almost impossible by continually revising the

　　functions he wanted it to do. After a year it became clear that this would be a

　　major source of delay.

　　He also insisted on building his own fully automated and futuristic factory,

　　just as he had for the Macintosh; he had not been chastened by that experience.

　　This time too he made the same mistakes, only more excessively. Machines and

　　robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme.

　　The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and

　　there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase, just as in

　　the corporate headquarters. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot

　　assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as

　　they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched

　　from the viewing gallery. Empty circuit boards were fed in at one end and twenty

　　minutes later, untouched by humans, came out the other end as completed boards.

　　The process followed the Japanese principle known as kanban, in which each

　　machine performs its task only when the next machine is ready to receive another

　　part.

　　Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. “He applied charm or

　　public humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective,”

　　Tribble recalled. But sometimes it wasn’t. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in

　　ninety-hour weeks for the first ten months at NeXT. He quit when “Steve walked

　　in one Friday afternoon and told us how unimpressed he was with what we were

　　doing.” When Business Week asked him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs

　　said it made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick

　　of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is

　　expected.” But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of field

　　trips, visits by akido masters, and off-site retreats. And he still exuded the

　　pirate flag spunkiness. When Apple fired Chiat/Day, the ad firm that had done

　　the “1984” ad and taken out the newspaper ad saying “Welcome IBM—seriously,”

　　Jobs took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming,

　　“Congratulations Chiat/Day—Seriously . . . Because I can guarantee you: there is

　　life after Apple.”

　　Perhaps the greatest similarity to his days at Apple was that Jobs brought with

　　him his reality distortion field. It was on display at the company’s first

　　retreat at Pebble Beach in late 1985. There Jobs pronounced that the first NeXT

　　computer would be shipped in just eighteen months. It was already clear that

　　this date was impossible, but he blew off a suggestion from one engineer that

　　they be realistic and plan on shipping in 1988. “If we do that, the world isn’t

　　standing still, the technology window passes us by, and all the work we’ve done

　　we have to throw down the toilet,” he argued.

　　Joanna Hoffman, the veteran of the Macintosh team who was among those willing to

　　challenge Jobs, did so. “Reality distortion has motivational value, and I think

　　that’s fine,” she said as Jobs stood at a whiteboard. “However, when it comes to

　　setting a date in a way that affects the design of the product, then we get into

　　real deep shit.” Jobs didn’t agree: “I think we have to drive a stake in the

　　ground somewhere, and I think if we miss this window, then our credibility

　　starts to erode.” What he did not say, even though it was suspected by all, was

　　that if their targets slipped they might run out of money. Jobs had pledged $7

　　million of his own funds, but at their current burn rate that would run out in

　　eighteen months if they didn’t start getting some revenue from shipped products.

　　Three months later, when they returned to Pebble Beach for their next retreat,

　　Jobs began his list of maxims with “The honeymoon is over.” By the time of the

　　third retreat, in Sonoma in September 1986, the timetable was gone, and it

　　looked as though the company would hit a financial wall.

　　Perot to the Rescue

　　In late 1986 Jobs sent out a proposal to venture capital firms offering a 10%

　　stake in NeXT for $3 million. That put a valuation on the entire company of $30

　　million, a number that Jobs had pulled out of thin air. Less than $7 million had

　　gone into the company thus far, and there was little to show for it other than a

　　neat logo and some snazzy offices. It had no revenue or products, nor any on the

　　horizon. Not surprisingly, the venture capitalists all passed on the offer to

　　invest.

　　There was, however, one cowboy who was dazzled. Ross Perot, the bantam Texan who

　　had founded Electronic Data Systems, then sold it to General Motors for $2.4

　　billion, happened to watch a PBS documentary, The Entrepreneurs, which had a

　　segment on Jobs and NeXT in November 1986. He instantly identified with Jobs and

　　his gang, so much so that, as he watched them on television, he said, “I was

　　finishing their sentences for them.” It was a line eerily similar to one Sculley

　　had often used. Perot called Jobs the next day and offered, “If you ever need an

　　investor, call me.”

　　Jobs did indeed need one, badly. But he was careful not to show it. He waited a

　　week before calling back. Perot sent some of his analysts to size up NeXT, but

　　Jobs took care to deal directly with Perot. One of his great regrets in life,

　　Perot later said, was that he had not bought Microsoft, or a large stake in it,

　　when a very young Bill Gates had come to visit him in Dallas in 1979. By the

　　time Perot called Jobs, Microsoft had just gone public with a $1 billion

　　valuation. Perot had missed out on the opportunity to make a lot of money and

　　have a fun adventure. He was eager not to make that mistake again.

　　Jobs made an offer to Perot that was three times more costly than had quietly

　　been offered to venture capitalists a few months earlier. For $20 million, Perot

　　would get 16% of the equity in the company, after Jobs put in another $5

　　million. That meant the company would be valued at about $126 million. But money

　　was not a major consideration for Perot. After a meeting with Jobs, he declared

　　that he was in. “I pick the jockeys, and the jockeys pick the horses and ride

　　them,” he told Jobs. “You guys are the ones I’m betting on, so you figure it

　　out.”

　　Perot brought to NeXT something that was almost as valuable as his $20 million

　　lifeline: He was a quotable, spirited cheerleader for the company, who could

　　lend it an air of credibility among grown-ups. “In terms of a startup company,

　　it’s one that carries the least risk of any I’ve seen in 25 years in the

　　computer industry,” he told the New York Times. “We’ve had some sophisticated

　　people see the hardware—it blew them away. Steve and his whole NeXT team are the

　　darnedest bunch of perfectionists I’ve ever seen.”

　　Perot also traveled in rarefied social and business circles that complemented

　　Jobs’s own. He took Jobs to a black-tie dinner dance in San Francisco that

　　Gordon and Ann Getty gave for King Juan Carlos I of Spain. When the king asked

　　Perot whom he should meet, Perot immediately produced Jobs. They were soon

　　engaged in what Perot later described as “electric conversation,” with Jobs

　　animatedly describing the next wave in computing. At the end the king scribbled

　　a note and handed it to Jobs. “What happened?” Perot asked. Jobs answered, “I

　　sold him a computer.”

　　These and other stories were incorporated into the mythologized story of Jobs

　　that Perot told wherever he went. At a briefing at the National Press Club in

　　Washington, he spun Jobs’s life story into a Texas-size yarn about a young man

　　so poor he couldn’t afford to go to college, working in his garage at night,

　　playing with computer chips, which was his hobby, and his dad—who looks like a

　　character out of a Norman Rockwell painting—comes in one day and said, “Steve,

　　either make something you can sell or go get a job.” Sixty days later, in a

　　wooden box that his dad made for him, the first Apple computer was created.

　　And this high school graduate literally changed the world.

　　The one phrase that was true was the one about Paul Jobs’s looking like someone

　　in a Rockwell painting. And perhaps the last phrase, the one about Jobs changing

　　the world. Certainly Perot believed that. Like Sculley, he saw himself in Jobs.

　　“Steve’s like me,” Perot told the Washington Post’s David Remnick. “We’re weird

　　in the same way. We’re soul mates.”

　　Gates and NeXT

　　Bill Gates was not a soul mate. Jobs had convinced him to produce software

　　applications for the Macintosh, which had turned out to be hugely profitable for

　　Microsoft. But Gates was one person who was resistant to Jobs’s reality

　　distortion field, and as a result he decided not to create software tailored for

　　the NeXT platform. Gates went to California to get periodic demonstrations, but

　　each time he came away unimpressed. “The Macintosh was truly unique, but I

　　personally don’t understand what is so unique about Steve’s new computer,” he

　　told Fortune.

　　Part of the problem was that the rival titans were congenitally unable to be

　　deferential to each other. When Gates made his first visit to NeXT’s Palo Alto

　　headquarters, in the summer of 1987, Jobs kept him waiting for a half hour in

　　the lobby, even though Gates could see through the glass walls that Jobs was

　　walking around having casual conversations. “I’d gone down to NeXT and I had the

　　Odwalla, the most expensive carrot juice, and I’d never seen tech offices so

　　lavish,” Gates recalled, shaking his head with just a hint of a smile. “And

　　Steve comes a half hour late to the meeting.”

　　Jobs’s sales pitch, according to Gates, was simple. “We did the Mac together,”

　　Jobs said. “How did that work for you? Very well. Now, we’re going to do this

　　together and this is going to be great.”

　　But Gates was brutal to Jobs, just as Jobs could be to others. “This machine is

　　crap,” he said. “The optical disk has too low latency, the fucking case is too

　　expensive. This thing is ridiculous.” He decided then, and reaffirmed on each

　　subsequent visit, that it made no sense for Microsoft to divert resources from

　　other projects to develop applications for NeXT. Worse yet, he repeatedly said

　　so publicly, which made others less likely to spend time developing for NeXT.

　　“Develop for it? I’ll piss on it,” he told InfoWorld.

　　When they happened to meet in the hallway at a conference, Jobs started berating

　　Gates for his refusal to do software for NeXT. “When you get a market, I will

　　consider it,” Gates replied. Jobs got angry. “It was a screaming battle, right

　　in front of everybody,” recalled Adele Goldberg, the Xerox PARC engineer. Jobs

　　insisted that NeXT was the next wave of computing. Gates, as he often did, got

　　more expressionless as Jobs got more heated. He finally just shook his head and

　　walked away.

　　Beneath their personal rivalry—and occasional grudging respect—was their basic

　　philosophical difference. Jobs believed in an end-to-end integration of hardware

　　and software, which led him to build a machine that was not compatible with

　　others. Gates believed in, and profited from, a world in which different

　　companies made machines that were compatible with one another; their hardware

　　ran a standard operating system (Microsoft’s Windows) and could all use the same

　　software apps (such as Microsoft’s Word and Excel). “His product comes with an

　　interesting feature called incompatibility,” Gates told the Washington Post. “It

　　doesn’t run any of the existing software. It’s a super-nice computer. I don’t

　　think if I went out to design an incompatible computer I would have done as well

　　as he did.”

　　At a forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989, Jobs and Gates appeared

　　sequentially, laying out their competing worldviews. Jobs spoke about how new

　　waves come along in the computer industry every few years. Macintosh had

　　launched a revolutionary new approach with the graphical interface; now NeXT was

　　doing it with object-oriented programming tied to a powerful new machine based

　　on an optical disk. Every major software vendor realized they had to be part of

　　this new wave, he said, “except Microsoft.” When Gates came up, he reiterated

　　his belief that Jobs’s end-to-end control of the software and the hardware was

　　destined for failure, just as Apple had failed in competing against the

　　Microsoft Windows standard. “The hardware market and the software market are

　　separate,” he said. When asked about the great design that could come from

　　Jobs’s approach, Gates gestured to the NeXT prototype that was still sitting

　　onstage and sneered, “If you want black, I’ll get you a can of paint.”

　　IBM

　　Jobs came up with a brilliant jujitsu maneuver against Gates, one that could

　　have changed the balance of power in the computer industry forever. It required

　　Jobs to do two things that were against his nature: licensing out his software

　　to another hardware maker and getting into bed with IBM. He had a pragmatic

　　streak, albeit a tiny one, so he was able to overcome his reluctance. But his

　　heart was never fully in it, which is why the alliance would turn out to be

　　short-lived.

　　It began at a party, a truly memorable one, for the seventieth birthday of the

　　Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in June 1987 in Washington. Six

　　hundred guests attended, including President Ronald Reagan. Jobs flew in from

　　California and IBM’s chairman John Akers from New York. It was the first time

　　they had met. Jobs took the opportunity to bad-mouth Microsoft and attempt to

　　wean IBM from using its Windows operating system. “I couldn’t resist telling him

　　I thought IBM was taking a giant gamble betting its entire software strategy on

　　Microsoft, because I didn’t think its software was very good,” Jobs recalled.

　　To Jobs’s delight, Akers replied, “How would you like to help us?” Within a few

　　weeks Jobs showed up at IBM’s Armonk, New York, headquarters with his software

　　engineer Bud Tribble. They put on a demo of NeXT, which impressed the IBM

　　engineers. Of particular significance was NeXTSTEP, the machine’s

　　object-oriented operating system. “NeXTSTEP took care of a lot of trivial

　　programming chores that slow down the software development process,” said Andrew

　　Heller, the general manager of IBM’s workstation unit, who was so impressed by

　　Jobs that he named his newborn son Steve.

　　The negotiations lasted into 1988, with Jobs becoming prickly over tiny details.

　　He would stalk out of meetings over disagreements about colors or design, only

　　to be calmed down by Tribble or Lewin. He didn’t seem to know which frightened

　　him more, IBM or Microsoft. In April Perot decided to play host for a mediating

　　session at his Dallas headquarters, and a deal was struck: IBM would license the

　　current version of the NeXTSTEP software, and if the managers liked it, they

　　would use it on some of their workstations. IBM sent to Palo Alto a 125-page

　　contract. Jobs tossed it down without reading it. “You don’t get it,” he said as

　　he walked out of the room. He demanded a simpler contract of only a few pages,

　　which he got within a week.

　　Jobs wanted to keep the arrangement secret from Bill Gates until the big

　　unveiling of the NeXT computer, scheduled for October. But IBM insisted on being

　　forthcoming. Gates was furious. He realized this could wean IBM off its

　　dependence on Microsoft operating systems. “NeXTSTEP isn’t compatible with

　　anything,” he raged to IBM executives.

　　At first Jobs seemed to have pulled off Gates’s worst nightmare. Other computer

　　makers that were beholden to Microsoft’s operating systems, most notably Compaq

　　and Dell, came to ask Jobs for the right to clone NeXT and license NeXTSTEP.

　　There were even offers to pay a lot more if NeXT would get out of the hardware

　　business altogether.

　　That was too much for Jobs, at least for the time being. He cut off the clone

　　discussions. And he began to cool toward IBM. The chill became reciprocal. When

　　the person who made the deal at IBM moved on, Jobs went to Armonk to meet his

　　replacement, Jim Cannavino. They cleared the room and talked one-on-one. Jobs

　　demanded more money to keep the relationship going and to license newer versions

　　of NeXTSTEP to IBM. Cannavino made no commitments, and he subsequently stopped

　　returning Jobs’s phone calls. The deal lapsed. NeXT got a bit of money for a

　　licensing fee, but it never got the chance to change the world.

　　The Launch, October 1988

　　Jobs had perfected the art of turning product launches into theatrical

　　productions, and for the world premiere of the NeXT computer—on October 12,

　　1988, in San Francisco’s Symphony Hall—he wanted to outdo himself. He needed to

　　blow away the doubters. In the weeks leading up to the event, he drove up to San

　　Francisco almost every day to hole up in the Victorian house of Susan Kare,

　　NeXT’s graphic designer, who had done the original fonts and icons for the

　　Macintosh. She helped prepare each of the slides as Jobs fretted over everything

　　from the wording to the right hue of green to serve as the background color. “I

　　like that green,” he said proudly as they were doing a trial run in front of

　　some staffers. “Great green, great green,” they all murmured in assent.

　　No detail was too small. Jobs went over the invitation list and even the lunch

　　menu (mineral water, croissants, cream cheese, bean sprouts). He picked out a

　　video projection company and paid it $60,000 for help. And he hired the

　　postmodernist theater producer George Coates to stage the show. Coates and Jobs

　　decided, not surprisingly, on an austere and radically simple stage look. The

　　unveiling of the black perfect cube would occur on a starkly minimalist stage

　　setting with a black background, a table covered by a black cloth, a black veil

　　draped over the computer, and a simple vase of flowers. Because neither the

　　hardware nor the operating system was actually ready, Jobs was urged to do a

　　simulation. But he refused. Knowing it would be like walking a tightrope without

　　a net, he decided to do the demonstration live.

　　More than three thousand people showed up at the event, lining up two hours

　　before curtain time. They were not disappointed, at least by the show. Jobs was

　　onstage for three hours, and he again proved to be, in the words of Andrew

　　Pollack of the New York Times, “the Andrew Lloyd Webber of product

　　introductions, a master of stage flair and special effects.” Wes Smith of the

　　Chicago Tribune said the launch was “to product demonstrations what Vatican II

　　was to church meetings.”

　　Jobs had the audience cheering from his opening line: “It’s great to be back.”

　　He began by recounting the history of personal computer architecture, and he

　　promised that they would now witness an event “that occurs only once or twice in

　　a decade—a time when a new architecture is rolled out that is going to change

　　the face of computing.” The NeXT software and hardware were designed, he said,

　　after three years of consulting with universities across the country. “What we

　　realized was that higher ed wants a personal mainframe.”

　　As usual there were superlatives. The product was “incredible,” he said, “the

　　best thing we could have imagined.” He praised the beauty of even the parts

　　unseen. Balancing on his fingertips the foot-square circuit board that would be

　　nestled in the foot-cube box, he enthused, “I hope you get a chance to look at

　　this a little later. It’s the most beautiful printed circuit board I’ve ever

　　seen in my life.” He then showed how the computer could play speeches—he

　　featured King’s “I Have a Dream” and Kennedy’s “Ask Not”—and send email with

　　audio attachments. He leaned into the microphone on the computer to record one

　　of his own. “Hi, this is Steve, sending a message on a pretty historic day.”

　　Then he asked those in the audience to add “a round of applause” to the message,

　　and they did.

　　One of Jobs’s management philosophies was that it is crucial, every now and

　　then, to roll the dice and “bet the company” on some new idea or technology. At

　　the NeXT launch, he boasted of an example that, as it turned out, would not be a

　　wise gamble: having a high-capacity (but slow) optical read/write disk and no

　　floppy disk as a backup. “Two years ago we made a decision,” he said. “We saw

　　some new technology and we made a decision to risk our company.”

　　Then he turned to a feature that would prove more prescient. “What we’ve done is

　　made the first real digital books,” he said, noting the inclusion of the Oxford

　　edition of Shakespeare and other tomes. “There has not been an advancement in

　　the state of the art of printed book technology since Gutenberg.”

　　At times he could be amusingly aware of his own foibles, and he used the

　　electronic book demonstration to poke fun at himself. “A word that’s sometimes

　　used to describe me is ‘mercurial,’” he said, then paused. The audience laughed

　　knowingly, especially those in the front rows, which were filled with NeXT

　　employees and former members of the Macintosh team. Then he pulled up the word

　　in the computer’s dictionary and read the first definition: “Of or relating to,

　　or born under the planet Mercury.” Scrolling down, he said, “I think the third

　　one is the one they mean: ‘Characterized by unpredictable changeableness of

　　mood.’” There was a bit more laughter. “If we scroll down the thesaurus, though,

　　we see that the antonym is ‘saturnine.’ Well what’s that? By simply

　　double-clicking on it, we immediately look that up in the dictionary, and here

　　it is: ‘Cold and steady in moods. Slow to act or change. Of a gloomy or surly

　　disposition.’” A little smile came across his face as he waited for the ripple

　　of laughter. “Well,” he concluded, “I don’t think ‘mercurial’ is so bad after

　　all.” After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle

　　point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis

　　Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard

　　she tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why,

　　sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

　　Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.

　　All of the good cheer served to sugarcoat, or distract attention from, the bad

　　news. When it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what

　　he would often do in product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe

　　them as being “worth thousands and thousands of dollars,” and get the audience

　　to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced what he hoped

　　would seem like a low price: “We’re going to be charging higher education a

　　single price of $6,500.” From the faithful, there was scattered applause. But

　　his panel of academic advisors had long pushed to keep the price to between

　　$2,000 and $3,000, and they thought that Jobs had promised to do so. Some of

　　them were appalled. This was especially true once they discovered that the

　　optional printer would cost another $2,000, and the slowness of the optical disk

　　would make the purchase of a $2,500 external hard disk advisable.

　　There was another disappointment that he tried to downplay: “Early next year, we

　　will have our 0.9 release, which is for software developers and aggressive end

　　users.” There was a bit of nervous laughter. What he was saying was that the

　　real release of the machine and its software, known as the 1.0 release, would

　　not actually be happening in early 1989. In fact he didn’t set a hard date. He

　　merely suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the

　　first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna

　　Hoffman’s pushback, from his commitment to have the machine finished in early

　　1987. Now it was clear it would be more than two years later.

　　The event ended on a more upbeat note, literally. Jobs brought onstage a

　　violinist from the San Francisco Symphony who played Bach’s A Minor Violin

　　Concerto in a duet with the NeXT computer onstage. People erupted in jubilant

　　applause. The price and the delayed release were forgotten in the frenzy. When

　　one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the machine was going to be so

　　late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.”

　　As would become his standard practice, Jobs offered to provide “exclusive”

　　interviews to anointed publications in return for their promising to put the

　　story on the cover. This time he went one “exclusive” too far, though it didn’t

　　really hurt. He agreed to a request from Business Week’s Katie Hafner for

　　exclusive access to him before the launch, but he also made a similar deal with

　　Newsweek and then with Fortune. What he didn’t consider was that one of

　　Fortune’s top editors, Susan Fraker, was married to Newsweek’s editor Maynard

　　Parker. At the Fortune story conference, when they were talking excitedly about

　　their exclusive, Fraker mentioned that she happened to know that Newsweek had

　　also been promised an exclusive, and it would be coming out a few days before

　　Fortune. So Jobs ended up that week on only two magazine covers. Newsweek used

　　the cover line “Mr. Chips” and showed him leaning on a beautiful NeXT, which it

　　proclaimed to be “the most exciting machine in years.” Business Week showed him

　　looking angelic in a dark suit, fingertips pressed together like a preacher or

　　professor. But Hafner pointedly reported on the manipulation that surrounded her

　　exclusive. “NeXT carefully parceled out interviews with its staff and suppliers,

　　monitoring them with a censor’s eye,” she wrote. “That strategy worked, but at a

　　price: Such maneuvering—self-serving and relentless—displayed the side of Steve

　　Jobs that so hurt him at Apple. The trait that most stands out is Jobs’s need to

　　control events.”

　　When the hype died down, the reaction to the NeXT computer was muted, especially

　　since it was not yet commercially available. Bill Joy, the brilliant and wry

　　chief scientist at rival Sun Microsystems, called it “the first Yuppie

　　workstation,” which was not an unalloyed compliment. Bill Gates, as might be

　　expected, continued to be publicly dismissive. “Frankly, I’m disappointed,” he

　　told the Wall Street Journal. “Back in 1981, we were truly excited by the

　　Macintosh when Steve showed it to us, because when you put it side-by-side with

　　another computer, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen before.” The NeXT

　　machine was not like that. “In the grand scope of things, most of these features

　　are truly trivial.” He said that Microsoft would continue its plans not to write

　　software for the NeXT. Right after the announcement event, Gates wrote a parody

　　email to his staff. “All reality has been completely suspended,” it began.

　　Looking back at it, Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I ever

　　wrote.”

　　When the NeXT computer finally went on sale in mid-1989, the factory was primed

　　to churn out ten thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were about four

　　hundred a month. The beautiful factory robots, so nicely painted, remained

　　mostly idle, and NeXT continued to hemorrhage cash.UnknownPIXAR

　　Technology Meets Art

　　Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lasseter, 1999

　　Lucasfilm’s Computer Division

　　When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a

　　walk with Alan Kay, who had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple Fellow. Kay

　　knew that Jobs was interested in the intersection of creativity and technology,

　　so he suggested they go see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who was running the

　　computer division of George Lucas’s film studio. They rented a limo and rode up

　　to Marin County to the edge of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where Catmull and his

　　little computer division were based. “I was blown away, and I came back and

　　tried to convince Sculley to buy it for Apple,” Jobs recalled. “But the folks

　　running Apple weren’t interested, and they were busy kicking me out anyway.”

　　The Lucasfilm computer division made hardware and software for rendering digital

　　images, and it also had a group of computer animators making shorts, which was

　　led by a talented cartoon-loving executive named John Lasseter. Lucas, who had

　　completed his first Star Wars trilogy, was embroiled in a contentious divorce,

　　and he needed to sell off the division. He told Catmull to find a buyer as soon

　　as possible.

　　After a few potential purchasers balked in the fall of 1985, Catmull and his

　　colleague Alvy Ray Smith decided to seek investors so that they could buy the

　　division themselves. So they called Jobs, arranged another meeting, and drove

　　down to his Woodside house. After railing for a while about the perfidies and

　　idiocies of Sculley, Jobs proposed that he buy their Lucasfilm division

　　outright. Catmull and Smith demurred: They wanted an investor, not a new owner.

　　But it soon became clear that there was a middle ground: Jobs could buy a

　　majority of the division and serve as chairman but allow Catmull and Smith to

　　run it.

　　“I wanted to buy it because I was really into computer graphics,” Jobs recalled.

　　“I realized they were way ahead of others in combining art and technology, which

　　is what I’ve always been interested in.” He offered to pay Lucas $5 million plus

　　invest another $5 million to capitalize the division as a stand-alone company.

　　That was far less than Lucas had been asking, but the timing was right. They

　　decided to negotiate a deal.

　　The chief financial officer at Lucasfilm found Jobs arrogant and prickly, so

　　when it came time to hold a meeting of all the players, he told Catmull, “We

　　have to establish the right pecking order.” The plan was to gather everyone in a

　　room with Jobs, and then the CFO would come in a few minutes late to establish

　　that he was the person running the meeting. “But a funny thing happened,”

　　Catmull recalled. “Steve started the meeting on time without the CFO, and by the

　　time the CFO walked in Steve was already in control of the meeting.”

　　Jobs met only once with George Lucas, who warned him that the people in the

　　division cared more about making animated movies than they did about making

　　computers. “You know, these guys are hell-bent on animation,” Lucas told him.

　　Lucas later recalled, “I did warn him that was basically Ed and John’s agenda. I

　　think in his heart he bought the company because that was his agenda too.”

　　The final agreement was reached in January 1986. It provided that, for his $10

　　million investment, Jobs would own 70% of the company, with the rest of the

　　stock distributed to Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and the thirty-eight other

　　founding employees, down to the receptionist. The division’s most important

　　piece of hardware was called the Pixar Image Computer, and from it the new

　　company took its name.

　　For a while Jobs let Catmull and Smith run Pixar without much interference.

　　Every month or so they would gather for a board meeting, usually at NeXT

　　headquarters, where Jobs would focus on the finances and strategy. Nevertheless,

　　by dint of his personality and controlling instincts, Jobs was soon playing a

　　stronger role. He spewed out a stream of ideas—some reasonable, others

　　wacky—about what Pixar’s hardware and software could become. And on his

　　occasional visits to the Pixar offices, he was an inspiring presence. “I grew up

　　a Southern Baptist, and we had revival meetings with mesmerizing but corrupt

　　preachers,” recounted Alvy Ray Smith. “Steve’s got it: the power of the tongue

　　and the web of words that catches people up. We were aware of this when we had

　　board meetings, so we developed signals—nose scratching or ear tugs—for when

　　someone had been caught up in Steve’s distortion field and he needed to be

　　tugged back to reality.”

　　Jobs had always appreciated the virtue of integrating hardware and software,

　　which is what Pixar did with its Image Computer and rendering software. It also

　　produced creative content, such as animated films and graphics. All three

　　elements benefited from Jobs’s combination of artistic creativity and

　　technological geekiness. “Silicon Valley folks don’t really respect Hollywood

　　creative types, and the Hollywood folks think that tech folks are people you

　　hire and never have to meet,” Jobs later said. “Pixar was one place where both

　　cultures were respected.”

　　Initially the revenue was supposed to come from the hardware side. The Pixar

　　Image Computer sold for $125,000. The primary customers were animators and

　　graphic designers, but the machine also soon found specialized markets in the

　　medical industry (CAT scan data could be rendered in three-dimensional graphics)

　　and intelligence fields (for rendering information from reconnaissance flights

　　and satellites). Because of the sales to the National Security Agency, Jobs had

　　to get a security clearance, which must have been fun for the FBI agent assigned

　　to vet him. At one point, a Pixar executive recalled, Jobs was called by the

　　investigator to go over the drug use questions, which he answered unabashedly.

　　“The last time I used that . . . ,” he would say, or on occasion he would answer

　　that no, he had actually never tried that particular drug.

　　Jobs pushed Pixar to build a lower-cost version of the computer that would sell

　　for around $30,000. He insisted that Hartmut Esslinger design it, despite

　　protests by Catmull and Smith about his fees. It ended up looking like the

　　original Pixar Image Computer, which was a cube with a round dimple in the

　　middle, but it had Esslinger’s signature thin grooves.

　　Jobs wanted to sell Pixar’s computers to a mass market, so he had the Pixar

　　folks open up sales offices—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on

　　the theory that creative people would soon come up with all sorts of ways to use

　　the machine. “My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out

　　clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined,” he later said.

　　“I thought that would happen with the Pixar computer, just as it did with the

　　Mac.” But the machine never took hold with regular consumers. It cost too much,

　　and there were not many software programs for it.

　　On the software side, Pixar had a rendering program, known as Reyes (Renders

　　everything you ever saw), for making 3-D graphics and images. After Jobs became

　　chairman, the company created a new language and interface, named RenderMan,

　　that it hoped would become a standard for 3-D graphics rendering, just as

　　Adobe’s PostScript was for laser printing.

　　As he had with the hardware, Jobs decided that they should try to find a mass

　　market, rather than just a specialized one, for the software they made. He was

　　never content to aim only at the corporate or high-end specialized markets. “He

　　would have these great visions of how RenderMan could be for everyman,” recalled

　　Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s marketing director. “He kept coming up with ideas about how

　　ordinary people would use it to make amazing 3-D graphics and photorealistic

　　images.” The Pixar team would try to dissuade him by saying that RenderMan was

　　not as easy to use as, say, Excel or Adobe Illustrator. Then Jobs would go to a

　　whiteboard and show them how to make it simpler and more user-friendly. “We

　　would be nodding our heads and getting excited and say, ‘Yes, yes, this will be

　　great!’” Kerwin recalled. “And then he would leave and we would consider it for

　　a moment and then say, ‘What the heck was he thinking!’ He was so weirdly

　　charismatic that you almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him.” As

　　it turned out, average consumers were not craving expensive software that would

　　let them render realistic images. RenderMan didn’t take off.

　　There was, however, one company that was eager to automate the rendering of

　　animators’ drawings into color images for film. When Roy Disney led a board

　　revolution at the company that his uncle Walt had founded, the new CEO, Michael

　　Eisner, asked what role he wanted. Disney said that he would like to revive the

　　company’s venerable but fading animation department. One of his first

　　initiatives was to look at ways to computerize the process, and Pixar won the

　　contract. It created a package of customized hardware and software known as

　　CAPS, Computer Animation Production System. It was first used in 1988 for the

　　final scene of The Little Mermaid, in which King Triton waves good-bye to Ariel.

　　Disney bought dozens of Pixar Image Computers as CAPS became an integral part of

　　its production.

　　Animation

　　The digital animation business at Pixar—the group that made little animated

　　films—was originally just a sideline, its main purpose being to show off the

　　hardware and software of the company. It was run by John Lasseter, a man whose

　　childlike face and demeanor masked an artistic perfectionism that rivaled that

　　of Jobs. Born in Hollywood, Lasseter grew up loving Saturday morning cartoon

　　shows. In ninth grade, he wrote a report on the history of Disney Studios, and

　　he decided then how he wished to spend his life.

　　When he graduated from high school, Lasseter enrolled in the animation program

　　at the California Institute of the Arts, founded by Walt Disney. In his summers

　　and spare time, he researched the Disney archives and worked as a guide on the

　　Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. The latter experience taught him the value of

　　timing and pacing in telling a story, an important but difficult concept to

　　master when creating, frame by frame, animated footage. He won the Student

　　Academy Award for the short he made in his junior year, Lady and the Lamp, which

　　showed his debt to Disney films and foreshadowed his signature talent for

　　infusing inanimate objects such as lamps with human personalities. After

　　graduation he took the job for which he was destined: as an animator at Disney

　　Studios.

　　Except it didn’t work out. “Some of us younger guys wanted to bring Star

　　Wars–level quality to the art of animation, but we were held in check,” Lasseter

　　recalled. “I got disillusioned, then I got caught in a feud between two bosses,

　　and the head animation guy fired me.” So in 1984 Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith

　　were able to recruit him to work where Star Wars–level quality was being

　　defined, Lucasfilm. It was not certain that George Lucas, already worried about

　　the cost of his computer division, would really approve of hiring a full-time

　　animator, so Lasseter was given the title “interface designer.”

　　After Jobs came onto the scene, he and Lasseter began to share their passion for

　　graphic design. “I was the only guy at Pixar who was an artist, so I bonded with

　　Steve over his design sense,” Lasseter said. He was a gregarious, playful, and

　　huggable man who wore flowery Hawaiian shirts, kept his office cluttered with

　　vintage toys, and loved cheeseburgers. Jobs was a prickly, whip-thin vegetarian

　　who favored austere and uncluttered surroundings. But they were actually

　　well-suited for each other. Lasseter was an artist, so Jobs treated him

　　deferentially, and Lasseter viewed Jobs, correctly, as a patron who could

　　appreciate artistry and knew how it could be interwoven with technology and

　　commerce.

　　Jobs and Catmull decided that, in order to show off their hardware and software,

　　Lasseter should produce another short animated film in 1986 for SIGGRAPH, the

　　annual computer graphics conference. At the time, Lasseter was using the Luxo

　　lamp on his desk as a model for graphic rendering, and he decided to turn Luxo

　　into a lifelike character. A friend’s young child inspired him to add Luxo Jr.,

　　and he showed a few test frames to another animator, who urged him to make sure

　　he told a story. Lasseter said he was making only a short, but the animator

　　reminded him that a story can be told even in a few seconds. Lasseter took the

　　lesson to heart. Luxo Jr. ended up being just over two minutes; it told the tale

　　of a parent lamp and a child lamp pushing a ball back and forth until the ball

　　bursts, to the child’s dismay.

　　Jobs was so excited that he took time off from the pressures at NeXT to fly down

　　with Lasseter to SIGGRAPH, which was being held in Dallas that August. “It was

　　so hot and muggy that when we’d walk outside the air hit us like a tennis

　　racket,” Lasseter recalled. There were ten thousand people at the trade show,

　　and Jobs loved it. Artistic creativity energized him, especially when it was

　　connected to technology.

　　There was a long line to get into the auditorium where the films were being

　　screened, so Jobs, not one to wait his turn, fast-talked their way in first.

　　Luxo Jr. got a prolonged standing ovation and was named the best film. “Oh,

　　wow!” Jobs exclaimed at the end. “I really get this, I get what it’s all about.”

　　As he later explained, “Our film was the only one that had art to it, not just

　　good technology. Pixar was about making that combination, just as the Macintosh

　　had been.”

　　Luxo Jr. was nominated for an Academy Award, and Jobs flew down to Los Angeles

　　to be there for the ceremony. It didn’t win, but Jobs became committed to making

　　new animated shorts each year, even though there was not much of a business

　　rationale for doing so. As times got tough at Pixar, he would sit through brutal

　　budget-cutting meetings showing no mercy. Then Lasseter would ask that the money

　　they had just saved be used for his next film, and Jobs would agree.

　　Tin Toy

　　Not all of Jobs’s relationships at Pixar were as good. His worst clash came with

　　Catmull’s cofounder, Alvy Ray Smith. From a Baptist background in rural north

　　Texas, Smith became a free-spirited hippie computer imaging engineer with a big

　　build, big laugh, and big personality—and occasionally an ego to match. “Alvy

　　just glows, with a high color, friendly laugh, and a whole bunch of groupies at

　　conferences,” said Pam Kerwin. “A personality like Alvy’s was likely to ruffle

　　Steve. They are both visionaries and high energy and high ego. Alvy is not as

　　willing to make peace and overlook things as Ed was.”

　　Smith saw Jobs as someone whose charisma and ego led him to abuse power. “He was

　　like a televangelist,” Smith said. “He wanted to control people, but I would not

　　be a slave to him, which is why we clashed. Ed was much more able to go with the

　　flow.” Jobs would sometimes assert his dominance at a meeting by saying

　　something outrageous or untrue. Smith took great joy in calling him on it, and

　　he would do so with a large laugh and a smirk. This did not endear him to Jobs.

　　One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar

　　executives for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new

　　version of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in

　　completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re

　　even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic,

　　or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith was feeling attacked or

　　confrontational, he tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs started

　　parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was a bully tactic, and I exploded with

　　everything I had,” Smith recalled. “Before I knew it, we were in each other’s

　　faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each other.”

　　Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so

　　the burly Smith pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!”

　　Jobs shouted.

　　“What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that

　　point Jobs stormed out.

　　Smith eventually resigned to form a new company to make software for digital

　　drawing and image editing. Jobs refused him permission to use some code he had

　　created while at Pixar, which further inflamed their enmity. “Alvy eventually

　　got what he needed,” said Catmull, “but he was very stressed for a year and

　　developed a lung infection.” In the end it worked out well enough; Microsoft

　　eventually bought Smith’s company, giving him the distinction of being a founder

　　of one company that was sold to Jobs and another that was sold to Gates.

　　Ornery in the best of times, Jobs became particularly so when it became clear

　　that all three Pixar endeavors—hardware, software, and animated content—were

　　losing money. “I’d get these plans, and in the end I kept having to put in more

　　money,” he recalled. He would rail, but then write the check. Having been ousted

　　at Apple and flailing at NeXT, he couldn’t afford a third strike.

　　To stem the losses, he ordered a round of deep layoffs, which he executed with

　　his typical empathy deficiency. As Pam Kerwin put it, he had “neither the

　　emotional nor financial runway to be decent to people he was letting go.” Jobs

　　insisted that the firings be done immediately, with no severance pay. Kerwin

　　took Jobs on a walk around the parking lot and begged that the employees be

　　given at least two weeks notice. “Okay,” he shot back, “but the notice is

　　retroactive from two weeks ago.” Catmull was in Moscow, and Kerwin put in

　　frantic calls to him. When he returned, he was able to institute a meager

　　severance plan and calm things down just a bit.

　　At one point the members of the Pixar animation team were trying to convince

　　Intel to let them make some of its commercials, and Jobs became impatient.

　　During a meeting, in the midst of berating an Intel marketing director, he

　　picked up the phone and called CEO Andy Grove directly. Grove, still playing

　　mentor, tried to teach Jobs a lesson: He supported his Intel manager. “I stuck

　　by my employee,” he recalled. “Steve doesn’t like to be treated like a

　　supplier.”

　　Grove also played mentor when Jobs proposed that Pixar give Intel suggestions on

　　how to improve the capacity of its processors to render 3-D graphics. When the

　　engineers at Intel accepted the offer, Jobs sent an email back saying Pixar

　　would need to be paid for its advice. Intel’s chief engineer replied, “We have

　　not entered into any financial arrangement in exchange for good ideas for our

　　microprocessors in the past and have no intention for the future.” Jobs

　　forwarded the answer to Grove, saying that he found the engineer’s response to

　　be “extremely arrogant, given Intel’s dismal showing in understanding computer

　　graphics.” Grove sent Jobs a blistering reply, saying that sharing ideas is

　　“what friendly companies and friends do for each other.” Grove added that he had

　　often freely shared ideas with Jobs in the past and that Jobs should not be so

　　mercenary. Jobs relented. “I have many faults, but one of them is not

　　ingratitude,” he responded. “Therefore, I have changed my position 180

　　degrees—we will freely help. Thanks for the clearer perspective.”

　　Pixar was able to create some powerful software products aimed at average

　　consumers, or at least those average consumers who shared Jobs’s passion for

　　designing things. Jobs still hoped that the ability to make super-realistic 3-D

　　images at home would become part of the desktop publishing craze. Pixar’s

　　Showplace, for example, allowed users to change the shadings on the 3-D objects

　　they created so that they could display them from various angles with

　　appropriate shadows. Jobs thought it was incredibly compelling, but most

　　consumers were content to live without it. It was a case where his passions

　　misled him: The software had so many amazing features that it lacked the

　　simplicity Jobs usually demanded. Pixar couldn’t compete with Adobe, which was

　　making software that was less sophisticated but far less complicated and

　　expensive.

　　Even as Pixar’s hardware and software product lines foundered, Jobs kept

　　protecting the animation group. It had become for him a little island of magical

　　artistry that gave him deep emotional pleasure, and he was willing to nurture it

　　and bet on it. In the spring of 1988 cash was running so short that he convened

　　a meeting to decree deep spending cuts across the board. When it was over,

　　Lasseter and his animation group were almost too afraid to ask Jobs about

　　authorizing some extra money for another short. Finally, they broached the topic

　　and Jobs sat silent, looking skeptical. It would require close to $300,000 more

　　out of his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked if there were any storyboards.

　　Catmull took him down to the animation offices, and once Lasseter started his

　　show—displaying his boards, doing the voices, showing his passion for his

　　product—Jobs started to warm up.

　　The story was about Lasseter’s love, classic toys. It was told from the

　　perspective of a toy one-man band named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and

　　terrorizes him. Escaping under the couch, Tinny finds other frightened toys, but

　　when the baby hits his head and cries, Tinny goes back out to cheer him up.

　　Jobs said he would provide the money. “I believed in what John was doing,” he

　　later said. “It was art. He cared, and I cared. I always said yes.” His only

　　comment at the end of Lasseter’s presentation was, “All I ask of you, John, is

　　to make it great.”

　　Tin Toy went on to win the 1988 Academy Award for animated short films, the

　　first computer-generated film to do so. To celebrate, Jobs took Lasseter and his

　　team to Greens, a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. Lasseter grabbed the

　　Oscar, which was in the center of the table, held it aloft, and toasted Jobs by

　　saying, “All you asked is that we make a great movie.”

　　The new team at Disney—Michael Eisner the CEO and Jeffrey Katzenberg in the film

　　division—began a quest to get Lasseter to come back. They liked Tin Toy, and

　　they thought that something more could be done with animated stories of toys

　　that come alive and have human emotions. But Lasseter, grateful for Jobs’s faith

　　in him, felt that Pixar was the only place where he could create a new world of

　　computer-generated animation. He told Catmull, “I can go to Disney and be a

　　director, or I can stay here and make history.” So Disney began talking about

　　making a production deal with Pixar. “Lasseter’s shorts were really breathtaking

　　both in storytelling and in the use of technology,” recalled Katzenberg. “I

　　tried so hard to get him to Disney, but he was loyal to Steve and Pixar. So if

　　you can’t beat them, join them. We decided to look for ways we could join up

　　with Pixar and have them make a film about toys for us.”

　　By this point Jobs had poured close to $50 million of his own money into

　　Pixar—more than half of what he had pocketed when he cashed out of Apple—and he

　　was still losing money at NeXT. He was hard-nosed about it; he forced all Pixar

　　employees to give up their options as part of his agreement to add another round

　　of personal funding in 1991. But he was also a romantic in his love for what

　　artistry and technology could do together. His belief that ordinary consumers

　　would love to do 3-D modeling on Pixar software turned out to be wrong, but that

　　was soon replaced by an instinct that turned out to be right: that combining

　　great art and digital technology would transform animated films more than

　　anything had since 1937, when Walt Disney had given life to Snow White.

　　Looking back, Jobs said that, had he known more, he would have focused on

　　animation sooner and not worried about pushing the company’s hardware or

　　software applications. On the other hand, had he known the hardware and software

　　would never be profitable, he would not have taken over Pixar. “Life kind of

　　snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better.”UnknownA REGULAR GUY

　　Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

　　Mona Simpson and her fiancé, Richard Appel, 1991

　　Joan Baez

　　In 1982, when he was still working on the Macintosh, Jobs met the famed

　　folksinger Joan Baez through her sister Mimi Fariña, who headed a charity that

　　was trying to get donations of computers for prisons. A few weeks later he and

　　Baez had lunch in Cupertino. “I wasn’t expecting a lot, but she was really smart

　　and funny,” he recalled. At the time, he was nearing the end of his relationship

　　with Barbara Jasinski. They had vacationed in Hawaii, shared a house in the

　　Santa Cruz mountains, and even gone to one of Baez’s concerts together. As his

　　relationship with Jasinski flamed out, Jobs began getting more serious with

　　Baez. He was twenty-seven and Baez was forty-one, but for a few years they had a

　　romance. “It turned into a serious relationship between two accidental friends

　　who became lovers,” Jobs recalled in a somewhat wistful tone.

　　Elizabeth Holmes, Jobs’s friend from Reed College, believed that one of the

　　reasons he went out with Baez—other than the fact that she was beautiful and

　　funny and talented—was that she had once been the lover of Bob Dylan. “Steve

　　loved that connection to Dylan,” she later said. Baez and Dylan had been lovers

　　in the early 1960s, and they toured as friends after that, including with the

　　Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. (Jobs had the bootlegs of those concerts.)

　　When she met Jobs, Baez had a fourteen-year-old son, Gabriel, from her marriage

　　to the antiwar activist David Harris. At lunch she told Jobs she was trying to

　　teach Gabe how to type. “You mean on a typewriter?” Jobs asked. When she said

　　yes, he replied, “But a typewriter is antiquated.”

　　“If a typewriter is antiquated, what does that make me?” she asked. There was an

　　awkward pause. As Baez later told me, “As soon as I said it, I realized the

　　answer was so obvious. The question just hung in the air. I was just horrified.”

　　Much to the astonishment of the Macintosh team, Jobs burst into the office one

　　day with Baez and showed her the prototype of the Macintosh. They were

　　dumbfounded that he would reveal the computer to an outsider, given his

　　obsession with secrecy, but they were even more blown away to be in the presence

　　of Joan Baez. He gave Gabe an Apple II, and he later gave Baez a Macintosh. On

　　visits Jobs would show off the features he liked. “He was sweet and patient, but

　　he was so advanced in his knowledge that he had trouble teaching me,” she

　　recalled.

　　He was a sudden multimillionaire; she was a world-famous celebrity, but sweetly

　　down-to-earth and not all that wealthy. She didn’t know what to make of him

　　then, and still found him puzzling when she talked about him almost thirty years

　　later. At one dinner early in their relationship, Jobs started talking about

　　Ralph Lauren and his Polo Shop, which she admitted she had never visited.

　　“There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you,” he said,

　　and then drove her to the store in the Stanford Mall. Baez recalled, “I said to

　　myself, far out, terrific, I’m with one of the world’s richest men and he wants

　　me to have this beautiful dress.” When they got to the store, Jobs bought a

　　handful of shirts for himself and showed her the red dress. “You ought to buy

　　it,” he said. She was a little surprised, and told him she couldn’t really

　　afford it. He said nothing, and they left. “Wouldn’t you think if someone had

　　talked like that the whole evening, that they were going to get it for you?” she

　　asked me, seeming genuinely puzzled about the incident. “The mystery of the red

　　dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.” He would give her

　　computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he made sure to say

　　they were left over from an event in the office. “He was both romantic and

　　afraid to be romantic,” she said.

　　When he was working on the NeXT computer, he went to Baez’s house in Woodside to

　　show her how well it could produce music. “He had it play a Brahms quartet, and

　　he told me eventually computers would sound better than humans playing it, even

　　get the innuendo and the cadences better,” Baez recalled. She was revolted by

　　the idea. “He was working himself up into a fervor of delight while I was

　　shrinking into a rage and thinking, How could you defile music like that?”

　　Jobs would confide in Debi Coleman and Joanna Hoffman about his relationship

　　with Baez and worry about whether he could marry someone who had a teenage son

　　and was probably past the point of wanting to have more children. “At times he

　　would belittle her as being an ‘issues’ singer and not a true ‘political’ singer

　　like Dylan,” said Hoffman. “She was a strong woman, and he wanted to show he was

　　in control. Plus, he always said he wanted to have a family, and with her he

　　knew that he wouldn’t.”

　　And so, after about three years, they ended their romance and drifted into

　　becoming just friends. “I thought I was in love with her, but I really just

　　liked her a lot,” he later said. “We weren’t destined to be together. I wanted

　　kids, and she didn’t want any more.” In her 1989 memoir, Baez wrote about her

　　breakup with her husband and why she never remarried: “I belonged alone, which

　　is how I have been since then, with occasional interruptions that are mostly

　　picnics.” She did add a nice acknowledgment at the end of the book to “Steve

　　Jobs for forcing me to use a word processor by putting one in my kitchen.”

　　Finding Joanne and Mona

　　When Jobs was thirty-one, a year after his ouster from Apple, his mother Clara,

　　who was a smoker, was stricken with lung cancer. He spent time by her deathbed,

　　talking to her in ways he had rarely done in the past and asking some questions

　　he had refrained from raising before. “When you and Dad got married, were you a

　　virgin?” he asked. It was hard for her to talk, but she forced a smile. That’s

　　when she told him that she had been married before, to a man who never made it

　　back from the war. She also filled in some of the details of how she and Paul

　　Jobs had come to adopt him.

　　Soon after that, Jobs succeeded in tracking down the woman who had put him up

　　for adoption. His quiet quest to find her had begun in the early 1980s, when he

　　hired a detective who had failed to come up with anything. Then Jobs noticed the

　　name of a San Francisco doctor on his birth certificate. “He was in the phone

　　book, so I gave him a call,” Jobs recalled. The doctor was no help. He claimed

　　that his records had been destroyed in a fire. That was not true. In fact, right

　　after Jobs called, the doctor wrote a letter, sealed it in an envelope, and

　　wrote on it, “To be delivered to Steve Jobs on my death.” When he died a short

　　time later, his widow sent the letter to Jobs. In it, the doctor explained that

　　his mother had been an unmarried graduate student from Wisconsin named Joanne

　　Schieble.

　　It took another few weeks and the work of another detective to track her down.

　　After giving him up, Joanne had married his biological father, Abdulfattah

　　“John” Jandali, and they had another child, Mona. Jandali abandoned them five

　　years later, and Joanne married a colorful ice-skating instructor, George

　　Simpson. That marriage didn’t last long either, and in 1970 she began a

　　meandering journey that took her and Mona (both of them now using the last name

　　Simpson) to Los Angeles.

　　Jobs had been reluctant to let Paul and Clara, whom he considered his real

　　parents, know about his search for his birth mother. With a sensitivity that was

　　unusual for him, and which showed the deep affection he felt for his parents, he

　　worried that they might be offended. So he never contacted Joanne Simpson until

　　after Clara Jobs died in early 1986. “I never wanted them to feel like I didn’t

　　consider them my parents, because they were totally my parents,” he recalled. “I

　　loved them so much that I never wanted them to know of my search, and I even had

　　reporters keep it quiet when any of them found out.” When Clara died, he decided

　　to tell Paul Jobs, who was perfectly comfortable and said he didn’t mind at all

　　if Steve made contact with his biological mother.

　　So one day Jobs called Joanne Simpson, said who he was, and arranged to come

　　down to Los Angeles to meet her. He later claimed it was mainly out of

　　curiosity. “I believe in environment more than heredity in determining your

　　traits, but still you have to wonder a little about your biological roots,” he

　　said. He also wanted to reassure Joanne that what she had done was all right. “I

　　wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank

　　her, because I’m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and

　　she went through a lot to have me.”

　　Joanne was overcome with emotion when Jobs arrived at her Los Angeles house. She

　　knew he was famous and rich, but she wasn’t exactly sure why. She immediately

　　began to pour out her emotions. She had been pressured to sign the papers

　　putting him up for adoption, she said, and did so only when told that he was

　　happy in the house of his new parents. She had always missed him and suffered

　　about what she had done. She apologized over and over, even as Jobs kept

　　reassuring her that he understood, and that things had turned out just fine.

　　Once she calmed down, she told Jobs that he had a full sister, Mona Simpson, who

　　was then an aspiring novelist in Manhattan. She had never told Mona that she had

　　a brother, and that day she broke the news, or at least part of it, by

　　telephone. “You have a brother, and he’s wonderful, and he’s famous, and I’m

　　going to bring him to New York so you can meet him,” she said. Mona was in the

　　throes of finishing a novel about her mother and their peregrination from

　　Wisconsin to Los Angeles, Anywhere but Here. Those who’ve read it will not be

　　surprised that Joanne was somewhat quirky in the way she imparted to Mona the

　　news about her brother. She refused to say who he was—only that he had been

　　poor, had gotten rich, was good-looking and famous, had long dark hair, and

　　lived in California. Mona then worked at the Paris Review, George Plimpton’s

　　literary journal housed on the ground floor of his townhouse near Manhattan’s

　　East River. She and her coworkers began a guessing game on who her brother might

　　be. John Travolta? That was one of the favorite guesses. Other actors were also

　　hot prospects. At one point someone did toss out a guess that “maybe it’s one of

　　those guys who started Apple computer,” but no one could recall their names.

　　The meeting occurred in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel. “He was totally

　　straightforward and lovely, just a normal and sweet guy,” Mona recalled. They

　　all sat and talked for a few minutes, then he took his sister for a long walk,

　　just the two of them. Jobs was thrilled to find that he had a sibling who was so

　　similar to him. They were both intense in their artistry, observant of their

　　surroundings, and sensitive yet strong-willed. When they went to dinner

　　together, they noticed the same architectural details and talked about them

　　excitedly afterward. “My sister’s a writer!” he exulted to colleagues at Apple

　　when he found out.

　　When Plimpton threw a party for Anywhere but Here in late 1986, Jobs flew to New

　　York to accompany Mona to it. They grew increasingly close, though their

　　friendship had the complexities that might be expected, considering who they

　　were and how they had come together. “Mona was not completely thrilled at first

　　to have me in her life and have her mother so emotionally affectionate toward

　　me,” he later said. “As we got to know each other, we became really good

　　friends, and she is my family. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I can’t

　　imagine a better sister. My adopted sister, Patty, and I were never close.” Mona

　　likewise developed a deep affection for him, and at times could be very

　　protective, although she would later write an edgy novel about him, A Regular

　　Guy, that described his quirks with discomforting accuracy.

　　One of the few things they would argue about was her clothes. She dressed like a

　　struggling novelist, and he would berate her for not wearing clothes that were

　　“fetching enough.” At one point his comments so annoyed her that she wrote him a

　　letter: “I am a young writer, and this is my life, and I’m not trying to be a

　　model anyway.” He didn’t answer. But shortly after, a box arrived from the store

　　of Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer whose stark and

　　technology-influenced style made him one of Jobs’s favorites. “He’d gone

　　shopping for me,” she later said, “and he’d picked out great things, exactly my

　　size, in flattering colors.” There was one pantsuit that he had particularly

　　liked, and the shipment included three of them, all identical. “I still remember

　　those first suits I sent Mona,” he said. “They were linen pants and tops in a

　　pale grayish green that looked beautiful with her reddish hair.”

　　The Lost Father

　　In the meantime, Mona Simpson had been trying to track down their father, who

　　had wandered off when she was five. Through Ken Auletta and Nick Pileggi,

　　prominent Manhattan writers, she was introduced to a retired New York cop who

　　had formed his own detective agency. “I paid him what little money I had,”

　　Simpson recalled, but the search was unsuccessful. Then she met another private

　　eye in California, who was able to find an address for Abdulfattah Jandali in

　　Sacramento through a Department of Motor Vehicles search. Simpson told her

　　brother and flew out from New York to see the man who was apparently their

　　father.

　　Jobs had no interest in meeting him. “He didn’t treat me well,” he later

　　explained. “I don’t hold anything against him—I’m happy to be alive. But what

　　bothers me most is that he didn’t treat Mona well. He abandoned her.” Jobs

　　himself had abandoned his own illegitimate daughter, Lisa, and now was trying to

　　restore their relationship, but that complexity did not soften his feelings

　　toward Jandali. Simpson went to Sacramento alone.

　　“It was very intense,” Simpson recalled. She found her father working in a small

　　restaurant. He seemed happy to see her, yet oddly passive about the entire

　　situation. They talked for a few hours, and he recounted that, after he left

　　Wisconsin, he had drifted away from teaching and gotten into the restaurant

　　business.

　　Jobs had asked Simpson not to mention him, so she didn’t. But at one point her

　　father casually remarked that he and her mother had had another baby, a boy,

　　before she had been born. “What happened to him?” she asked. He replied, “We’ll

　　never see that baby again. That baby’s gone.” Simpson recoiled but said nothing.

　　An even more astonishing revelation occurred when Jandali was describing the

　　previous restaurants that he had run. There had been some nice ones, he

　　insisted, fancier than the Sacramento joint they were then sitting in. He told

　　her, somewhat emotionally, that he wished she could have seen him when he was

　　managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose. “That was a wonderful

　　place,” he said. “All of the successful technology people used to come there.

　　Even Steve Jobs.” Simpson was stunned. “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was

　　a sweet guy, and a big tipper,” her father added. Mona was able to refrain from

　　blurting out, Steve Jobs is your son!

　　When the visit was over, she called Jobs surreptitiously from the pay phone at

　　the restaurant and arranged to meet him at the Espresso Roma café in Berkeley.

　　Adding to the personal and family drama, he brought along Lisa, now in grade

　　school, who lived with her mother, Chrisann. When they all arrived at the café,

　　it was close to 10 p.m., and Simpson poured forth the tale. Jobs was

　　understandably astonished when she mentioned the restaurant near San Jose. He

　　could recall being there and even meeting the man who was his biological father.

　　“It was amazing,” he later said of the revelation. “I had been to that

　　restaurant a few times, and I remember meeting the owner. He was Syrian.

　　Balding. We shook hands.”

　　Nevertheless Jobs still had no desire to see him. “I was a wealthy man by then,

　　and I didn’t trust him not to try to blackmail me or go to the press about it,”

　　he recalled. “I asked Mona not to tell him about me.”

　　She never did, but years later Jandali saw his relationship to Jobs mentioned

　　online. (A blogger noticed that Simpson had listed Jandali as her father in a

　　reference book and figured out he must be Jobs’s father as well.) By then

　　Jandali was married for a fourth time and working as a food and beverage manager

　　at the Boomtown Resort and Casino just west of Reno, Nevada. When he brought his

　　new wife, Roscille, to visit Simpson in 2006, he raised the topic. “What is this

　　thing about Steve Jobs?” he asked. She confirmed the story, but added that she

　　thought Jobs had no interest in meeting him. Jandali seemed to accept that. “My

　　father is thoughtful and a beautiful storyteller, but he is very, very passive,”

　　Simpson said. “He never contacted Steve.”

　　Simpson turned her search for Jandali into a basis for her second novel, The

　　Lost Father, published in 1992. (Jobs convinced Paul Rand, the designer who did

　　the NeXT logo, to design the cover, but according to Simpson, “It was God-awful

　　and we never used it.”) She also tracked down various members of the Jandali

　　family, in Homs and in America, and in 2011 was writing a novel about her Syrian

　　roots. The Syrian ambassador in Washington threw a dinner for her that included

　　a cousin and his wife who then lived in Florida and had flown up for the

　　occasion.

　　Simpson assumed that Jobs would eventually meet Jandali, but as time went on he

　　showed even less interest. In 2010, when Jobs and his son, Reed, went to a

　　birthday dinner for Simpson at her Los Angeles house, Reed spent some time

　　looking at pictures of his biological grandfather, but Jobs ignored them. Nor

　　did he seem to care about his Syrian heritage. When the Middle East would come

　　up in conversation, the topic did not engage him or evoke his typical strong

　　opinions, even after Syria was swept up in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. “I

　　don’t think anybody really knows what we should be doing over there,” he said

　　when I asked whether the Obama administration should be intervening more in

　　Egypt, Libya, and Syria. “You’re fucked if you do and you’re fucked if you

　　don’t.”

　　Jobs did retain a friendly relationship with his biological mother, Joanne

　　Simpson. Over the years she and Mona would often spend Christmas at Jobs’s

　　house. The visits could be sweet, but also emotionally draining. Joanne would

　　sometimes break into tears, say how much she had loved him, and apologize for

　　giving him up. It turned out all right, Jobs would reassure her. As he told her

　　one Christmas, “Don’t worry. I had a great childhood. I turned out okay.”

　　Lisa

　　Lisa Brennan, however, did not have a great childhood. When she was young, her

　　father almost never came to see her. “I didn’t want to be a father, so I

　　wasn’t,” Jobs later said, with only a touch of remorse in his voice. Yet

　　occasionally he felt the tug. One day, when Lisa was three, Jobs was driving

　　near the house he had bought for her and Chrisann, and he decided to stop. Lisa

　　didn’t know who he was. He sat on the doorstep, not venturing inside, and talked

　　to Chrisann. The scene was repeated once or twice a year. Jobs would come by

　　unannounced, talk a little bit about Lisa’s school options or other issues, then

　　drive off in his Mercedes.

　　But by the time Lisa turned eight, in 1986, the visits were occurring more

　　frequently. Jobs was no longer immersed in the grueling push to create the

　　Macintosh or in the subsequent power struggles with Sculley. He was at NeXT,

　　which was calmer, friendlier, and headquartered in Palo Alto, near where

　　Chrisann and Lisa lived. In addition, by the time she was in third grade, it was

　　clear that Lisa was a smart and artistic kid, who had already been singled out

　　by her teachers for her writing ability. She was spunky and high-spirited and

　　had a little of her father’s defiant attitude. She also looked a bit like him,

　　with arched eyebrows and a faintly Middle Eastern angularity. One day, to the

　　surprise of his colleagues, he brought her by the office. As she turned

　　cartwheels in the corridor, she squealed, “Look at me!”

　　Avie Tevanian, a lanky and gregarious engineer at NeXT who had become Jobs’s

　　friend, remembers that every now and then, when they were going out to dinner,

　　they would stop by Chrisann’s house to pick up Lisa. “He was very sweet to her,”

　　Tevanian recalled. “He was a vegetarian, and so was Chrisann, but she wasn’t. He

　　was fine with that. He suggested she order chicken, and she did.”

　　Eating chicken became her little indulgence as she shuttled between two parents

　　who were vegetarians with a spiritual regard for natural foods. “We bought our

　　groceries—our puntarella, quinoa, celeriac, carob-covered nuts—in

　　yeasty-smelling stores where the women didn’t dye their hair,” she later wrote

　　about her time with her mother. “But we sometimes tasted foreign treats. A few

　　times we bought a hot, seasoned chicken from a gourmet shop with rows and rows

　　of chickens turning on spits, and ate it in the car from the foil-lined paper

　　bag with our fingers.” Her father, whose dietary fixations came in fanatic

　　waves, was more fastidious about what he ate. She watched him spit out a

　　mouthful of soup one day after learning that it contained butter. After

　　loosening up a bit while at Apple, he was back to being a strict vegan. Even at

　　a young age Lisa began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life

　　philosophy, one in which asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent

　　sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure

　　from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t know:

　　Things led to their opposites.”

　　In a similar way, the absence and coldness of her father made his occasional

　　moments of warmth so much more intensely gratifying. “I didn’t live with him,

　　but he would stop by our house some days, a deity among us for a few tingling

　　moments or hours,” she recalled. Lisa soon became interesting enough that he

　　would take walks with her. He would also go rollerblading with her on the quiet

　　streets of old Palo Alto, often stopping at the houses of Joanna Hoffman and

　　Andy Hertzfeld. The first time he brought her around to see Hoffman, he just

　　knocked on the door and announced, “This is Lisa.” Hoffman knew right away. “It

　　was obvious she was his daughter,” she told me. “Nobody has that jaw. It’s a

　　signature jaw.” Hoffman, who suffered from not knowing her own divorced father

　　until she was ten, encouraged Jobs to be a better father. He followed her

　　advice, and later thanked her for it.

　　Once he took Lisa on a business trip to Tokyo, and they stayed at the sleek and

　　businesslike Okura Hotel. At the elegant downstairs sushi bar, Jobs ordered

　　large trays of unagi sushi, a dish he loved so much that he allowed the warm

　　cooked eel to pass muster as vegetarian. The pieces were coated with fine salt

　　or a thin sweet sauce, and Lisa remembered later how they dissolved in her

　　mouth. So, too, did the distance between them. As she later wrote, “It was the

　　first time I’d felt, with him, so relaxed and content, over those trays of meat;

　　the excess, the permission and warmth after the cold salads, meant a once

　　inaccessible space had opened. He was less rigid with himself, even human under

　　the great ceilings with the little chairs, with the meat, and me.”

　　But it was not always sweetness and light. Jobs was as mercurial with Lisa as he

　　was with almost everyone, cycling between embrace and abandonment. On one visit

　　he would be playful; on the next he would be cold; often he was not there at

　　all. “She was always unsure of their relationship,” according to Hertzfeld. “I

　　went to a birthday party of hers, and Steve was supposed to come, and he was

　　very, very, late. She got extremely anxious and disappointed. But when he

　　finally did come, she totally lit up.”

　　Lisa learned to be temperamental in return. Over the years their relationship

　　would be a roller coaster, with each of the low points elongated by their shared

　　stubbornness. After a falling-out, they could go for months not speaking to each

　　other. Neither one was good at reaching out, apologizing, or making the effort

　　to heal, even when he was wrestling with repeated health problems. One day in

　　the fall of 2010 he was wistfully going through a box of old snapshots with me,

　　and paused over one that showed him visiting Lisa when she was young. “I

　　probably didn’t go over there enough,” he said. Since he had not spoken to her

　　all that year, I asked if he might want to reach out to her with a call or

　　email. He looked at me blankly for a moment, then went back to riffling through

　　other old photographs.

　　The Romantic

　　When it came to women, Jobs could be deeply romantic. He tended to fall in love

　　dramatically, share with friends every up and down of a relationship, and pine

　　in public whenever he was away from his current girlfriend. In the summer of

　　1983 he went to a small dinner party in Silicon Valley with Joan Baez and sat

　　next to an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania named Jennifer Egan,

　　who was not quite sure who he was. By then he and Baez had realized that they

　　weren’t destined to be forever young together, and Jobs found himself fascinated

　　by Egan, who was working on a San Francisco weekly during her summer vacation.

　　He tracked her down, gave her a call, and took her to Café Jacqueline, a little

　　bistro near Telegraph Hill that specialized in vegetarian soufflés.

　　They dated for a year, and Jobs often flew east to visit her. At a Boston

　　Macworld event, he told a large gathering how much in love he was and thus

　　needed to rush out to catch a plane for Philadelphia to see his girlfriend. The

　　audience was enchanted. When he was visiting New York, she would take the train

　　up to stay with him at the Carlyle or at Jay Chiat’s Upper East Side apartment,

　　and they would eat at Café Luxembourg, visit (repeatedly) the apartment in the

　　San Remo he was planning to remodel, and go to movies or (once at least) the

　　opera.

　　He and Egan also spoke for hours on the phone many nights. One topic they

　　wrestled with was his belief, which came from his Buddhist studies, that it was

　　important to avoid attachment to material objects. Our consumer desires are

　　unhealthy, he told her, and to attain enlightenment you need to develop a life

　　of nonattachment and non-materialism. He even sent her a tape of Kobun Chino,

　　his Zen teacher, lecturing about the problems caused by craving and obtaining

　　things. Egan pushed back. Wasn’t he defying that philosophy, she asked, by

　　making computers and other products that people coveted? “He was irritated by

　　the dichotomy, and we had exuberant debates about it,” Egan recalled.

　　In the end Jobs’s pride in the objects he made overcame his sensibility that

　　people should eschew being attached to such possessions. When the Macintosh came

　　out in January 1984, Egan was staying at her mother’s apartment in San Francisco

　　during her winter break from Penn. Her mother’s dinner guests were astonished

　　one night when Steve Jobs—suddenly very famous—appeared at the door carrying a

　　freshly boxed Macintosh and proceeded to Egan’s bedroom to set it up.

　　Jobs told Egan, as he had a few other friends, about his premonition that he

　　would not live a long life. That was why he was driven and impatient, he

　　confided. “He felt a sense of urgency about all he wanted to get done,” Egan

　　later said. Their relationship tapered off by the fall of 1984, when Egan made

　　it clear that she was still far too young to think of getting married.

　　Shortly after that, just as the turmoil with Sculley was beginning to build at

　　Apple in early 1985, Jobs was heading to a meeting when he stopped at the office

　　of a guy who was working with the Apple Foundation, which helped get computers

　　to nonprofit organizations. Sitting in his office was a lithe, very blond woman

　　who combined a hippie aura of natural purity with the solid sensibilities of a

　　computer consultant. Her name was Tina Redse. “She was the most beautiful woman

　　I’d ever seen,” Jobs recalled.

　　He called her the next day and asked her to dinner. She said no, that she was

　　living with a boyfriend. A few days later he took her on a walk to a nearby park

　　and again asked her out, and this time she told her boyfriend that she wanted to

　　go. She was very honest and open. After dinner she started to cry because she

　　knew her life was about to be disrupted. And it was. Within a few months she had

　　moved into the unfurnished mansion in Woodside. “She was the first person I was

　　truly in love with,” Jobs later said. “We had a very deep connection. I don’t

　　know that anyone will ever understand me better than she did.”

　　Redse came from a troubled family, and Jobs shared with her his own pain about

　　being put up for adoption. “We were both wounded from our childhood,” Redse

　　recalled. “He said to me that we were misfits, which is why we belonged

　　together.” They were physically passionate and prone to public displays of

　　affection; their make-out sessions in the NeXT lobby are well remembered by

　　employees. So too were their fights, which occurred at movie theaters and in

　　front of visitors to Woodside. Yet he constantly praised her purity and

　　naturalness. As the well-grounded Joanna Hoffman pointed out when discussing

　　Jobs’s infatuation with the otherworldly Redse, “Steve had a tendency to look at

　　vulnerabilities and neuroses and turn them into spiritual attributes.”

　　When he was being eased out at Apple in 1985, Redse traveled with him in Europe,

　　where he was salving his wounds. Standing on a bridge over the Seine one

　　evening, they bandied about the idea, more romantic than serious, of just

　　staying in France, maybe settling down, perhaps indefinitely. Redse was eager,

　　but Jobs didn’t want to. He was burned but still ambitious. “I am a reflection

　　of what I do,” he told her. She recalled their Paris moment in a poignant email

　　she sent to him twenty-five years later, after they had gone their separate ways

　　but retained their spiritual connection:

　　We were on a bridge in Paris in the summer of 1985. It was overcast. We leaned

　　against the smooth stone rail and stared at the green water rolling on below.

　　Your world had cleaved and then it paused, waiting to rearrange itself around

　　whatever you chose next. I wanted to run away from what had come before. I

　　tried to convince you to begin a new life with me in Paris, to shed our former

　　selves and let something else course through us. I wanted us to crawl through

　　that black chasm of your broken world and emerge, anonymous and new, in simple

　　lives where I could cook you simple dinners and we could be together every

　　day, like children playing a sweet game with no purpose save the game itself.

　　I like to think you considered it before you laughed and said “What could I

　　do? I’ve made myself unemployable.” I like to think that in that moment’s

　　hesitation before our bold futures reclaimed us, we lived that simple life

　　together all the way into our peaceful old ages, with a brood of grandchildren

　　around us on a farm in the south of France, quietly going about our days, warm

　　and complete like loaves of fresh bread, our small world filled with the aroma

　　of patience and familiarity.

　　The relationship lurched up and down for five years. Redse hated living in his

　　sparsely furnished Woodside house. Jobs had hired a hip young couple, who had

　　once worked at Chez Panisse, as housekeepers and vegetarian cooks, and they made

　　her feel like an interloper. She would occasionally move out to an apartment of

　　her own in Palo Alto, especially after one of her torrential arguments with

　　Jobs. “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the hallway

　　to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how

　　uncaring he could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be

　　in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed

　　incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on

　　anyone, she said.

　　They were different in so many ways. “On the spectrum of cruel to kind, they are

　　close to the opposite poles,” Hertzfeld later said. Redse’s kindness was

　　manifest in ways large and small; she always gave money to street people, she

　　volunteered to help those who (like her father) were afflicted with mental

　　illness, and she took care to make Lisa and even Chrisann feel comfortable with

　　her. More than anyone, she helped persuade Jobs to spend more time with Lisa.

　　But she lacked Jobs’s ambition and drive. The ethereal quality that made her

　　seem so spiritual to Jobs also made it hard for them to stay on the same

　　wavelength. “Their relationship was incredibly tempestuous,” said Hertzfeld.

　　“Because of both of their characters, they would have lots and lots of fights.”

　　They also had a basic philosophical difference about whether aesthetic tastes

　　were fundamentally individual, as Redse believed, or universal and could be

　　taught, as Jobs believed. She accused him of being too influenced by the Bauhaus

　　movement. “Steve believed it was our job to teach people aesthetics, to teach

　　people what they should like,” she recalled. “I don’t share that perspective. I

　　believe when we listen deeply, both within ourselves and to each other, we are

　　able to allow what’s innate and true to emerge.”

　　When they were together for a long stretch, things did not work out well. But

　　when they were apart, Jobs would pine for her. Finally, in the summer of 1989,

　　he asked her to marry him. She couldn’t do it. It would drive her crazy, she

　　told friends. She had grown up in a volatile household, and her relationship

　　with Jobs bore too many similarities to that environment. They were opposites

　　who attracted, she said, but the combination was too combustible. “I could not

　　have been a good wife to ‘Steve Jobs,’ the icon,” she later explained. “I would

　　have sucked at it on many levels. In our personal interactions, I couldn’t abide

　　his unkindness. I didn’t want to hurt him, yet I didn’t want to stand by and

　　watch him hurt other people either. It was painful and exhausting.”

　　After they broke up, Redse helped found OpenMind, a mental health resource

　　network in California. She happened to read in a psychiatric manual about

　　Narcissistic Personality Disorder and decided that Jobs perfectly met the

　　criteria. “It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with,

　　that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like

　　expecting a blind man to see,” she said. “It also explained some of the choices

　　he’d made about his daughter Lisa at that time. I think the issue is empathy—the

　　capacity for empathy is lacking.”

　　Redse later married, had two children, and then divorced. Every now and then

　　Jobs would openly pine for her, even after he was happily married. And when he

　　began his battle with cancer, she got in touch again to give support. She became

　　very emotional whenever she recalled their relationship. “Though our values

　　clashed and made it impossible for us to have the relationship we once hoped

　　for,” she told me, “the care and love I felt for him decades ago has continued.”

　　Similarly, Jobs suddenly started to cry one afternoon as he sat in his living

　　room reminiscing about her. “She was one of the purest people I’ve ever known,”

　　he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. “There was something spiritual about her

　　and spiritual about the connection we had.” He said he always regretted that

　　they could not make it work, and he knew that she had such regrets as well. But

　　it was not meant to be. On that they both agreed.UnknownFAMILY MAN

　　At Home with the Jobs Clan

　　With Laurene Powell, 1991

　　Laurene Powell

　　By this point, based on his dating history, a matchmaker could have put together

　　a composite sketch of the woman who would be right for Jobs. Smart, yet

　　unpretentious. Tough enough to stand up to him, yet Zen-like enough to rise

　　above turmoil. Well-educated and independent, yet ready to make accommodations

　　for him and a family. Down-to-earth, but with a touch of the ethereal. Savvy

　　enough to know how to manage him, but secure enough to not always need to. And

　　it wouldn’t hurt to be a beautiful, lanky blonde with an easygoing sense of

　　humor who liked organic vegetarian food. In October 1989, after his split with

　　Tina Redse, just such a woman walked into his life.

　　More specifically, just such a woman walked into his classroom. Jobs had agreed

　　to give one of the “View from the Top” lectures at the Stanford Business School

　　one Thursday evening. Laurene Powell was a new graduate student at the business

　　school, and a guy in her class talked her into going to the lecture. They

　　arrived late and all the seats were taken, so they sat in the aisle. When an

　　usher told them they had to move, Powell took her friend down to the front row

　　and commandeered two of the reserved seats there. Jobs was led to the one next

　　to her when he arrived. “I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl

　　there, so we started chatting while I was waiting to be introduced,” Jobs

　　recalled. They bantered a bit, and Laurene joked that she was sitting there

　　because she had won a raffle, and the prize was that he got to take her to

　　dinner. “He was so adorable,” she later said.

　　After the speech Jobs hung around on the edge of the stage chatting with

　　students. He watched Powell leave, then come back and stand at the edge of the

　　crowd, then leave again. He bolted out after her, brushing past the dean, who

　　was trying to grab him for a conversation. After catching up with her in the

　　parking lot, he said, “Excuse me, wasn’t there something about a raffle you won,

　　that I’m supposed to take you to dinner?” She laughed. “How about Saturday?” he

　　asked. She agreed and wrote down her number. Jobs headed to his car to drive up

　　to the Thomas Fogarty winery in the Santa Cruz mountains above Woodside, where

　　the NeXT education sales group was holding a dinner. But he suddenly stopped and

　　turned around. “I thought, wow, I’d rather have dinner with her than the

　　education group, so I ran back to her car and said ‘How about dinner tonight?’”

　　She said yes. It was a beautiful fall evening, and they walked into Palo Alto to

　　a funky vegetarian restaurant, St. Michael’s Alley, and ended up staying there

　　for four hours. “We’ve been together ever since,” he said.

　　Avie Tevanian was sitting at the winery restaurant waiting with the rest of the

　　NeXT education group. “Steve was sometimes unreliable, but when I talked to him

　　I realized that something special had come up,” he said. As soon as Powell got

　　home, after midnight, she called her close friend Kathryn (Kat) Smith, who was

　　at Berkeley, and left a message on her machine. “You will not believe what just

　　happened to me!” it said. “You will not believe who I met!” Smith called back

　　the next morning and heard the tale. “We had known about Steve, and he was a

　　person of interest to us, because we were business students,” she recalled.

　　Andy Hertzfeld and a few others later speculated that Powell had been scheming

　　to meet Jobs. “Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating, and I think she

　　targeted him from the beginning,” Hertzfeld said. “Her college roommate told me

　　that Laurene had magazine covers of Steve and vowed she was going to meet him.

　　If it’s true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of irony there.”

　　But Powell later insisted that this wasn’t the case. She went only because her

　　friend wanted to go, and she was slightly confused as to who they were going to

　　see. “I knew that Steve Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that

　　of Bill Gates,” she recalled. “I had them mixed up. This was 1989. He was

　　working at NeXT, and he was not that big of a deal to me. I wasn’t that

　　enthused, but my friend was, so we went.”

　　“There were only two women in my life that I was truly in love with, Tina and

　　Laurene,” Jobs later said. “I thought I was in love with Joan Baez, but I really

　　just liked her a lot. It was just Tina and then Laurene.”

　　Laurene Powell had been born in New Jersey in 1963 and learned to be

　　self-sufficient at an early age. Her father was a Marine Corps pilot who died a

　　hero in a crash in Santa Ana, California; he had been leading a crippled plane

　　in for a landing, and when it hit his plane he kept flying to avoid a

　　residential area rather than ejecting in time to save his life. Her mother’s

　　second marriage turned out to be a horrible situation, but she felt she couldn’t

　　leave because she had no means to support her large family. For ten years

　　Laurene and her three brothers had to suffer in a tense household, keeping a

　　good demeanor while compartmentalizing problems. She did well. “The lesson I

　　learned was clear, that I always wanted to be self-sufficient,” she said. “I

　　took pride in that. My relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be

　　self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is part of who I am.”

　　After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she worked at Goldman

　　Sachs as a fixed income trading strategist, dealing with enormous sums of money

　　that she traded for the house account. Jon Corzine, her boss, tried to get her

　　to stay at Goldman, but instead she decided the work was unedifying. “You could

　　be really successful,” she said, “but you’re just contributing to capital

　　formation.” So after three years she quit and went to Florence, Italy, living

　　there for eight months before enrolling in Stanford Business School.

　　After their Thursday night dinner, she invited Jobs over to her Palo Alto

　　apartment on Saturday. Kat Smith drove down from Berkeley and pretended to be

　　her roommate so she could meet him as well. Their relationship became very

　　passionate. “They would kiss and make out,” Smith said. “He was enraptured with

　　her. He would call me on the phone and ask, ‘What do you think, does she like

　　me?’ Here I am in this bizarre position of having this iconic person call me.”

　　That New Year’s Eve of 1989 the three went to Chez Panisse, the famed Alice

　　Waters restaurant in Berkeley, along with Lisa, then eleven. Something happened

　　at the dinner that caused Jobs and Powell to start arguing. They left

　　separately, and Powell ended up spending the night at Kat Smith’s apartment. At

　　nine the next morning there was a knock at the door, and Smith opened it to find

　　Jobs, standing in the drizzle holding some wildflowers he had picked. “May I

　　come in and see Laurene?” he said. She was still asleep, and he walked into the

　　bedroom. A couple of hours went by, while Smith waited in the living room,

　　unable to go in and get her clothes. Finally, she put a coat on over her

　　nightgown and went to Peet’s Coffee to pick up some food. Jobs did not emerge

　　until after noon. “Kat, can you come here for a minute?” he asked. They all

　　gathered in the bedroom. “As you know, Laurene’s father passed away, and

　　Laurene’s mother isn’t here, and since you’re her best friend, I’m going to ask

　　you the question,” he said. “I’d like to marry Laurene. Will you give your

　　blessing?”

　　Smith clambered onto the bed and thought about it. “Is this okay with you?” she

　　asked Powell. When she nodded yes, Smith announced, “Well, there’s your answer.”

　　It was not, however, a definitive answer. Jobs had a way of focusing on

　　something with insane intensity for a while and then, abruptly, turning away his

　　gaze. At work, he would focus on what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and on

　　other matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get

　　him to engage. In his personal life, he was the same way. At times he and Powell

　　would indulge in public displays of affection that were so intense they

　　embarrassed everyone in their presence, including Kat Smith and Powell’s mother.

　　In the mornings at his Woodside mansion, he would wake Powell up by blasting the

　　Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” on his tape deck. Yet at other times

　　he would ignore her. “Steve would fluctuate between intense focus, where she was

　　the center of the universe, to being coldly distant and focused on work,” said

　　Smith. “He had the power to focus like a laser beam, and when it came across

　　you, you basked in the light of his attention. When it moved to another point of

　　focus, it was very, very dark for you. It was very confusing to Laurene.”

　　Once she had accepted his marriage proposal on the first day of 1990, he didn’t

　　mention it again for several months. Finally, Smith confronted him while they

　　were sitting on the edge of a sandbox in Palo Alto. What was going on? Jobs

　　replied that he needed to feel sure that Powell could handle the life he lived

　　and the type of person he was. In September she became fed up with waiting and

　　moved out. The following month, he gave her a diamond engagement ring, and she

　　moved back in.

　　In December Jobs took Powell to his favorite vacation spot, Kona Village in

　　Hawaii. He had started going there nine years earlier when, stressed out at

　　Apple, he had asked his assistant to pick out a place for him to escape. At

　　first glance, he didn’t like the cluster of sparse thatched-roof bungalows

　　nestled on a beach on the big island of Hawaii. It was a family resort, with

　　communal eating. But within hours he had begun to view it as paradise. There was

　　a simplicity and spare beauty that moved him, and he returned whenever he could.

　　He especially enjoyed being there that December with Powell. Their love had

　　matured. The night before Christmas he again declared, even more formally, that

　　he wanted to marry her. Soon another factor would drive that decision. While in

　　Hawaii, Powell got pregnant. “We know exactly where it happened,” Jobs later

　　said with a laugh.

　　The Wedding, March 18, 1991

　　Powell’s pregnancy did not completely settle the issue. Jobs again began balking

　　at the idea of marriage, even though he had dramatically proposed to her both at

　　the very beginning and the very end of 1990. Furious, she moved out of his house

　　and back to her apartment. For a while he sulked or ignored the situation. Then

　　he thought he might still be in love with Tina Redse; he sent her roses and

　　tried to convince her to return to him, maybe even get married. He was not sure

　　what he wanted, and he surprised a wide swath of friends and even acquaintances

　　by asking them what he should do. Who was prettier, he would ask, Tina or

　　Laurene? Who did they like better? Who should he marry? In a chapter about this

　　in Mona Simpson’s novel A Regular Guy, the Jobs character “asked more than a

　　hundred people who they thought was more beautiful.” But that was fiction; in

　　reality, it was probably fewer than a hundred.

　　He ended up making the right choice. As Redse told friends, she never would have

　　survived if she had gone back to Jobs, nor would their marriage. Even though he

　　would pine about the spiritual nature of his connection to Redse, he had a far

　　more solid relationship with Powell. He liked her, he loved her, he respected

　　her, and he was comfortable with her. He may not have seen her as mystical, but

　　she was a sensible anchor for his life. “He is the luckiest guy to have landed

　　with Laurene, who is smart and can engage him intellectually and can sustain his

　　ups and downs and tempestuous personality,” said Joanna Hoffman. “Because she’s

　　not neurotic, Steve may feel that she is not as mystical as Tina or something.

　　But that’s silly.” Andy Hertzfeld agreed. “Laurene looks a lot like Tina, but

　　she is totally different because she is tougher and armor-plated. That’s why the

　　marriage works.”

　　Jobs understood this as well. Despite his emotional turbulence and occasional

　　meanness, the marriage would turn out to be enduring, marked by loyalty and

　　faithfulness, overcoming the ups and downs and jangling emotional complexities

　　it encountered.

　　• • •

　　Avie Tevanian decided Jobs needed a bachelor’s party. This was not as easy as it

　　sounded. Jobs did not like to party and didn’t have a gang of male buddies. He

　　didn’t even have a best man. So the party turned out to be just Tevanian and

　　Richard Crandall, a computer science professor at Reed who had taken a leave to

　　work at NeXT. Tevanian hired a limo, and when they got to Jobs’s house, Powell

　　answered the door dressed in a suit and wearing a fake moustache, saying that

　　she wanted to come as one of the guys. It was just a joke, and soon the three

　　bachelors, none of them drinkers, were rolling to San Francisco to see if they

　　could pull off their own pale version of a bachelor party.

　　Tevanian had been unable to get reservations at Greens, the vegetarian

　　restaurant at Fort Mason that Jobs liked, so he booked a very fancy restaurant

　　at a hotel. “I don’t want to eat here,” Jobs announced as soon as the bread was

　　placed on the table. He made them get up and walk out, to the horror of

　　Tevanian, who was not yet used to Jobs’s restaurant manners. He led them to Café

　　Jacqueline in North Beach, the soufflé place that he loved, which was indeed a

　　better choice. Afterward they took the limo across the Golden Gate Bridge to a

　　bar in Sausalito, where all three ordered shots of tequila but only sipped them.

　　“It was not great as bachelor parties go, but it was the best we could come up

　　with for someone like Steve, and nobody else volunteered to do it,” recalled

　　Tevanian. Jobs was appreciative. He decided that he wanted Tevanian to marry his

　　sister Mona Simpson. Though nothing came of it, the thought was a sign of

　　affection.

　　Powell had fair warning of what she was getting into. As she was planning the

　　wedding, the person who was going to do the calligraphy for the invitations came

　　by the house to show them some options. There was no furniture for her to sit

　　on, so she sat on the floor and laid out the samples. Jobs looked for a few

　　minutes, then got up and left the room. They waited for him to come back, but he

　　didn’t. After a while Powell went to find him in his room. “Get rid of her,” he

　　said. “I can’t look at her stuff. It’s shit.”

　　On March 18, 1991, Steven Paul Jobs, thirty-six, married Laurene Powell,

　　twenty-seven, at the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the

　　1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of stone, concrete, and timber designed

　　in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Park

　　Service’s love of huge fireplaces. Its best features are the views. It has

　　floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Half Dome and Yosemite Falls.

　　About fifty people came, including Steve’s father Paul Jobs and sister Mona

　　Simpson. She brought her fiancé, Richard Appel, a lawyer who went on to become a

　　television comedy writer. (As a writer for The Simpsons, he named Homer’s mother

　　after his wife.) Jobs insisted that they all arrive by chartered bus; he wanted

　　to control all aspects of the event.

　　The ceremony was in the solarium, with the snow coming down hard and Glacier

　　Point just visible in the distance. It was conducted by Jobs’s longtime Sōtō Zen

　　teacher, Kobun Chino, who shook a stick, struck a gong, lit incense, and chanted

　　in a mumbling manner that most guests found incomprehensible. “I thought he was

　　drunk,” said Tevanian. He wasn’t. The wedding cake was in the shape of Half

　　Dome, the granite crest at the end of Yosemite Valley, but since it was strictly

　　vegan—devoid of eggs, milk, or any refined products—more than a few of the

　　guests found it inedible. Afterward they all went hiking, and Powell’s three

　　strapping brothers launched a snowball fight, with lots of tackling and

　　roughhousing. “You see, Mona,” Jobs said to his sister, “Laurene is descended

　　from Joe Namath and we’re descended from John Muir.”

　　A Family Home

　　Powell shared her husband’s interest in natural foods. While at business school,

　　she had worked part time at Odwalla, the juice company, where she helped develop

　　the first marketing plan. After marrying Jobs, she felt that it was important to

　　have a career, having learned from her childhood the need to be self-sufficient.

　　So she started her own company, Terravera, that made ready-to-eat organic meals

　　and delivered them to stores throughout northern California.

　　Instead of living in the isolated and rather spooky unfurnished Woodside

　　mansion, the couple moved into a charming and unpretentious house on a corner in

　　a family-friendly neighborhood in old Palo Alto. It was a privileged

　　realm—neighbors would eventually include the visionary venture capitalist John

　　Doerr, Google’s founder Larry Page, and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg,

　　along with Andy Hertzfeld and Joanna Hoffman—but the homes were not

　　ostentatious, and there were no high hedges or long drives shielding them from

　　view. Instead, houses were nestled on lots next to each other along flat, quiet

　　streets flanked by wide sidewalks. “We wanted to live in a neighborhood where

　　kids could walk to see friends,” Jobs later said.

　　The house was not the minimalist and modernist style Jobs would have designed if

　　he had built a home from scratch. Nor was it a large or distinctive mansion that

　　would make people stop and take notice as they drove down his street in Palo

　　Alto. It was built in the 1930s by a local designer named Carr Jones, who

　　specialized in carefully crafted homes in the “storybook style” of English or

　　French country cottages.

　　The two-story house was made of red brick, with exposed wood beams and a shingle

　　roof with curved lines; it evoked a rambling Cotswold cottage, or perhaps a home

　　where a well-to-do Hobbit might have lived. The one Californian touch was a

　　mission-style courtyard framed by the wings of the house. The two-story

　　vaulted-ceiling living room was informal, with a floor of tile and terra-cotta.

　　At one end was a large triangular window leading up to the peak of the ceiling;

　　it had stained glass when Jobs bought it, as if it were a chapel, but he

　　replaced it with clear glass. The other renovation he and Powell made was to

　　expand the kitchen to include a wood-burning pizza oven and room for a long

　　wooden table that would become the family’s primary gathering place. It was

　　supposed to be a four-month renovation, but it took sixteen months because Jobs

　　kept redoing the design. They also bought the small house behind them and razed

　　it to make a backyard, which Powell turned into a beautiful natural garden

　　filled with a profusion of seasonal flowers along with vegetables and herbs.

　　Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old material, including

　　used bricks and wood from telephone poles, to provide a simple and sturdy

　　structure. The beams in the kitchen had been used to make the molds for the

　　concrete foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was under construction

　　when the house was built. “He was a careful craftsman who was self-taught,” Jobs

　　said as he pointed out each of the details. “He cared more about being inventive

　　than about making money, and he never got rich. He never left California. His

　　ideas came from reading books in the library and Architectural Digest.”

　　Jobs had never furnished his Woodside house beyond a few bare essentials: a

　　chest of drawers and a mattress in his bedroom, a card table and some folding

　　chairs in what would have been a dining room. He wanted around him only things

　　that he could admire, and that made it hard simply to go out and buy a lot of

　　furniture. Now that he was living in a normal neighborhood home with a wife and

　　soon a child, he had to make some concessions to necessity. But it was hard.

　　They got beds, dressers, and a music system for the living room, but items like

　　sofas took longer. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,”

　　recalled Powell. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose

　　of a sofa?’” Buying appliances was also a philosophical task, not just an

　　impulse purchase. A few years later, Jobs described to Wired the process that

　　went into getting a new washing machine:

　　It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The

　　Europeans make them much better—but they take twice as long to do clothes! It

　　turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your

　　clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t

　　trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come

　　out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time

　　in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up

　　talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we

　　care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or

　　did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did

　　we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking

　　about this every night at the dinner table.

　　They ended up getting a Miele washer and dryer, made in Germany. “I got more

　　thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years,” Jobs

　　said.

　　The one piece of art that Jobs bought for the vaulted-ceiling living room was an

　　Ansel Adams print of the winter sunrise in the Sierra Nevada taken from Lone

　　Pine, California. Adams had made the huge mural print for his daughter, who

　　later sold it. At one point Jobs’s housekeeper wiped it with a wet cloth, and

　　Jobs tracked down a person who had worked with Adams to come to the house, strip

　　it down a layer, and restore it.

　　The house was so unassuming that Bill Gates was somewhat baffled when he visited

　　with his wife. “Do all of you live here?” asked Gates, who was then in the

　　process of building a 66,000-square-foot mansion near Seattle. Even when he had

　　his second coming at Apple and was a world-famous billionaire, Jobs had no

　　security guards or live-in servants, and he even kept the back door unlocked

　　during the day.

　　His only security problem came, sadly and strangely, from Burrell Smith, the

　　mop-headed, cherubic Macintosh software engineer who had been Andy Hertzfeld’s

　　sidekick. After leaving Apple, Smith descended into schizophrenia. He lived in a

　　house down the street from Hertzfeld, and as his disorder progressed he began

　　wandering the streets naked, at other times smashing the windows of cars and

　　churches. He was put on strong medication, but it proved difficult to calibrate.

　　At one point when his demons returned, he began going over to the Jobs house in

　　the evenings, throwing rocks through the windows, leaving rambling letters, and

　　once tossing a firecracker into the house. He was arrested, but the case was

　　dropped when he went for more treatment. “Burrell was so funny and naïve, and

　　then one April day he suddenly snapped,” Jobs recalled. “It was the weirdest,

　　saddest thing.”

　　Jobs was sympathetic, and often asked Hertzfeld what more he could do to help.

　　At one point Smith was thrown in jail and refused to identify himself. When

　　Hertzfeld found out, three days later, he called Jobs and asked for assistance

　　in getting him released. Jobs did help, but he surprised Hertzfeld with a

　　question: “If something similar happened to me, would you take as good care of

　　me as you do Burrell?”

　　Jobs kept his mansion in Woodside, about ten miles up into the mountains from

　　Palo Alto. He wanted to tear down the fourteen-bedroom 1925 Spanish colonial

　　revival, and he had plans drawn up to replace it with an extremely simple,

　　Japanese-inspired modernist home one-third the size. But for more than twenty

　　years he engaged in a slow-moving series of court battles with preservationists

　　who wanted the crumbling original house to be saved. (In 2011 he finally got

　　permission to raze the house, but by then he had no desire to build a second

　　home.)

　　On occasion Jobs would use the semi-abandoned Woodside home, especially its

　　swimming pool, for family parties. When Bill Clinton was president, he and

　　Hillary Clinton stayed in the 1950s ranch house on the property on their visits

　　to their daughter, who was at Stanford. Since both the main house and ranch

　　house were unfurnished, Powell would call furniture and art dealers when the

　　Clintons were coming and pay them to furnish the houses temporarily. Once,

　　shortly after the Monica Lewinsky flurry broke, Powell was making a final

　　inspection of the furnishings and noticed that one of the paintings was missing.

　　Worried, she asked the advance team and Secret Service what had happened. One of

　　them pulled her aside and explained that it was a painting of a dress on a

　　hanger, and given the issue of the blue dress in the Lewinsky matter they had

　　decided to hide it. (During one of his late-night phone conversations with Jobs,

　　Clinton asked how he should handle the Lewinsky issue. “I don’t know if you did

　　it, but if so, you’ve got to tell the country,” Jobs told the president. There

　　was silence on the other end of the line.)

　　Lisa Moves In

　　In the middle of Lisa’s eighth-grade year, her teachers called Jobs. There were

　　serious problems, and it was probably best for her to move out of her mother’s

　　house. So Jobs went on a walk with Lisa, asked about the situation, and offered

　　to let her move in with him. She was a mature girl, just turning fourteen, and

　　she thought about it for two days. Then she said yes. She already knew which

　　room she wanted: the one right next to her father’s. When she was there once,

　　with no one home, she had tested it out by lying down on the bare floor.

　　It was a tough period. Chrisann Brennan would sometimes walk over from her own

　　house a few blocks away and yell at them from the yard. When I asked her

　　recently about her behavior and the allegations that led to Lisa’s moving out of

　　her house, she said that she had still not been able to process in her own mind

　　what occurred during that period. But then she wrote me a long email that she

　　said would help explain the situation:

　　Do you know how Steve was able to get the city of Woodside to allow him to

　　tear his Woodside home down? There was a community of people who wanted to

　　preserve his Woodside house due to its historical value, but Steve wanted to

　　tear it down and build a home with an orchard. Steve let that house fall into

　　so much disrepair and decay over a number of years that there was no way to

　　save it. The strategy he used to get what he wanted was to simply follow the

　　line of least involvement and resistance. So by his doing nothing on the

　　house, and maybe even leaving the windows open for years, the house fell

　　apart. Brilliant, no? . . . In a similar way did Steve work to undermine my

　　effectiveness AND my well being at the time when Lisa was 13 and 14 to get her

　　to move into his house. He started with one strategy but then it moved to

　　another easier one that was even more destructive to me and more problematic

　　for Lisa. It may not have been of the greatest integrity, but he got what he

　　wanted.

　　Lisa lived with Jobs and Powell for all four of her years at Palo Alto High

　　School, and she began using the name Lisa Brennan-Jobs. He tried to be a good

　　father, but there were times when he was cold and distant. When Lisa felt she

　　had to escape, she would seek refuge with a friendly family who lived nearby.

　　Powell tried to be supportive, and she was the one who attended most of Lisa’s

　　school events.

　　By the time Lisa was a senior, she seemed to be flourishing. She joined the

　　school newspaper, The Campanile, and became the coeditor. Together with her

　　classmate Ben Hewlett, grandson of the man who gave her father his first job,

　　she exposed secret raises that the school board had given to administrators.

　　When it came time to go to college, she knew she wanted to go east. She applied

　　to Harvard—forging her father’s signature on the application because he was out

　　of town—and was accepted for the class entering in 1996.

　　At Harvard Lisa worked on the college newspaper, The Crimson, and then the

　　literary magazine, The Advocate. After breaking up with her boyfriend, she took

　　a year abroad at King’s College, London. Her relationship with her father

　　remained tumultuous throughout her college years. When she would come home,

　　fights over small things—what was being served for dinner, whether she was

　　paying enough attention to her half-siblings—would blow up, and they would not

　　speak to each other for weeks and sometimes months. The arguments occasionally

　　got so bad that Jobs would stop supporting her, and she would borrow money from

　　Andy Hertzfeld or others. Hertzfeld at one point lent Lisa $20,000 when she

　　thought that her father was not going to pay her tuition. “He was mad at me for

　　making the loan,” Hertzfeld recalled, “but he called early the next morning and

　　had his accountant wire me the money.” Jobs did not go to Lisa’s Harvard

　　graduation in 2000. He said, “She didn’t even invite me.”

　　There were, however, some nice times during those years, including one summer

　　when Lisa came back home and performed at a benefit concert for the Electronic

　　Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that supports access to technology. The

　　concert took place at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, which had been

　　made famous by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. She sang

　　Tracy Chapman’s anthem “Talkin’ bout a Revolution” (“Poor people are gonna rise

　　up / And get their share”) as her father stood in the back cradling his

　　one-year-old daughter, Erin.

　　Jobs’s ups and downs with Lisa continued after she moved to Manhattan as a

　　freelance writer. Their problems were exacerbated because of Jobs’s frustrations

　　with Chrisann. He had bought a $700,000 house for Chrisann to use and put it in

　　Lisa’s name, but Chrisann convinced her to sign it over and then sold it, using

　　the money to travel with a spiritual advisor and to live in Paris. Once the

　　money ran out, she returned to San Francisco and became an artist creating

　　“light paintings” and Buddhist mandalas. “I am a ‘Connector’ and a visionary

　　contributor to the future of evolving humanity and the ascended Earth,” she said

　　on her website (which Hertzfeld maintained for her). “I experience the forms,

　　color, and sound frequencies of sacred vibration as I create and live with the

　　paintings.” When Chrisann needed money for a bad sinus infection and dental

　　problem, Jobs refused to give it to her, causing Lisa again to not speak to him

　　for a few years. And thus the pattern would continue.

　　Mona Simpson used all of this, plus her imagination, as a springboard for her

　　third novel, A Regular Guy, published in 1996. The book’s title character is

　　based on Jobs, and to some extent it adheres to reality: It depicts Jobs’s quiet

　　generosity to, and purchase of a special car for, a brilliant friend who had

　　degenerative bone disease, and it accurately describes many unflattering aspects

　　of his relationship with Lisa, including his original denial of paternity. But

　　other parts are purely fiction; Chrisann had taught Lisa at a very early age how

　　to drive, for example, but the book’s scene of “Jane” driving a truck across the

　　mountains alone at age five to find her father of course never happened. In

　　addition, there are little details in the novel that, in journalist parlance,

　　are too good to check, such as the head-snapping description of the character

　　based on Jobs in the very first sentence: “He was a man too busy to flush

　　toilets.”

　　On the surface, the novel’s fictional portrayal of Jobs seems harsh. Simpson

　　describes her main character as unable “to see any need to pander to the wishes

　　or whims of other people.” His hygiene is also as dubious as that of the real

　　Jobs. “He didn’t believe in deodorant and often professed that with a proper

　　diet and the peppermint castile soap, you would neither perspire nor smell.” But

　　the novel is lyrical and intricate on many levels, and by the end there is a

　　fuller picture of a man who loses control of the great company he had founded

　　and learns to appreciate the daughter he had abandoned. The final scene is of

　　him dancing with his daughter.

　　Jobs later said that he never read the novel. “I heard it was about me,” he told

　　me, “and if it was about me, I would have gotten really pissed off, and I didn’t

　　want to get pissed at my sister, so I didn’t read it.” However, he told the New

　　York Times a few months after the book appeared that he had read it and saw the

　　reflections of himself in the main character. “About 25% of it is totally me,

　　right down to the mannerisms,” he told the reporter, Steve Lohr. “And I’m

　　certainly not telling you which 25%.” His wife said that, in fact, Jobs glanced

　　at the book and asked her to read it for him to see what he should make of it.

　　Simpson sent the manuscript to Lisa before it was published, but at first she

　　didn’t read more than the opening. “In the first few pages, I was confronted

　　with my family, my anecdotes, my things, my thoughts, myself in the character

　　Jane,” she noted. “And sandwiched between the truths was invention—lies to me,

　　made more evident because of their dangerous proximity to the truth.” Lisa was

　　wounded, and she wrote a piece for the Harvard Advocate explaining why. Her

　　first draft was very bitter, then she toned it down a bit before she published

　　it. She felt violated by Simpson’s friendship. “I didn’t know, for those six

　　years, that Mona was collecting,” she wrote. “I didn’t know that as I sought her

　　consolations and took her advice, she, too, was taking.” Eventually Lisa

　　reconciled with Simpson. They went out to a coffee shop to discuss the book, and

　　Lisa told her that she hadn’t been able to finish it. Simpson told her she would

　　like the ending. Over the years Lisa had an on-and-off relationship with

　　Simpson, but it would be closer in some ways than the one she had with her

　　father.

　　Children

　　When Powell gave birth in 1991, a few months after her wedding to Jobs, their

　　child was known for two weeks as “baby boy Jobs,” because settling on a name was

　　proving only slightly less difficult than choosing a washing machine. Finally,

　　they named him Reed Paul Jobs. His middle name was that of Jobs’s father, and

　　his first name (both Jobs and Powell insist) was chosen because it sounded good

　　rather than because it was the name of Jobs’s college.

　　Reed turned out to be like his father in many ways: incisive and smart, with

　　intense eyes and a mesmerizing charm. But unlike his father, he had sweet

　　manners and a self-effacing grace. He was creative—as a kid he liked to dress in

　　costume and stay in character—and also a great student, interested in science.

　　He could replicate his father’s stare, but he was demonstrably affectionate and

　　seemed not to have an ounce of cruelty in his nature.

　　Erin Siena Jobs was born in 1995. She was a little quieter and sometimes

　　suffered from not getting much of her father’s attention. She picked up her

　　father’s interest in design and architecture, but she also learned to keep a bit

　　of an emotional distance, so as not to be hurt by his detachment.

　　The youngest child, Eve, was born in 1998, and she turned into a strong-willed,

　　funny firecracker who, neither needy nor intimidated, knew how to handle her

　　father, negotiate with him (and sometimes win), and even make fun of him. Her

　　father joked that she’s the one who will run Apple someday, if she doesn’t

　　become president of the United States.

　　Jobs developed a strong relationship with Reed, but with his daughters he was

　　more distant. As he would with others, he would occasionally focus on them, but

　　just as often would completely ignore them when he had other things on his mind.

　　“He focuses on his work, and at times he has not been there for the girls,”

　　Powell said. At one point Jobs marveled to his wife at how well their kids were

　　turning out, “especially since we’re not always there for them.” This amused,

　　and slightly annoyed, Powell, because she had given up her career when Reed

　　turned two and she decided she wanted to have more children.

　　In 1995 Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison threw a fortieth-birthday party for Jobs

　　filled with tech stars and moguls. Ellison had become a close friend, and he

　　would often take the Jobs family out on one of his many luxurious yachts. Reed

　　started referring to him as “our rich friend,” which was amusing evidence of how

　　his father refrained from ostentatious displays of wealth. The lesson Jobs

　　learned from his Buddhist days was that material possessions often cluttered

　　life rather than enriched it. “Every other CEO I know has a security detail,” he

　　said. “They’ve even got them at their homes. It’s a nutso way to live. We just

　　decided that’s not how we wanted to raise our kids.”UnknownTOY STORY

　　Buzz and Woody to the Rescue

　　Jeffrey Katzenberg

　　“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,” Walt Disney once said. That was the

　　type of attitude that appealed to Jobs. He admired Disney’s obsession with

　　detail and design, and he felt that there was a natural fit between Pixar and

　　the movie studio that Disney had founded.

　　The Walt Disney Company had licensed Pixar’s Computer Animation Production

　　System, and that made it the largest customer for Pixar’s computers. One day

　　Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney’s film division, invited Jobs down to the

　　Burbank studios to see the technology in operation. As the Disney folks were

　　showing him around, Jobs turned to Katzenberg and asked, “Is Disney happy with

　　Pixar?” With great exuberance, Katzenberg answered yes. Then Jobs asked, “Do you

　　think we at Pixar are happy with Disney?” Katzenberg said he assumed so. “No,

　　we’re not,” Jobs said. “We want to do a film with you. That would make us

　　happy.”

　　Katzenberg was willing. He admired John Lasseter’s animated shorts and had tried

　　unsuccessfully to lure him back to Disney. So Katzenberg invited the Pixar team

　　down to discuss partnering on a film. When Catmull, Jobs, and Lasseter got

　　settled at the conference table, Katzenberg was forthright. “John, since you

　　won’t come work for me,” he said, looking at Lasseter, “I’m going to make it

　　work this way.”

　　Just as the Disney company shared some traits with Pixar, so Katzenberg shared

　　some with Jobs. Both were charming when they wanted to be, and aggressive (or

　　worse) when it suited their moods or interests. Alvy Ray Smith, on the verge of

　　quitting Pixar, was at the meeting. “Katzenberg and Jobs impressed me as a lot

　　alike,” he recalled. “Tyrants with an amazing gift of gab.” Katzenberg was

　　delightfully aware of this. “Everybody thinks I’m a tyrant,” he told the Pixar

　　team. “I am a tyrant. But I’m usually right.” One can imagine Jobs saying the

　　same.

　　As befitted two men of equal passion, the negotiations between Katzenberg and

　　Jobs took months. Katzenberg insisted that Disney be given the rights to Pixar’s

　　proprietary technology for making 3-D animation. Jobs refused, and he ended up

　　winning that engagement. Jobs had his own demand: Pixar would have part

　　ownership of the film and its characters, sharing control of both video rights

　　and sequels. “If that’s what you want,” Katzenberg said, “we can just quit

　　talking and you can leave now.” Jobs stayed, conceding that point.

　　Lasseter was riveted as he watched the two wiry and tightly wound principals

　　parry and thrust. “Just to see Steve and Jeffrey go at it, I was in awe,” he

　　recalled. “It was like a fencing match. They were both masters.” But Katzenberg

　　went into the match with a saber, Jobs with a mere foil. Pixar was on the verge

　　of bankruptcy and needed a deal with Disney far more than Disney needed a deal

　　with Pixar. Plus, Disney could afford to finance the whole enterprise, and Pixar

　　couldn’t. The result was a deal, struck in May 1991, by which Disney would own

　　the picture and its characters outright, have creative control, and pay Pixar

　　about 12.5% of the ticket revenues. It had the option (but not the obligation)

　　to do Pixar’s next two films and the right to make (with or without Pixar)

　　sequels using the characters in the film. Disney could also kill the film at any

　　time with only a small penalty.

　　The idea that John Lasseter pitched was called “Toy Story.” It sprang from a

　　belief, which he and Jobs shared, that products have an essence to them, a

　　purpose for which they were made. If the object were to have feelings, these

　　would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of a glass, for

　　example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and

　　sad when empty. The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human.

　　The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their

　　purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of

　　being discarded or upstaged by newer toys. So a buddy movie pairing an old

　　favorite toy with a shiny new one would have an essential drama to it,

　　especially when the action revolved around the toys’ being separated from their

　　kid. The original treatment began, “Everyone has had the traumatic childhood

　　experience of losing a toy. Our story takes the toy’s point of view as he loses

　　and tries to regain the single thing most important to him: to be played with by

　　children. This is the reason for the existence of all toys. It is the emotional

　　foundation of their existence.”

　　The two main characters went through many iterations before they ended up as

　　Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Every couple of weeks, Lasseter and his team would put

　　together their latest set of storyboards or footage to show the folks at Disney.

　　In early screen tests, Pixar showed off its amazing technology by, for example,

　　producing a scene of Woody rustling around on top of a dresser while the light

　　rippling in through a Venetian blind cast shadows on his plaid shirt—an effect

　　that would have been almost impossible to render by hand. Impressing Disney with

　　the plot, however, was more difficult. At each presentation by Pixar, Katzenberg

　　would tear much of it up, barking out his detailed comments and notes. And a

　　cadre of clipboard-carrying flunkies was on hand to make sure every suggestion

　　and whim uttered by Katzenberg received follow-up treatment.

　　Katzenberg’s big push was to add more edginess to the two main characters. It

　　may be an animated movie called Toy Story, he said, but it should not be aimed

　　only at children. “At first there was no drama, no real story, and no conflict,”

　　Katzenberg recalled. He suggested that Lasseter watch some classic buddy movies,

　　such as The Defiant Ones and 48 Hours, in which two characters with different

　　attitudes are thrown together and have to bond. In addition, he kept pushing for

　　what he called “edge,” and that meant making Woody’s character more jealous,

　　mean, and belligerent toward Buzz, the new interloper in the toy box. “It’s a

　　toy-eat-toy world,” Woody says at one point, after pushing Buzz out of a window.

　　After many rounds of notes from Katzenberg and other Disney execs, Woody had

　　been stripped of almost all charm. In one scene he throws the other toys off the

　　bed and orders Slinky to come help. When Slinky hesitates, Woody barks, “Who

　　said your job was to think, spring-wiener?” Slinky then asks a question that the

　　Pixar team members would soon be asking themselves: “Why is the cowboy so

　　scary?” As Tom Hanks, who had signed up to be Woody’s voice, exclaimed at one

　　point, “This guy’s a real jerk!”

　　Cut!

　　Lasseter and his Pixar team had the first half of the movie ready to screen by

　　November 1993, so they brought it down to Burbank to show to Katzenberg and

　　other Disney executives. Peter Schneider, the head of feature animation, had

　　never been enamored of Katzenberg’s idea of having outsiders make animation for

　　Disney, and he declared it a mess and ordered that production be stopped.

　　Katzenberg agreed. “Why is this so terrible?” he asked a colleague, Tom

　　Schumacher. “Because it’s not their movie anymore,” Schumacher bluntly replied.

　　He later explained, “They were following Katzenberg’s notes, and the project had

　　been driven completely off-track.”

　　Lasseter realized that Schumacher was right. “I sat there and I was pretty much

　　embarrassed with what was on the screen,” he recalled. “It was a story filled

　　with the most unhappy, mean characters that I’ve ever seen.” He asked Disney for

　　the chance to retreat back to Pixar and rework the script. Katzenberg was

　　supportive.

　　Jobs did not insert himself much into the creative process. Given his proclivity

　　to be in control, especially on matters of taste and design, this self-restraint

　　was a testament to his respect for Lasseter and the other artists at Pixar—as

　　well as for the ability of Lasseter and Catmull to keep him at bay. He did,

　　however, help manage the relationship with Disney, and the Pixar team

　　appreciated that. When Katzenberg and Schneider halted production on Toy Story,

　　Jobs kept the work going with his own personal funding. And he took their side

　　against Katzenberg. “He had Toy Story all messed up,” Jobs later said. “He

　　wanted Woody to be a bad guy, and when he shut us down we kind of kicked him out

　　and said, ‘This isn’t what we want,’ and did it the way we always wanted.”

　　The Pixar team came back with a new script three months later. The character of

　　Woody morphed from being a tyrannical boss of Andy’s other toys to being their

　　wise leader. His jealousy after the arrival of Buzz Lightyear was portrayed more

　　sympathetically, and it was set to the strains of a Randy Newman song, “Strange

　　Things.” The scene in which Woody pushed Buzz out of the window was rewritten to

　　make Buzz’s fall the result of an accident triggered by a little trick Woody

　　initiated involving a Luxo lamp. Katzenberg & Co. approved the new approach, and

　　by February 1994 the film was back in production.

　　Katzenberg had been impressed with Jobs’s focus on keeping costs under control.

　　“Even in the early budgeting process, Steve was very eager to do it as

　　efficiently as possible,” he said. But the $17 million production budget was

　　proving inadequate, especially given the major revision that was necessary after

　　Katzenberg had pushed them to make Woody too edgy. So Jobs demanded more in

　　order to complete the film right. “Listen, we made a deal,” Katzenberg told him.

　　“We gave you business control, and you agreed to do it for the amount we

　　offered.” Jobs was furious. He would call Katzenberg by phone or fly down to

　　visit him and be, in Katzenberg’s words, “as wildly relentless as only Steve can

　　be.” Jobs insisted that Disney was liable for the cost overruns because

　　Katzenberg had so badly mangled the original concept that it required extra work

　　to restore things. “Wait a minute!” Katzenberg shot back. “We were helping you.

　　You got the benefit of our creative help, and now you want us to pay you for

　　that.” It was a case of two control freaks arguing about who was doing the other

　　a favor.

　　Ed Catmull, more diplomatic than Jobs, was able to reach a compromise new

　　budget. “I had a much more positive view of Jeffrey than some of the folks

　　working on the film did,” he said. But the incident did prompt Jobs to start

　　plotting about how to have more leverage with Disney in the future. He did not

　　like being a mere contractor; he liked being in control. That meant Pixar would

　　have to bring its own funding to projects in the future, and it would need a new

　　deal with Disney.

　　As the film progressed, Jobs became ever more excited about it. He had been

　　talking to various companies, ranging from Hallmark to Microsoft, about selling

　　Pixar, but watching Woody and Buzz come to life made him realize that he might

　　be on the verge of transforming the movie industry. As scenes from the movie

　　were finished, he watched them repeatedly and had friends come by his home to

　　share his new passion. “I can’t tell you the number of versions of Toy Story I

　　saw before it came out,” said Larry Ellison. “It eventually became a form of

　　torture. I’d go over there and see the latest 10% improvement. Steve is obsessed

　　with getting it right—both the story and the technology—and isn’t satisfied with

　　anything less than perfection.”

　　Jobs’s sense that his investments in Pixar might actually pay off was reinforced

　　when Disney invited him to attend a gala press preview of scenes from Pocahontas

　　in January 1995 in a tent in Manhattan’s Central Park. At the event, Disney CEO

　　Michael Eisner announced that Pocahontas would have its premiere in front of

　　100,000 people on eighty-foot-high screens on the Great Lawn of Central Park.

　　Jobs was a master showman who knew how to stage great premieres, but even he was

　　astounded by this plan. Buzz Lightyear’s great exhortation—“To infinity and

　　beyond!”—suddenly seemed worth heeding.

　　Jobs decided that the release of Toy Story that November would be the occasion

　　to take Pixar public. Even the usually eager investment bankers were dubious and

　　said it couldn’t happen. Pixar had spent five years hemorrhaging money. But Jobs

　　was determined. “I was nervous and argued that we should wait until after our

　　second movie,” Lasseter recalled. “Steve overruled me and said we needed the

　　cash so we could put up half the money for our films and renegotiate the Disney

　　deal.”

　　To Infinity!

　　There were two premieres of Toy Story in November 1995. Disney organized one at

　　El Capitan, a grand old theater in Los Angeles, and built a fun house next door

　　featuring the characters. Pixar was given a handful of passes, but the evening

　　and its celebrity guest list was very much a Disney production; Jobs did not

　　even attend. Instead, the next night he rented the Regency, a similar theater in

　　San Francisco, and held his own premiere. Instead of Tom Hanks and Steve Martin,

　　the guests were Silicon Valley celebrities, such as Larry Ellison and Andy

　　Grove. This was clearly Jobs’s show; he, not Lasseter, took the stage to

　　introduce the movie.

　　The dueling premieres highlighted a festering issue: Was Toy Story a Disney or a

　　Pixar movie? Was Pixar merely an animation contractor helping Disney make

　　movies? Or was Disney merely a distributor and marketer helping Pixar roll out

　　its movies? The answer was somewhere in between. The question would be whether

　　the egos involved, mainly those of Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs, could get to

　　such a partnership.

　　The stakes were raised when Toy Story opened to blockbuster commercial and

　　critical success. It recouped its cost the first weekend, with a domestic

　　opening of $30 million, and it went on to become the top-grossing film of the

　　year, beating Batman Forever and Apollo 13, with $192 million in receipts

　　domestically and a total of $362 million worldwide. According to the review

　　aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of the seventy-three critics surveyed gave it a

　　positive review. Time’s Richard Corliss called it “the year’s most inventive

　　comedy,” David Ansen of Newsweek pronounced it a “marvel,” and Janet Maslin of

　　the New York Times recommended it both for children and adults as “a work of

　　incredible cleverness in the best two-tiered Disney tradition.”

　　The only rub for Jobs was that reviewers such as Maslin wrote of the “Disney

　　tradition,” not the emergence of Pixar. After reading her review, he decided he

　　had to go on the offensive to raise Pixar’s profile. When he and Lasseter went

　　on the Charlie Rose show, Jobs emphasized that Toy Story was a Pixar movie, and

　　he even tried to highlight the historic nature of a new studio being born.

　　“Since Snow White was released, every major studio has tried to break into the

　　animation business, and until now Disney was the only studio that had ever made

　　a feature animated film that was a blockbuster,” he told Rose. “Pixar has now

　　become the second studio to do that.”

　　Jobs made a point of casting Disney as merely the distributor of a Pixar film.

　　“He kept saying, ‘We at Pixar are the real thing and you Disney guys are shit,’”

　　recalled Michael Eisner. “But we were the ones who made Toy Story work. We

　　helped shape the movie, and we pulled together all of our divisions, from our

　　consumer marketers to the Disney Channel, to make it a hit.” Jobs came to the

　　conclusion that the fundamental issue—Whose movie was it?—would have to be

　　settled contractually rather than by a war of words. “After Toy Story’s

　　success,” he said, “I realized that we needed to cut a new deal with Disney if

　　we were ever to build a studio and not just be a work-for-hire place.” But in

　　order to sit down with Disney on an equal basis, Pixar had to bring money to the

　　table. That required a successful IPO.

　　The public offering occurred exactly one week after Toy Story’s opening. Jobs

　　had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off,

　　big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a celebration was planned at the San Francisco

　　office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the shares were to go on sale.

　　The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about $14, to

　　be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing them at $22, which would give

　　the company more money if the offering was a success. It was, beyond even his

　　wildest hopes. It exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. In the first

　　half hour, the stock shot up to $45, and trading had to be delayed because there

　　were too many buy orders. It then went up even further, to $49, before settling

　　back to close the day at $39.

　　Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let

　　him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the

　　shares he had retained—80% of the company—were worth more than twenty times

　　that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he’d made when

　　Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of the New York Times that

　　the money did not mean much to him. “There’s no yacht in my future,” he said.

　　“I’ve never done this for the money.”

　　The successful IPO meant that Pixar would no longer have to be dependent on

　　Disney to finance its movies. That was just the leverage Jobs wanted. “Because

　　we could now fund half the cost of our movies, I could demand half the profits,”

　　he recalled. “But more important, I wanted co-branding. These were to be Pixar

　　as well as Disney movies.”

　　Jobs flew down to have lunch with Eisner, who was stunned at his audacity. They

　　had a three-picture deal, and Pixar had made only one. Each side had its own

　　nuclear weapons. After an acrimonious split with Eisner, Katzenberg had left

　　Disney and become a cofounder, with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, of

　　DreamWorks SKG. If Eisner didn’t agree to a new deal with Pixar, Jobs said, then

　　Pixar would go to another studio, such as Katzenberg’s, once the three-picture

　　deal was done. In Eisner’s hand was the threat that Disney could, if that

　　happened, make its own sequels to Toy Story, using Woody and Buzz and all of the

　　characters that Lasseter had created. “That would have been like molesting our

　　children,” Jobs later recalled. “John started crying when he considered that

　　possibility.”

　　So they hammered out a new arrangement. Eisner agreed to let Pixar put up half

　　the money for future films and in return take half of the profits. “He didn’t

　　think we could have many hits, so he thought he was saving himself some money,”

　　said Jobs. “Ultimately that was great for us, because Pixar would have ten

　　blockbusters in a row.” They also agreed on co-branding, though that took a lot

　　of haggling to define. “I took the position that it’s a Disney movie, but

　　eventually I relented,” Eisner recalled. “We start negotiating how big the

　　letters in ‘Disney’ are going to be, how big is ‘Pixar’ going to be, just like

　　four-year-olds.” But by the beginning of 1997 they had a deal, for five films

　　over the course of ten years, and even parted as friends, at least for the time

　　being. “Eisner was reasonable and fair to me then,” Jobs later said. “But

　　eventually, over the course of a decade, I came to the conclusion that he was a

　　dark man.”

　　In a letter to Pixar shareholders, Jobs explained that winning the right to have

　　equal branding with Disney on all the movies, as well as advertising and toys,

　　was the most important aspect of the deal. “We want Pixar to grow into a brand

　　that embodies the same level of trust as the Disney brand,” he wrote. “But in

　　order for Pixar to earn this trust, consumers must know that Pixar is creating

　　the films.” Jobs was known during his career for creating great products. But

　　just as significant was his ability to create great companies with valuable

　　brands. And he created two of the best of his era: Apple and Pixar.UnknownTHE SECOND COMING

　　What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last . . .

　　Steve Jobs, 1996

　　Things Fall Apart

　　When Jobs unveiled the NeXT computer in 1988, there was a burst of excitement.

　　That fizzled when the computer finally went on sale the following year. Jobs’s

　　ability to dazzle, intimidate, and spin the press began to fail him, and there

　　was a series of stories on the company’s woes. “NeXT is incompatible with other

　　computers at a time when the industry is moving toward interchangeable systems,”

　　Bart Ziegler of Associated Press reported. “Because relatively little software

　　exists to run on NeXT, it has a hard time attracting customers.”

　　NeXT tried to reposition itself as the leader in a new category, personal

　　workstations, for people who wanted the power of a workstation and the

　　friendliness of a personal computer. But those customers were by now buying them

　　from fast-growing Sun Microsystems. Revenues for NeXT in 1990 were $28 million;

　　Sun made $2.5 billion that year. IBM abandoned its deal to license the NeXT

　　software, so Jobs was forced to do something against his nature: Despite his

　　ingrained belief that hardware and software should be integrally linked, he

　　agreed in January 1992 to license the NeXTSTEP operating system to run on other

　　computers.

　　One surprising defender of Jobs was Jean-Louis Gassée, who had bumped elbows

　　with Jobs when he replaced him at Apple and subsequently been ousted himself. He

　　wrote an article extolling the creativity of NeXT products. “NeXT might not be

　　Apple,” Gassée argued, “but Steve is still Steve.” A few days later his wife

　　answered a knock on the door and went running upstairs to tell him that Jobs was

　　standing there. He thanked Gassée for the article and invited him to an event

　　where Intel’s Andy Grove would join Jobs in announcing that NeXTSTEP would be

　　ported to the IBM/Intel platform. “I sat next to Steve’s father, Paul Jobs, a

　　movingly dignified individual,” Gassée recalled. “He raised a difficult son, but

　　he was proud and happy to see him onstage with Andy Grove.”

　　A year later Jobs took the inevitable subsequent step: He gave up making the

　　hardware altogether. This was a painful decision, just as it had been when he

　　gave up making hardware at Pixar. He cared about all aspects of his products,

　　but the hardware was a particular passion. He was energized by great design,

　　obsessed over manufacturing details, and would spend hours watching his robots

　　make his perfect machines. But now he had to lay off more than half his

　　workforce, sell his beloved factory to Canon (which auctioned off the fancy

　　furniture), and satisfy himself with a company that tried to license an

　　operating system to manufacturers of uninspired machines.

　　By the mid-1990s Jobs was finding some pleasure in his new family life and his

　　astonishing triumph in the movie business, but he despaired about the personal

　　computer industry. “Innovation has virtually ceased,” he told Gary Wolf of Wired

　　at the end of 1995. “Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. Apple

　　lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages.”

　　He was also gloomy in an interview with Tony Perkins and the editors of Red

　　Herring. First, he displayed the “Bad Steve” side of his personality. Soon after

　　Perkins and his colleagues arrived, Jobs slipped out the back door “for a walk,”

　　and he didn’t return for forty-five minutes. When the magazine’s photographer

　　began taking pictures, he snapped at her sarcastically and made her stop.

　　Perkins later noted, “Manipulation, selfishness, or downright rudeness, we

　　couldn’t figure out the motivation behind his madness.” When he finally settled

　　down for the interview, he said that even the advent of the web would do little

　　to stop Microsoft’s domination. “Windows has won,” he said. “It beat the Mac,

　　unfortunately, it beat UNIX, it beat OS/2. An inferior product won.”

　　Apple Falling

　　For a few years after Jobs was ousted, Apple was able to coast comfortably with

　　a high profit margin based on its temporary dominance in desktop publishing.

　　Feeling like a genius back in 1987, John Sculley had made a series of

　　proclamations that nowadays sound embarrassing. Jobs wanted Apple “to become a

　　wonderful consumer products company,” Sculley wrote. “This was a lunatic plan. .

　　. . Apple would never be a consumer products company. . . . We couldn’t bend

　　reality to all our dreams of changing the world. . . . High tech could not be

　　designed and sold as a consumer product.”

　　Jobs was appalled, and he became angry and contemptuous as Sculley presided over

　　a steady decline in market share for Apple in the early 1990s. “Sculley

　　destroyed Apple by bringing in corrupt people and corrupt values,” Jobs later

　　lamented. “They cared about making money—for themselves mainly, and also for

　　Apple—rather than making great products.” He felt that Sculley’s drive for

　　profits came at the expense of gaining market share. “Macintosh lost to

　　Microsoft because Sculley insisted on milking all the profits he could get

　　rather than improving the product and making it affordable.” As a result, the

　　profits eventually disappeared.

　　It had taken Microsoft a few years to replicate Macintosh’s graphical user

　　interface, but by 1990 it had come out with Windows 3.0, which began the

　　company’s march to dominance in the desktop market. Windows 95, which was

　　released in 1995, became the most successful operating system ever, and

　　Macintosh sales began to collapse. “Microsoft simply ripped off what other

　　people did,” Jobs later said. “Apple deserved it. After I left, it didn’t invent

　　anything new. The Mac hardly improved. It was a sitting duck for Microsoft.”

　　His frustration with Apple was evident when he gave a talk to a Stanford

　　Business School club at the home of a student, who asked him to sign a Macintosh

　　keyboard. Jobs agreed to do so if he could remove the keys that had been added

　　to the Mac after he left. He pulled out his car keys and pried off the four

　　arrow cursor keys, which he had once banned, as well as the top row of F1, F2,

　　F3 . . . function keys. “I’m changing the world one keyboard at a time,” he

　　deadpanned. Then he signed the mutilated keyboard.

　　During his 1995 Christmas vacation in Kona Village, Hawaii, Jobs went walking

　　along the beach with his friend Larry Ellison, the irrepressible Oracle

　　chairman. They discussed making a takeover bid for Apple and restoring Jobs as

　　its head. Ellison said he could line up $3 billion in financing: “I will buy

　　Apple, you will get 25% of it right away for being CEO, and we can restore it to

　　its past glory.” But Jobs demurred. “I decided I’m not a hostile-takeover kind

　　of guy,” he explained. “If they had asked me to come back, it might have been

　　different.”

　　By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the

　　late 1980s. Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple’s European

　　operations who had replaced Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to

　　Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, and he was ousted in February 1996

　　and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was CEO of National

　　Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock

　　price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was

　　pushing other stocks into the stratosphere.

　　Amelio was not a fan of Jobs. Their first meeting had been in 1994, just after

　　Amelio was elected to the Apple board. Jobs had called him and announced, “I

　　want to come over and see you.” Amelio invited him over to his office at

　　National Semiconductor, and he later recalled watching through the glass wall of

　　his office as Jobs arrived. He looked “rather like a boxer, aggressive and

　　elusively graceful, or like an elegant jungle cat ready to spring at its prey.”

　　After a few minutes of pleasantries—far more than Jobs usually engaged in—he

　　abruptly announced the reason for his visit. He wanted Amelio to help him return

　　to Apple as the CEO. “There’s only one person who can rally the Apple troops,”

　　Jobs said, “only one person who can straighten out the company.” The Macintosh

　　era had passed, Jobs argued, and it was now time for Apple to create something

　　new that was just as innovative.

　　“If the Mac is dead, what’s going to replace it?” Amelio asked. Jobs’s reply

　　didn’t impress him. “Steve didn’t seem to have a clear answer,” Amelio later

　　said. “He seemed to have a set of one-liners.” Amelio felt he was witnessing

　　Jobs’s reality distortion field and was proud to be immune to it. He shooed Jobs

　　unceremoniously out of his office.

　　By the summer of 1996 Amelio realized that he had a serious problem. Apple was

　　pinning its hopes on creating a new operating system, called Copland, but Amelio

　　had discovered soon after becoming CEO that it was a bloated piece of vaporware

　　that would not solve Apple’s needs for better networking and memory protection,

　　nor would it be ready to ship as scheduled in 1997. He publicly promised that he

　　would quickly find an alternative. His problem was that he didn’t have one.

　　So Apple needed a partner, one that could make a stable operating system,

　　preferably one that was UNIX-like and had an object-oriented application layer.

　　There was one company that could obviously supply such software—NeXT—but it

　　would take a while for Apple to focus on it.

　　Apple first homed in on a company that had been started by Jean-Louis Gassée,

　　called Be. Gassée began negotiating the sale of Be to Apple, but in August 1996

　　he overplayed his hand at a meeting with Amelio in Hawaii. He said he wanted to

　　bring his fifty-person team to Apple, and he asked for 15% of the company, worth

　　about $500 million. Amelio was stunned. Apple calculated that Be was worth about

　　$50 million. After a few offers and counteroffers, Gassée refused to budge from

　　demanding at least $275 million. He thought that Apple had no alternatives. It

　　got back to Amelio that Gassée said, “I’ve got them by the balls, and I’m going

　　to squeeze until it hurts.” This did not please Amelio.

　　Apple’s chief technology officer, Ellen Hancock, argued for going with Sun’s

　　UNIX-based Solaris operating system, even though it did not yet have a friendly

　　user interface. Amelio began to favor using, of all things, Microsoft’s Windows

　　NT, which he felt could be rejiggered on the surface to look and feel just like

　　a Mac while being compatible with the wide range of software available to

　　Windows users. Bill Gates, eager to make a deal, began personally calling

　　Amelio.

　　There was, of course, one other option. Two years earlier Macworld magazine

　　columnist (and former Apple software evangelist) Guy Kawasaki had published a

　　parody press release joking that Apple was buying NeXT and making Jobs its CEO.

　　In the spoof Mike Markkula asked Jobs, “Do you want to spend the rest of your

　　life selling UNIX with a sugarcoating, or change the world?” Jobs responded,

　　“Because I’m now a father, I needed a steadier source of income.” The release

　　noted that “because of his experience at Next, he is expected to bring a

　　newfound sense of humility back to Apple.” It also quoted Bill Gates as saying

　　there would now be more innovations from Jobs that Microsoft could copy.

　　Everything in the press release was meant as a joke, of course. But reality has

　　an odd habit of catching up with satire.

　　Slouching toward Cupertino

　　“Does anyone know Steve well enough to call him on this?” Amelio asked his

　　staff. Because his encounter with Jobs two years earlier had ended badly, Amelio

　　didn’t want to make the call himself. But as it turned out, he didn’t need to.

　　Apple was already getting incoming pings from NeXT. A midlevel product marketer

　　at NeXT, Garrett Rice, had simply picked up the phone and, without consulting

　　Jobs, called Ellen Hancock to see if she might be interested in taking a look at

　　its software. She sent someone to meet with him.

　　By Thanksgiving of 1996 the two companies had begun midlevel talks, and Jobs

　　picked up the phone to call Amelio directly. “I’m on my way to Japan, but I’ll

　　be back in a week and I’d like to see you as soon as I return,” he said. “Don’t

　　make any decision until we can get together.” Amelio, despite his earlier

　　experience with Jobs, was thrilled to hear from him and entranced by the

　　possibility of working with him. “For me, the phone call with Steve was like

　　inhaling the flavors of a great bottle of vintage wine,” he recalled. He gave

　　his assurance he would make no deal with Be or anyone else before they got

　　together.

　　For Jobs, the contest against Be was both professional and personal. NeXT was

　　failing, and the prospect of being bought by Apple was a tantalizing lifeline.

　　In addition, Jobs held grudges, sometimes passionately, and Gassée was near the

　　top of his list, despite the fact that they had seemed to reconcile when Jobs

　　was at NeXT. “Gassée is one of the few people in my life I would say is truly

　　horrible,” Jobs later insisted, unfairly. “He knifed me in the back in 1985.”

　　Sculley, to his credit, had at least been gentlemanly enough to knife Jobs in

　　the front.

　　On December 2, 1996, Steve Jobs set foot on Apple’s Cupertino campus for the

　　first time since his ouster eleven years earlier. In the executive conference

　　room, he met Amelio and Hancock to make the pitch for NeXT. Once again he was

　　scribbling on the whiteboard there, this time giving his lecture about the four

　　waves of computer systems that had culminated, at least in his telling, with the

　　launch of NeXT. He was at his most seductive, despite the fact that he was

　　speaking to two people he didn’t respect. He was particularly adroit at feigning

　　modesty. “It’s probably a totally crazy idea,” he said, but if they found it

　　appealing, “I’ll structure any kind of deal you want—license the software, sell

　　you the company, whatever.” He was, in fact, eager to sell everything, and he

　　pushed that approach. “When you take a close look, you’ll decide you want more

　　than my software,” he told them. “You’ll want to buy the whole company and take

　　all the people.”

　　A few weeks later Jobs and his family went to Hawaii for Christmas vacation.

　　Larry Ellison was also there, as he had been the year before. “You know, Larry,

　　I think I’ve found a way for me to get back into Apple and get control of it

　　without you having to buy it,” Jobs said as they walked along the shore. Ellison

　　recalled, “He explained his strategy, which was getting Apple to buy NeXT, then

　　he would go on the board and be one step away from being CEO.” Ellison thought

　　that Jobs was missing a key point. “But Steve, there’s one thing I don’t

　　understand,” he said. “If we don’t buy the company, how can we make any money?”

　　It was a reminder of how different their desires were. Jobs put his hand on

　　Ellison’s left shoulder, pulled him so close that their noses almost touched,

　　and said, “Larry, this is why it’s really important that I’m your friend. You

　　don’t need any more money.”

　　Ellison recalled that his own answer was almost a whine: “Well, I may not need

　　the money, but why should some fund manager at Fidelity get the money? Why

　　should someone else get it? Why shouldn’t it be us?”

　　“I think if I went back to Apple, and I didn’t own any of Apple, and you didn’t

　　own any of Apple, I’d have the moral high ground,” Jobs replied.

　　“Steve, that’s really expensive real estate, this moral high ground,” said

　　Ellison. “Look, Steve, you’re my best friend, and Apple is your company. I’ll do

　　whatever you want.” Although Jobs later said that he was not plotting to take

　　over Apple at the time, Ellison thought it was inevitable. “Anyone who spent

　　more than a half hour with Amelio would realize that he couldn’t do anything but

　　self-destruct,” he later said.

　　The big bakeoff between NeXT and Be was held at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo

　　Alto on December 10, in front of Amelio, Hancock, and six other Apple

　　executives. NeXT went first, with Avie Tevanian demonstrating the software while

　　Jobs displayed his hypnotizing salesmanship. They showed how the software could

　　play four video clips on the screen at once, create multimedia, and link to the

　　Internet. “Steve’s sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling,”

　　according to Amelio. “He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were

　　describing a performance of Olivier as Macbeth.”

　　Gassée came in afterward, but he acted as if he had the deal in his hand. He

　　provided no new presentation. He simply said that the Apple team knew the

　　capabilities of the Be OS and asked if they had any further questions. It was a

　　short session. While Gassée was presenting, Jobs and Tevanian walked the streets

　　of Palo Alto. After a while they bumped into one of the Apple executives who had

　　been at the meetings. “You’re going to win this,” he told them.

　　Tevanian later said that this was no surprise: “We had better technology, we had

　　a solution that was complete, and we had Steve.” Amelio knew that bringing Jobs

　　back into the fold would be a double-edged sword, but the same was true of

　　bringing Gassée back. Larry Tesler, one of the Macintosh veterans from the old

　　days, recommended to Amelio that he choose NeXT, but added, “Whatever company

　　you choose, you’ll get someone who will take your job away, Steve or

　　Jean-Louis.”

　　Amelio opted for Jobs. He called Jobs to say that he planned to propose to the

　　Apple board that he be authorized to negotiate a purchase of NeXT. Would he like

　　to be at the meeting? Jobs said he would. When he walked in, there was an

　　emotional moment when he saw Mike Markkula. They had not spoken since Markkula,

　　once his mentor and father figure, had sided with Sculley there back in 1985.

　　Jobs walked over and shook his hand.

　　Jobs invited Amelio to come to his house in Palo Alto so they could negotiate in

　　a friendly setting. When Amelio arrived in his classic 1973 Mercedes, Jobs was

　　impressed; he liked the car. In the kitchen, which had finally been renovated,

　　Jobs put a kettle on for tea, and then they sat at the wooden table in front of

　　the open-hearth pizza oven. The financial part of the negotiations went

　　smoothly; Jobs was eager not to make Gassée’s mistake of overreaching. He

　　suggested that Apple pay $12 a share for NeXT. That would amount to about $500

　　million. Amelio said that was too high. He countered with $10 a share, or just

　　over $400 million. Unlike Be, NeXT had an actual product, real revenues, and a

　　great team, but Jobs was nevertheless pleasantly surprised at that counteroffer.

　　He accepted immediately.

　　One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio

　　insisted that he needed to “have skin in the game” and take the payout in stock

　　that he would agree to hold for at least a year. Jobs resisted. Finally, they

　　compromised: Jobs would take $120 million in cash and $37 million in stock, and

　　he pledged to hold the stock for at least six months.

　　As usual Jobs wanted to have some of their conversation while taking a walk.

　　While they ambled around Palo Alto, he made a pitch to be put on Apple’s board.

　　Amelio tried to deflect it, saying there was too much history to do something

　　like that too quickly. “Gil, that really hurts,” Jobs said. “This was my

　　company. I’ve been left out since that horrible day with Sculley.” Amelio said

　　he understood, but he was not sure what the board would want. When he was about

　　to begin his negotiations with Jobs, he had made a mental note to “move ahead

　　with logic as my drill sergeant” and “sidestep the charisma.” But during the

　　walk he, like so many others, was caught in Jobs’s force field. “I was hooked in

　　by Steve’s energy and enthusiasm,” he recalled.

　　After circling the long blocks a couple of times, they returned to the house

　　just as Laurene and the kids were arriving home. They all celebrated the easy

　　negotiations, then Amelio rode off in his Mercedes. “He made me feel like a

　　lifelong friend,” Amelio recalled. Jobs indeed had a way of doing that. Later,

　　after Jobs had engineered his ouster, Amelio would look back on Jobs’s

　　friendliness that day and note wistfully, “As I would painfully discover, it was

　　merely one facet of an extremely complex personality.”

　　After informing Gassée that Apple was buying NeXT, Amelio had what turned out to

　　be an even more uncomfortable task: telling Bill Gates. “He went into orbit,”

　　Amelio recalled. Gates found it ridiculous, but perhaps not surprising, that

　　Jobs had pulled off this coup. “Do you really think Steve Jobs has anything

　　there?” Gates asked Amelio. “I know his technology, it’s nothing but a

　　warmed-over UNIX, and you’ll never be able to make it work on your machines.”

　　Gates, like Jobs, had a way of working himself up, and he did so now: “Don’t you

　　understand that Steve doesn’t know anything about technology? He’s just a super

　　salesman. I can’t believe you’re making such a stupid decision. . . . He doesn’t

　　know anything about engineering, and 99% of what he says and thinks is wrong.

　　What the hell are you buying that garbage for?”

　　Years later, when I raised it with him, Gates did not recall being that upset.

　　The purchase of NeXT, he argued, did not really give Apple a new operating

　　system. “Amelio paid a lot for NeXT, and let’s be frank, the NeXT OS was never

　　really used.” Instead the purchase ended up bringing in Avie Tevanian, who could

　　help the existing Apple operating system evolve so that it eventually

　　incorporated the kernel of the NeXT technology. Gates knew that the deal was

　　destined to bring Jobs back to power. “But that was a twist of fate,” he said.

　　“What they ended up buying was a guy who most people would not have predicted

　　would be a great CEO, because he didn’t have much experience at it, but he was a

　　brilliant guy with great design taste and great engineering taste. He suppressed

　　his craziness enough to get himself appointed interim CEO.”

　　Despite what both Ellison and Gates believed, Jobs had deeply conflicted

　　feelings about whether he wanted to return to an active role at Apple, at least

　　while Amelio was there. A few days before the NeXT purchase was due to be

　　announced, Amelio asked Jobs to rejoin Apple full-time and take charge of

　　operating system development. Jobs, however, kept deflecting Amelio’s request.

　　Finally, on the day that he was scheduled to make the big announcement, Amelio

　　called Jobs in. He needed an answer. “Steve, do you just want to take your money

　　and leave?” Amelio asked. “It’s okay if that’s what you want.” Jobs did not

　　answer; he just stared. “Do you want to be on the payroll? An advisor?” Again

　　Jobs stayed silent. Amelio went out and grabbed Jobs’s lawyer, Larry Sonsini,

　　and asked what he thought Jobs wanted. “Beats me,” Sonsini said. So Amelio went

　　back behind closed doors with Jobs and gave it one more try. “Steve, what’s on

　　your mind? What are you feeling? Please, I need a decision now.”

　　“I didn’t get any sleep last night,” Jobs replied.

　　“Why? What’s the problem?”

　　“I was thinking about all the things that need to be done and about the deal

　　we’re making, and it’s all running together for me. I’m really tired now and not

　　thinking clearly. I just don’t want to be asked any more questions.”

　　Amelio said that wasn’t possible. He needed to say something.

　　Finally Jobs answered, “Look, if you have to tell them something, just say

　　advisor to the chairman.” And that is what Amelio did.

　　The announcement was made that evening—December 20, 1996—in front of 250

　　cheering employees at Apple headquarters. Amelio did as Jobs had requested and

　　described his new role as merely that of a part-time advisor. Instead of

　　appearing from the wings of the stage, Jobs walked in from the rear of the

　　auditorium and ambled down the aisle. Amelio had told the gathering that Jobs

　　would be too tired to say anything, but by then he had been energized by the

　　applause. “I’m very excited,” Jobs said. “I’m looking forward to get to reknow

　　some old colleagues.” Louise Kehoe of the Financial Times came up to the stage

　　afterward and asked Jobs, sounding almost accusatory, whether he was going to

　　end up taking over Apple. “Oh no, Louise,” he said. “There are a lot of other

　　things going on in my life now. I have a family. I am involved at Pixar. My time

　　is limited, but I hope I can share some ideas.”

　　The next day Jobs drove to Pixar. He had fallen increasingly in love with the

　　place, and he wanted to let the crew there know he was still going to be

　　president and deeply involved. But the Pixar people were happy to see him go

　　back to Apple part-time; a little less of Jobs’s focus would be a good thing. He

　　was useful when there were big negotiations, but he could be dangerous when he

　　had too much time on his hands. When he arrived at Pixar that day, he went to

　　Lasseter’s office and explained that even just being an advisor at Apple would

　　take up a lot of his time. He said he wanted Lasseter’s blessing. “I keep

　　thinking about all the time away from my family this will cause, and the time

　　away from the other family at Pixar,” Jobs said. “But the only reason I want to

　　do it is that the world will be a better place with Apple in it.”

　　Lasseter smiled gently. “You have my blessing,” he said.UnknownTHE RESTORATION

　　The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win

　　Amelio calling up Wozniak as Jobs hangs back, 1997

　　Hovering Backstage

　　“It’s rare that you see an artist in his thirties or forties able to really

　　contribute something amazing,” Jobs declared as he was about to turn thirty.

　　That held true for Jobs in his thirties, during the decade that began with his

　　ouster from Apple in 1985. But after turning forty in 1995, he flourished. Toy

　　Story was released that year, and the following year Apple’s purchase of NeXT

　　offered him reentry into the company he had founded. In returning to Apple, Jobs

　　would show that even people over forty could be great innovators. Having

　　transformed personal computers in his twenties, he would now help to do the same

　　for music players, the recording industry’s business model, mobile phones, apps,

　　tablet computers, books, and journalism.

　　He had told Larry Ellison that his return strategy was to sell NeXT to Apple,

　　get appointed to the board, and be there ready when CEO Gil Amelio stumbled.

　　Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by

　　money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption

　　needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how

　　high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead his ego needs and personal drives

　　led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual

　　legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company.

　　He wanted to be in the pantheon with, indeed a notch above, people like Edwin

　　Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all this was

　　to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom.

　　And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant,

　　reluctant, perhaps coy.

　　He returned to Apple officially in January 1997 as a part-time advisor, as he

　　had told Amelio he would. He began to assert himself in some personnel areas,

　　especially in protecting his people who had made the transition from NeXT. But

　　in most other ways he was unusually passive. The decision not to ask him to join

　　the board offended him, and he felt demeaned by the suggestion that he run the

　　company’s operating system division. Amelio was thus able to create a situation

　　in which Jobs was both inside the tent and outside the tent, which was not a

　　prescription for tranquillity. Jobs later recalled:

　　Gil didn’t want me around. And I thought he was a bozo. I knew that before I

　　sold him the company. I thought I was just going to be trotted out now and

　　then for events like Macworld, mainly for show. That was fine, because I was

　　working at Pixar. I rented an office in downtown Palo Alto where I could work

　　a few days a week, and I drove up to Pixar for one or two days. It was a nice

　　life. I could slow down, spend time with my family.

　　Jobs was, in fact, trotted out for Macworld right at the beginning of January,

　　and this reaffirmed his opinion that Amelio was a bozo. Close to four thousand

　　of the faithful fought for seats in the ballroom of the San Francisco Marriott

　　to hear Amelio’s keynote address. He was introduced by the actor Jeff Goldblum.

　　“I play an expert in chaos theory in The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” he said. “I

　　figure that will qualify me to speak at an Apple event.” He then turned it over

　　to Amelio, who came onstage wearing a flashy sports jacket and a banded-collar

　　shirt buttoned tight at the neck, “looking like a Vegas comic,” the Wall Street

　　Journal reporter Jim Carlton noted, or in the words of the technology writer

　　Michael Malone, “looking exactly like your newly divorced uncle on his first

　　date.”

　　The bigger problem was that Amelio had gone on vacation, gotten into a nasty

　　tussle with his speechwriters, and refused to rehearse. When Jobs arrived

　　backstage, he was upset by the chaos, and he seethed as Amelio stood on the

　　podium bumbling through a disjointed and endless presentation. Amelio was

　　unfamiliar with the talking points that popped up on his teleprompter and soon

　　was trying to wing his presentation. Repeatedly he lost his train of thought.

　　After more than an hour, the audience was aghast. There were a few welcome

　　breaks, such as when he brought out the singer Peter Gabriel to demonstrate a

　　new music program. He also pointed out Muhammad Ali in the first row; the champ

　　was supposed to come onstage to promote a website about Parkinson’s disease, but

　　Amelio never invited him up or explained why he was there.

　　Amelio rambled for more than two hours before he finally called onstage the

　　person everyone was waiting to cheer. “Jobs, exuding confidence, style, and

　　sheer magnetism, was the antithesis of the fumbling Amelio as he strode

　　onstage,” Carlton wrote. “The return of Elvis would not have provoked a bigger

　　sensation.” The crowd jumped to its feet and gave him a raucous ovation for more

　　than a minute. The wilderness decade was over. Finally Jobs waved for silence

　　and cut to the heart of the challenge. “We’ve got to get the spark back,” he

　　said. “The Mac didn’t progress much in ten years. So Windows caught up. So we

　　have to come up with an OS that’s even better.”

　　Jobs’s pep talk could have been a redeeming finale to Amelio’s frightening

　　performance. Unfortunately Amelio came back onstage and resumed his ramblings

　　for another hour. Finally, more than three hours after the show began, Amelio

　　brought it to a close by calling Jobs back onstage and then, in a surprise,

　　bringing up Steve Wozniak as well. Again there was pandemonium. But Jobs was

　　clearly annoyed. He avoided engaging in a triumphant trio scene, arms in the

　　air. Instead he slowly edged offstage. “He ruthlessly ruined the closing moment

　　I had planned,” Amelio later complained. “His own feelings were more important

　　than good press for Apple.” It was only seven days into the new year for Apple,

　　and already it was clear that the center would not hold.

　　Jobs immediately put people he trusted into the top ranks at Apple. “I wanted to

　　make sure the really good people who came in from NeXT didn’t get knifed in the

　　back by the less competent people who were then in senior jobs at Apple,” he

　　recalled. Ellen Hancock, who had favored choosing Sun’s Solaris over NeXT, was

　　on the top of his bozo list, especially when she continued to want to use the

　　kernel of Solaris in the new Apple operating system. In response to a reporter’s

　　question about the role Jobs would play in making that decision, she answered

　　curtly, “None.” She was wrong. Jobs’s first move was to make sure that two of

　　his friends from NeXT took over her duties.

　　To head software engineering, he tapped his buddy Avie Tevanian. To run the

　　hardware side, he called on Jon Rubinstein, who had done the same at NeXT back

　　when it had a hardware division. Rubinstein was vacationing on the Isle of Skye

　　when Jobs called him. “Apple needs some help,” he said. “Do you want to come

　　aboard?” Rubinstein did. He got back in time to attend Macworld and see Amelio

　　bomb onstage. Things were worse than he expected. He and Tevanian would exchange

　　glances at meetings as if they had stumbled into an insane asylum, with people

　　making deluded assertions while Amelio sat at the end of the table in a seeming

　　stupor.

　　Jobs did not come into the office regularly, but he was on the phone to Amelio

　　often. Once he had succeeded in making sure that Tevanian, Rubinstein, and

　　others he trusted were given top positions, he turned his focus onto the

　　sprawling product line. One of his pet peeves was Newton, the handheld personal

　　digital assistant that boasted handwriting recognition capability. It was not

　　quite as bad as the jokes and Doonesbury comic strip made it seem, but Jobs

　　hated it. He disdained the idea of having a stylus or pen for writing on a

　　screen. “God gave us ten styluses,” he would say, waving his fingers. “Let’s not

　　invent another.” In addition, he viewed Newton as John Sculley’s one major

　　innovation, his pet project. That alone doomed it in Jobs’s eyes.

　　“You ought to kill Newton,” he told Amelio one day by phone.

　　It was a suggestion out of the blue, and Amelio pushed back. “What do you mean,

　　kill it?” he said. “Steve, do you have any idea how expensive that would be?”

　　“Shut it down, write it off, get rid of it,” said Jobs. “It doesn’t matter what

　　it costs. People will cheer you if you got rid of it.”

　　“I’ve looked into Newton and it’s going to be a moneymaker,” Amelio declared. “I

　　don’t support getting rid of it.” By May, however, he announced plans to spin

　　off the Newton division, the beginning of its yearlong stutter-step march to the

　　grave.

　　Tevanian and Rubinstein would come by Jobs’s house to keep him informed, and

　　soon much of Silicon Valley knew that Jobs was quietly wresting power from

　　Amelio. It was not so much a Machiavellian power play as it was Jobs being Jobs.

　　Wanting control was ingrained in his nature. Louise Kehoe, the Financial Times

　　reporter who had foreseen this when she questioned Jobs and Amelio at the

　　December announcement, was the first with the story. “Mr. Jobs has become the

　　power behind the throne,” she reported at the end of February. “He is said to be

　　directing decisions on which parts of Apple’s operations should be cut. Mr. Jobs

　　has urged a number of former Apple colleagues to return to the company, hinting

　　strongly that he plans to take charge, they said. According to one of Mr. Jobs’

　　confidantes, he has decided that Mr. Amelio and his appointees are unlikely to

　　succeed in reviving Apple, and he is intent upon replacing them to ensure the

　　survival of ‘his company.’”

　　That month Amelio had to face the annual stockholders meeting and explain why

　　the results for the final quarter of 1996 showed a 30% plummet in sales from the

　　year before. Shareholders lined up at the microphones to vent their anger.

　　Amelio was clueless about how poorly he handled the meeting. “The presentation

　　was regarded as one of the best I had ever given,” he later wrote. But Ed

　　Woolard, the former CEO of DuPont who was now the chair of the Apple board

　　(Markkula had been demoted to vice chair), was appalled. “This is a disaster,”

　　his wife whispered to him in the midst of the session. Woolard agreed. “Gil came

　　dressed real cool, but he looked and sounded silly,” he recalled. “He couldn’t

　　answer the questions, didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t inspire

　　any confidence.”

　　Woolard picked up the phone and called Jobs, whom he’d never met. The pretext

　　was to invite him to Delaware to speak to DuPont executives. Jobs declined, but

　　as Woolard recalled, “the request was a ruse in order to talk to him about Gil.”

　　He steered the phone call in that direction and asked Jobs point-blank what his

　　impression of Amelio was. Woolard remembers Jobs being somewhat circumspect,

　　saying that Amelio was not in the right job. Jobs recalled being more blunt:

　　I thought to myself, I either tell him the truth, that Gil is a bozo, or I lie

　　by omission. He’s on the board of Apple, I have a duty to tell him what I

　　think; on the other hand, if I tell him, he will tell Gil, in which case Gil

　　will never listen to me again, and he’ll fuck the people I brought into Apple.

　　All of this took place in my head in less than thirty seconds. I finally

　　decided that I owed this guy the truth. I cared deeply about Apple. So I just

　　let him have it. I said this guy is the worst CEO I’ve ever seen, I think if

　　you needed a license to be a CEO he wouldn’t get one. When I hung up the

　　phone, I thought, I probably just did a really stupid thing.

　　That spring Larry Ellison saw Amelio at a party and introduced him to the

　　technology journalist Gina Smith, who asked how Apple was doing. “You know,

　　Gina, Apple is like a ship,” Amelio answered. “That ship is loaded with

　　treasure, but there’s a hole in the ship. And my job is to get everyone to row

　　in the same direction.” Smith looked perplexed and asked, “Yeah, but what about

　　the hole?” From then on, Ellison and Jobs joked about the parable of the ship.

　　“When Larry relayed this story to me, we were in this sushi place, and I

　　literally fell off my chair laughing,” Jobs recalled. “He was just such a

　　buffoon, and he took himself so seriously. He insisted that everyone call him

　　Dr. Amelio. That’s always a warning sign.”

　　Brent Schlender, Fortune’s well-sourced technology reporter, knew Jobs and was

　　familiar with his thinking, and in March he came out with a story detailing the

　　mess. “Apple Computer, Silicon Valley’s paragon of dysfunctional management and

　　fumbled techno-dreams, is back in crisis mode, scrambling lugubriously in slow

　　motion to deal with imploding sales, a floundering technology strategy, and a

　　hemorrhaging brand name,” he wrote. “To the Machiavellian eye, it looks as if

　　Jobs, despite the lure of Hollywood—lately he has been overseeing Pixar, maker

　　of Toy Story and other computer-animated films—might be scheming to take over

　　Apple.”

　　Once again Ellison publicly floated the idea of doing a hostile takeover and

　　installing his “best friend” Jobs as CEO. “Steve’s the only one who can save

　　Apple,” he told reporters. “I’m ready to help him the minute he says the word.”

　　Like the third time the boy cried wolf, Ellison’s latest takeover musings didn’t

　　get much notice, so later in the month he told Dan Gillmore of the San Jose

　　Mercury News that he was forming an investor group to raise $1 billion to buy a

　　majority stake in Apple. (The company’s market value was about $2.3 billion.)

　　The day the story came out, Apple stock shot up 11% in heavy trading. To add to

　　the frivolity, Ellison set up an email address, savapple@us.oracle.com, asking

　　the general public to vote on whether he should go ahead with it.

　　Jobs was somewhat amused by Ellison’s self-appointed role. “Larry brings this up

　　now and then,” he told a reporter. “I try to explain my role at Apple is to be

　　an advisor.” Amelio, however, was livid. He called Ellison to dress him down,

　　but Ellison wouldn’t take the call. So Amelio called Jobs, whose response was

　　equivocal but also partly genuine. “I really don’t understand what is going on,”

　　he told Amelio. “I think all this is crazy.” Then he added a reassurance that

　　was not at all genuine: “You and I have a good relationship.” Jobs could have

　　ended the speculation by releasing a statement rejecting Ellison’s idea, but

　　much to Amelio’s annoyance, he didn’t. He remained aloof, which served both his

　　interests and his nature.

　　By then the press had turned against Amelio. Business Week ran a cover asking

　　“Is Apple Mincemeat?”; Red Herring ran an editorial headlined “Gil Amelio,

　　Please Resign”; and Wired ran a cover that showed the Apple logo crucified as a

　　sacred heart with a crown of thorns and the headline “Pray.” Mike Barnicle of

　　the Boston Globe, railing against years of Apple mismanagement, wrote, “How can

　　these nitwits still draw a paycheck when they took the only computer that didn’t

　　frighten people and turned it into the technological equivalent of the 1997 Red

　　Sox bullpen?”

　　When Jobs and Amelio had signed the contract in February, Jobs began hopping

　　around exuberantly and declared, “You and I need to go out and have a great

　　bottle of wine to celebrate!” Amelio offered to bring wine from his cellar and

　　suggested that they invite their wives. It took until June before they settled

　　on a date, and despite the rising tensions they were able to have a good time.

　　The food and wine were as mismatched as the diners; Amelio brought a bottle of

　　1964 Cheval Blanc and a Montrachet that each cost about $300; Jobs chose a

　　vegetarian restaurant in Redwood City where the food bill totaled $72. Amelio’s

　　wife remarked afterward, “He’s such a charmer, and his wife is too.”

　　Jobs could seduce and charm people at will, and he liked to do so. People such

　　as Amelio and Sculley allowed themselves to believe that because Jobs was

　　charming them, it meant that he liked and respected them. It was an impression

　　that he sometimes fostered by dishing out insincere flattery to those hungry for

　　it. But Jobs could be charming to people he hated just as easily as he could be

　　insulting to people he liked. Amelio didn’t see this because, like Sculley, he

　　was so eager for Jobs’s affection. Indeed the words he used to describe his

　　yearning for a good relationship with Jobs are almost the same as those used by

　　Sculley. “When I was wrestling with a problem, I would walk through the issue

　　with him,” Amelio recalled. “Nine times out of ten we would agree.” Somehow he

　　willed himself to believe that Jobs really respected him: “I was in awe over the

　　way Steve’s mind approached problems, and had the feeling we were building a

　　mutually trusting relationship.”

　　Amelio’s disillusionment came a few days after their dinner. During their

　　negotiations, he had insisted that Jobs hold the Apple stock he got for at least

　　six months, and preferably longer. That six months ended in June. When a block

　　of 1.5 million shares was sold, Amelio called Jobs. “I’m telling people that the

　　shares sold were not yours,” he said. “Remember, you and I had an understanding

　　that you wouldn’t sell any without advising us first.”

　　“That’s right,” Jobs replied. Amelio took that response to mean that Jobs had

　　not sold his shares, and he issued a statement saying so. But when the next SEC

　　filing came out, it revealed that Jobs had indeed sold the shares. “Dammit,

　　Steve, I asked you point-blank about these shares and you denied it was you.”

　　Jobs told Amelio that he had sold in a “fit of depression” about where Apple was

　　going and he didn’t want to admit it because he was “a little embarrassed.” When

　　I asked him about it years later, he simply said, “I didn’t feel I needed to

　　tell Gil.”

　　Why did Jobs mislead Amelio about selling the shares? One reason is simple: Jobs

　　sometimes avoided the truth. Helmut Sonnenfeldt once said of Henry Kissinger,

　　“He lies not because it’s in his interest, he lies because it’s in his nature.”

　　It was in Jobs’s nature to mislead or be secretive when he felt it was

　　warranted. But he also indulged in being brutally honest at times, telling the

　　truths that most of us sugarcoat or suppress. Both the dissembling and the

　　truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that

　　ordinary rules didn’t apply to him.

　　Exit, Pursued by a Bear

　　Jobs had refused to quash Larry Ellison’s takeover talk, and he had secretly

　　sold his shares and been misleading about it. So Amelio finally became convinced

　　that Jobs was gunning for him. “I finally absorbed the fact that I had been too

　　willing and too eager to believe he was on my team,” Amelio recalled. “Steve’s

　　plans to manipulate my termination were charging forward.”

　　Jobs was indeed bad-mouthing Amelio at every opportunity. He couldn’t help

　　himself. But there was a more important factor in turning the board against

　　Amelio. Fred Anderson, the chief financial officer, saw it as his fiduciary duty

　　to keep Ed Woolard and the board informed of Apple’s dire situation. “Fred was

　　the guy telling me that cash was draining, people were leaving, and more key

　　players were thinking of it,” said Woolard. “He made it clear the ship was going

　　to hit the sand soon, and even he was thinking of leaving.” That added to the

　　worries Woolard already had from watching Amelio bumble the shareholders

　　meeting.

　　At an executive session of the board in June, with Amelio out of the room,

　　Woolard described to current directors how he calculated their odds. “If we stay

　　with Gil as CEO, I think there’s only a 10% chance we will avoid bankruptcy,” he

　　said. “If we fire him and convince Steve to come take over, we have a 60% chance

　　of surviving. If we fire Gil, don’t get Steve back, and have to search for a new

　　CEO, then we have a 40% chance of surviving.” The board gave him authority to

　　ask Jobs to return.

　　Woolard and his wife flew to London, where they were planning to watch the

　　Wimbledon tennis matches. He saw some of the tennis during the day, but spent

　　his evenings in his suite at the Inn on the Park calling people back in America,

　　where it was daytime. By the end of his stay, his telephone bill was $2,000.

　　First, he called Jobs. The board was going to fire Amelio, he said, and it

　　wanted Jobs to come back as CEO. Jobs had been aggressive in deriding Amelio and

　　pushing his own ideas about where to take Apple. But suddenly, when offered the

　　cup, he became coy. “I will help,” he replied.

　　“As CEO?” Woolard asked.

　　Jobs said no. Woolard pushed hard for him to become at least the acting CEO.

　　Again Jobs demurred. “I will be an advisor,” he said. “Unpaid.” He also agreed

　　to become a board member—that was something he had yearned for—but declined to

　　be the board chairman. “That’s all I can give now,” he said. After rumors began

　　circulating, he emailed a memo to Pixar employees assuring them that he was not

　　abandoning them. “I got a call from Apple’s board of directors three weeks ago

　　asking me to return to Apple as their CEO,” he wrote. “I declined. They then

　　asked me to become chairman, and I again declined. So don’t worry—the crazy

　　rumors are just that. I have no plans to leave Pixar. You’re stuck with me.”

　　Why did Jobs not seize the reins? Why was he reluctant to grab the job that for

　　two decades he had seemed to desire? When I asked him, he said:

　　We’d just taken Pixar public, and I was happy being CEO there. I never knew of

　　anyone who served as CEO of two public companies, even temporarily, and I

　　wasn’t even sure it was legal. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was

　　enjoying spending more time with my family. I was torn. I knew Apple was a

　　mess, so I wondered: Do I want to give up this nice lifestyle that I have?

　　What are all the Pixar shareholders going to think? I talked to people I

　　respected. I finally called Andy Grove at about eight one Saturday morning—too

　　early. I gave him the pros and the cons, and in the middle he stopped me and

　　said, “Steve, I don’t give a shit about Apple.” I was stunned. It was then I

　　realized that I do give a shit about Apple—I started it and it is a good thing

　　to have in the world. That was when I decided to go back on a temporary basis

　　to help them hire a CEO.

　　The claim that he was enjoying spending more time with his family was not

　　convincing. He was never destined to win a Father of the Year trophy, even when

　　he had spare time on his hands. He was getting better at paying heed to his

　　children, especially Reed, but his primary focus was on his work. He was

　　frequently aloof from his two younger daughters, estranged again from Lisa, and

　　often prickly as a husband.

　　So what was the real reason for his hesitancy in taking over at Apple? For all

　　of his willfulness and insatiable desire to control things, Jobs was indecisive

　　and reticent when he felt unsure about something. He craved perfection, and he

　　was not always good at figuring out how to settle for something less. He did not

　　like to wrestle with complexity or make accommodations. This was true in

　　products, design, and furnishings for the house. It was also true when it came

　　to personal commitments. If he knew for sure a course of action was right, he

　　was unstoppable. But if he had doubts, he sometimes withdrew, preferring not to

　　think about things that did not perfectly suit him. As happened when Amelio had

　　asked him what role he wanted to play, Jobs would go silent and ignore

　　situations that made him uncomfortable.

　　This attitude arose partly out of his tendency to see the world in binary terms.

　　A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit. But

　　he could be stymied by things that were more complex, shaded, or nuanced:

　　getting married, buying the right sofa, committing to run a company. In

　　addition, he didn’t want to be set up for failure. “I think Steve wanted to

　　assess whether Apple could be saved,” Fred Anderson said.

　　Woolard and the board decided to go ahead and fire Amelio, even though Jobs was

　　not yet forthcoming about how active a role he would play as an advisor. Amelio

　　was about to go on a picnic with his wife, children, and grandchildren when the

　　call came from Woolard in London. “We need you to step down,” Woolard said

　　simply. Amelio replied that it was not a good time to discuss this, but Woolard

　　felt he had to persist. “We are going to announce that we’re replacing you.”

　　Amelio resisted. “Remember, Ed, I told the board it was going to take three

　　years to get this company back on its feet again,” he said. “I’m not even

　　halfway through.”

　　“The board is at the place where we don’t want to discuss it further,” Woolard

　　replied. Amelio asked who knew about the decision, and Woolard told him the

　　truth: the rest of the board plus Jobs. “Steve was one of the people we talked

　　to about this,” Woolard said. “His view is that you’re a really nice guy, but

　　you don’t know much about the computer industry.”

　　“Why in the world would you involve Steve in a decision like this?” Amelio

　　replied, getting angry. “Steve is not even a member of the board of directors,

　　so what the hell is he doing in any of this conversation?” But Woolard didn’t

　　back down, and Amelio hung up to carry on with the family picnic before telling

　　his wife.

　　At times Jobs displayed a strange mixture of prickliness and neediness. He

　　usually didn’t care one iota what people thought of him; he could cut people off

　　and never care to speak to them again. Yet sometimes he also felt a compulsion

　　to explain himself. So that evening Amelio received, to his surprise, a phone

　　call from Jobs. “Gee, Gil, I just wanted you to know, I talked to Ed today about

　　this thing and I really feel bad about it,” he said. “I want you to know that I

　　had absolutely nothing to do with this turn of events, it was a decision the

　　board made, but they had asked me for advice and counsel.” He told Amelio he

　　respected him for having “the highest integrity of anyone I’ve ever met,” and

　　went on to give some unsolicited advice. “Take six months off,” Jobs told him.

　　“When I got thrown out of Apple, I immediately went back to work, and I

　　regretted it.” He offered to be a sounding board if Amelio ever wanted more

　　advice.

　　Amelio was stunned but managed to mumble a few words of thanks. He turned to his

　　wife and recounted what Jobs said. “In ways, I still like the man, but I don’t

　　believe him,” he told her.

　　“I was totally taken in by Steve,” she said, “and I really feel like an idiot.”

　　“Join the crowd,” her husband replied.

　　Steve Wozniak, who was himself now an informal advisor to the company, was

　　thrilled that Jobs was coming back. (He forgave easily.) “It was just what we

　　needed,” he said, “because whatever you think of Steve, he knows how to get the

　　magic back.” Nor did Jobs’s triumph over Amelio surprise him. As he told Wired

　　shortly after it happened, “Gil Amelio meets Steve Jobs, game over.”

　　That Monday Apple’s top employees were summoned to the auditorium. Amelio came

　　in looking calm and relaxed. “Well, I’m sad to report that it’s time for me to

　　move on,” he said. Fred Anderson, who had agreed to be interim CEO, spoke next,

　　and he made it clear that he would be taking his cues from Jobs. Then, exactly

　　twelve years since he had lost power in a July 4 weekend struggle, Jobs walked

　　back onstage at Apple.

　　It immediately became clear that, whether or not he wanted to admit it publicly

　　(or even to himself), Jobs was going to take control and not be a mere advisor.

　　As soon as he came onstage that day—wearing shorts, sneakers, and a black

　　turtleneck—he got to work reinvigorating his beloved institution. “Okay, tell me

　　what’s wrong with this place,” he said. There were some murmurings, but Jobs cut

　　them off. “It’s the products!” he answered. “So what’s wrong with the products?”

　　Again there were a few attempts at an answer, until Jobs broke in to hand down

　　the correct answer. “The products suck!” he shouted. “There’s no sex in them

　　anymore!”

　　Woolard was able to coax Jobs to agree that his role as an advisor would be a

　　very active one. Jobs approved a statement saying that he had “agreed to step up

　　my involvement with Apple for up to 90 days, helping them until they hire a new

　　CEO.” The clever formulation that Woolard used in his statement was that Jobs

　　was coming back “as an advisor leading the team.”

　　Jobs took a small office next to the boardroom on the executive floor,

　　conspicuously eschewing Amelio’s big corner office. He got involved in all

　　aspects of the business: product design, where to cut, supplier negotiations,

　　and advertising agency review. He believed that he had to stop the hemorrhaging

　　of top Apple employees, and to do so he wanted to reprice their stock options.

　　Apple stock had dropped so low that the options had become worthless. Jobs

　　wanted to lower the exercise price, so they would be valuable again. At the

　　time, that was legally permissible, but it was not considered good corporate

　　practice. On his first Thursday back at Apple, Jobs called for a telephonic

　　board meeting and outlined the problem. The directors balked. They asked for

　　time to do a legal and financial study of what the change would mean. “It has to

　　be done fast,” Jobs told them. “We’re losing good people.”

　　Even his supporter Ed Woolard, who headed the compensation committee, objected.

　　“At DuPont we never did such a thing,” he said.

　　“You brought me here to fix this thing, and people are the key,” Jobs argued.

　　When the board proposed a study that could take two months, Jobs exploded: “Are

　　you nuts?!?” He paused for a long moment of silence, then continued. “Guys, if

　　you don’t want to do this, I’m not coming back on Monday. Because I’ve got

　　thousands of key decisions to make that are far more difficult than this, and if

　　you can’t throw your support behind this kind of decision, I will fail. So if

　　you can’t do this, I’m out of here, and you can blame it on me, you can say,

　　‘Steve wasn’t up for the job.’”

　　The next day, after consulting with the board, Woolard called Jobs back. “We’re

　　going to approve this,” he said. “But some of the board members don’t like it.

　　We feel like you’ve put a gun to our head.” The options for the top team (Jobs

　　had none) were reset at $13.25, which was the price of the stock the day Amelio

　　was ousted.

　　Instead of declaring victory and thanking the board, Jobs continued to seethe at

　　having to answer to a board he didn’t respect. “Stop the train, this isn’t going

　　to work,” he told Woolard. “This company is in shambles, and I don’t have time

　　to wet-nurse the board. So I need all of you to resign. Or else I’m going to

　　resign and not come back on Monday.” The one person who could stay, he said, was

　　Woolard.

　　Most members of the board were aghast. Jobs was still refusing to commit himself

　　to coming back full-time or being anything more than an advisor, yet he felt he

　　had the power to force them to leave. The hard truth, however, was that he did

　　have that power over them. They could not afford for him to storm off in a fury,

　　nor was the prospect of remaining an Apple board member very enticing by then.

　　“After all they’d been through, most were glad to be let off,” Woolard recalled.

　　Once again the board acquiesced. It made only one request: Would he permit one

　　other director to stay, in addition to Woolard? It would help the optics. Jobs

　　assented. “They were an awful board, a terrible board,” he later said. “I agreed

　　they could keep Ed Woolard and a guy named Gareth Chang, who turned out to be a

　　zero. He wasn’t terrible, just a zero. Woolard, on the other hand, was one of

　　the best board members I’ve ever seen. He was a prince, one of the most

　　supportive and wise people I’ve ever met.”

　　Among those being asked to resign was Mike Markkula, who in 1976, as a young

　　venture capitalist, had visited the Jobs garage, fallen in love with the nascent

　　computer on the workbench, guaranteed a $250,000 line of credit, and become the

　　third partner and one-third owner of the new company. Over the subsequent two

　　decades, he was the one constant on the board, ushering in and out a variety of

　　CEOs. He had supported Jobs at times but also clashed with him, most notably

　　when he sided with Sculley in the showdowns of 1985. With Jobs returning, he

　　knew that it was time for him to leave.

　　Jobs could be cutting and cold, especially toward people who crossed him, but he

　　could also be sentimental about those who had been with him from the early days.

　　Wozniak fell into that favored category, of course, even though they had drifted

　　apart; so did Andy Hertzfeld and a few others from the Macintosh team. In the

　　end, Mike Markkula did as well. “I felt deeply betrayed by him, but he was like

　　a father and I always cared about him,” Jobs later recalled. So when the time

　　came to ask him to resign from the Apple board, Jobs drove to Markkula’s

　　chateau-like mansion in the Woodside hills to do it personally. As usual, he

　　asked to take a walk, and they strolled the grounds to a redwood grove with a

　　picnic table. “He told me he wanted a new board because he wanted to start

　　fresh,” Markkula said. “He was worried that I might take it poorly, and he was

　　relieved when I didn’t.”

　　They spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the

　　future. Jobs’s ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked

　　Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting

　　companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that

　　repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator

　　company, then a computer company. “Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the

　　PC business,” Markkula said. “You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some

　　other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a

　　butterfly and have a metamorphosis.” Jobs didn’t say much, but he agreed.

　　The old board met in late July to ratify the transition. Woolard, who was as

　　genteel as Jobs was prickly, was mildly taken aback when Jobs appeared dressed

　　in jeans and sneakers, and he worried that Jobs might start berating the veteran

　　board members for screwing up. But Jobs merely offered a pleasant “Hi,

　　everyone.” They got down to the business of voting to accept the resignations,

　　elect Jobs to the board, and empower Woolard and Jobs to find new board members.

　　Jobs’s first recruit was, not surprisingly, Larry Ellison. He said he would be

　　pleased to join, but he hated attending meetings. Jobs said it would be fine if

　　he came to only half of them. (After a while Ellison was coming to only a third

　　of the meetings. Jobs took a picture of him that had appeared on the cover of

　　Business Week and had it blown up to life size and pasted on a cardboard cutout

　　to put in his chair.)

　　Jobs also brought in Bill Campbell, who had run marketing at Apple in the early

　　1980s and been caught in the middle of the Sculley-Jobs clash. Campbell had

　　ended up sticking with Sculley, but he had grown to dislike him so much that

　　Jobs forgave him. Now he was the CEO of Intuit and a walking buddy of Jobs. “We

　　were sitting out in the back of his house,” recalled Campbell, who lived only

　　five blocks from Jobs in Palo Alto, “and he said he was going back to Apple and

　　wanted me on the board. I said, ‘Holy shit, of course I will do that.’” Campbell

　　had been a football coach at Columbia, and his great talent, Jobs said, was to

　　“get A performances out of B players.” At Apple, Jobs told him, he would get to

　　work with A players.

　　Woolard helped bring in Jerry York, who had been the chief financial officer at

　　Chrysler and then IBM. Others were considered and then rejected by Jobs,

　　including Meg Whitman, who was then the manager of Hasbro’s Playskool division

　　and had been a strategic planner at Disney. (In 1998 she became CEO of eBay, and

　　she later ran unsuccessfully for governor of California.) Over the years Jobs

　　would bring in some strong leaders to serve on the Apple board, including Al

　　Gore, Eric Schmidt of Google, Art Levinson of Genentech, Mickey Drexler of the

　　Gap and J. Crew, and Andrea Jung of Avon. But he always made sure they were

　　loyal, sometimes loyal to a fault. Despite their stature, they seemed at times

　　awed or intimidated by Jobs, and they were eager to keep him happy.

　　At one point he invited Arthur Levitt, the former SEC chairman, to become a

　　board member. Levitt, who bought his first Macintosh in 1984 and was proudly

　　“addicted” to Apple computers, was thrilled. He was excited to visit Cupertino,

　　where he discussed the role with Jobs. But then Jobs read a speech Levitt had

　　given about corporate governance, which argued that boards should play a strong

　　and independent role, and he telephoned to withdraw the invitation. “Arthur, I

　　don’t think you’d be happy on our board, and I think it best if we not invite

　　you,” Levitt said Jobs told him. “Frankly, I think some of the issues you

　　raised, while appropriate for some companies, really don’t apply to Apple’s

　　culture.” Levitt later wrote, “I was floored. . . . It’s plain to me that

　　Apple’s board is not designed to act independently of the CEO.”

　　Macworld Boston, August 1997

　　The staff memo announcing the repricing of Apple’s stock options was signed

　　“Steve and the executive team,” and it soon became public that he was running

　　all of the company’s product review meetings. These and other indications that

　　Jobs was now deeply engaged at Apple helped push the stock up from about $13 to

　　$20 during July. It also created a frisson of excitement as the Apple faithful

　　gathered for the August 1997 Macworld in Boston. More than five thousand showed

　　up hours in advance to cram into the Castle convention hall of the Park Plaza

　　hotel for Jobs’s keynote speech. They came to see their returning hero—and to

　　find out whether he was really ready to lead them again.

　　Huge cheers erupted when a picture of Jobs from 1984 was flashed on the overhead

　　screen. “Steve! Steve! Steve!” the crowd started to chant, even as he was still

　　being introduced. When he finally strode onstage—wearing a black vest,

　　collarless white shirt, jeans, and an impish smile—the screams and flashbulbs

　　rivaled those for any rock star. At first he punctured the excitement by

　　reminding them of where he officially worked. “I’m Steve Jobs, the chairman and

　　CEO of Pixar,” he introduced himself, flashing a slide onscreen with that title.

　　Then he explained his role at Apple. “I, like a lot of other people, are pulling

　　together to help Apple get healthy again.”

　　But as Jobs paced back and forth across the stage, changing the overhead slides

　　with a clicker in his hand, it was clear that he was now in charge at Apple—and

　　was likely to remain so. He delivered a carefully crafted presentation, using no

　　notes, on why Apple’s sales had fallen by 30% over the previous two years.

　　“There are a lot of great people at Apple, but they’re doing the wrong things

　　because the plan has been wrong,” he said. “I’ve found people who can’t wait to

　　fall into line behind a good strategy, but there just hasn’t been one.” The

　　crowd again erupted in yelps, whistles, and cheers.

　　As he spoke, his passion poured forth with increasing intensity, and he began

　　saying “we” and “I”—rather than “they”—when referring to what Apple would be

　　doing. “I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer,”

　　he said. “The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative

　　spirits in this world, and they’re out to change the world. We make tools for

　　those kinds of people.” When he stressed the word “we” in that sentence, he

　　cupped his hands and tapped his fingers on his chest. And then, in his final

　　peroration, he continued to stress the word “we” as he talked about Apple’s

　　future. “We too are going to think differently and serve the people who have

　　been buying our products from the beginning. Because a lot of people think

　　they’re crazy, but in that craziness we see genius.” During the prolonged

　　standing ovation, people looked at each other in awe, and a few wiped tears from

　　their eyes. Jobs had made it very clear that he and the “we” of Apple were one.

　　The Microsoft Pact

　　The climax of Jobs’s August 1997 Macworld appearance was a bombshell

　　announcement, one that made the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Near the end of

　　his speech, he paused for a sip of water and began to talk in more subdued

　　tones. “Apple lives in an ecosystem,” he said. “It needs help from other

　　partners. Relationships that are destructive don’t help anybody in this

　　industry.” For dramatic effect, he paused again, and then explained: “I’d like

　　to announce one of our first new partnerships today, a very meaningful one, and

　　that is one with Microsoft.” The Microsoft and Apple logos appeared together on

　　the screen as people gasped.

　　Apple and Microsoft had been at war for a decade over a variety of copyright and

　　patent issues, most notably whether Microsoft had stolen the look and feel of

　　Apple’s graphical user interface. Just as Jobs was being eased out of Apple in

　　1985, John Sculley had struck a surrender deal: Microsoft could license the

　　Apple GUI for Windows 1.0, and in return it would make Excel exclusive to the

　　Mac for up to two years. In 1988, after Microsoft came out with Windows 2.0,

　　Apple sued. Sculley contended that the 1985 deal did not apply to Windows 2.0

　　and that further refinements to Windows (such as copying Bill Atkinson’s trick

　　of “clipping” overlapping windows) had made the infringement more blatant. By

　　1997 Apple had lost the case and various appeals, but remnants of the litigation

　　and threats of new suits lingered. In addition, President Clinton’s Justice

　　Department was preparing a massive antitrust case against Microsoft. Jobs

　　invited the lead prosecutor, Joel Klein, to Palo Alto. Don’t worry about

　　extracting a huge remedy against Microsoft, Jobs told him over coffee. Instead

　　simply keep them tied up in litigation. That would allow Apple the opportunity,

　　Jobs explained, to “make an end run” around Microsoft and start offering

　　competing products.

　　Under Amelio, the showdown had become explosive. Microsoft refused to commit to

　　developing Word and Excel for future Macintosh operating systems, which could

　　have destroyed Apple. In defense of Bill Gates, he was not simply being

　　vindictive. It was understandable that he was reluctant to commit to developing

　　for a future Macintosh operating system when no one, including the ever-changing

　　leadership at Apple, seemed to know what that new operating system would be.

　　Right after Apple bought NeXT, Amelio and Jobs flew together to visit Microsoft,

　　but Gates had trouble figuring out which of them was in charge. A few days later

　　he called Jobs privately. “Hey, what the fuck, am I supposed to put my

　　applications on the NeXT OS?” Gates asked. Jobs responded by “making smart-ass

　　remarks about Gil,” Gates recalled, and suggesting that the situation would soon

　　be clarified.

　　When the leadership issue was partly resolved by Amelio’s ouster, one of Jobs’s

　　first phone calls was to Gates. Jobs recalled:

　　I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always

　　had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business.

　　The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and

　　said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If

　　we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar

　　patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that

　　long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this

　　right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for

　　the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our

　　success.”

　　When I recounted to him what Jobs said, Gates agreed it was accurate. “We had a

　　group of people who liked working on the Mac stuff, and we liked the Mac,” Gates

　　recalled. He had been negotiating with Amelio for six months, and the proposals

　　kept getting longer and more complicated. “So Steve comes in and says, ‘Hey,

　　that deal is too complicated. What I want is a simple deal. I want the

　　commitment and I want an investment.’ And so we put that together in just four

　　weeks.”

　　Gates and his chief financial officer, Greg Maffei, made the trip to Palo Alto

　　to work out the framework for a deal, and then Maffei returned alone the

　　following Sunday to work on the details. When he arrived at Jobs’s home, Jobs

　　grabbed two bottles of water out of the refrigerator and took Maffei for a walk

　　around the Palo Alto neighborhood. Both men wore shorts, and Jobs walked

　　barefoot. As they sat in front of a Baptist church, Jobs cut to the core issues.

　　“These are the things we care about,” he said. “A commitment to make software

　　for the Mac and an investment.”

　　Although the negotiations went quickly, the final details were not finished

　　until hours before Jobs’s Macworld speech in Boston. He was rehearsing at the

　　Park Plaza Castle when his cell phone rang. “Hi, Bill,” he said as his words

　　echoed through the old hall. Then he walked to a corner and spoke in a soft tone

　　so others couldn’t hear. The call lasted an hour. Finally, the remaining deal

　　points were resolved. “Bill, thank you for your support of this company,” Jobs

　　said as he crouched in his shorts. “I think the world’s a better place for it.”

　　During his Macworld keynote address, Jobs walked through the details of the

　　Microsoft deal. At first there were groans and hisses from the faithful.

　　Particularly galling was Jobs’s announcement that, as part of the peace pact,

　　“Apple has decided to make Internet Explorer its default browser on the

　　Macintosh.” The audience erupted in boos, and Jobs quickly added, “Since we

　　believe in choice, we’re going to be shipping other Internet browsers, as well,

　　and the user can, of course, change their default should they choose to.” There

　　were some laughs and scattered applause. The audience was beginning to come

　　around, especially when he announced that Microsoft would be investing $150

　　million in Apple and getting nonvoting shares.

　　But the mellower mood was shattered for a moment when Jobs made one of the few

　　visual and public relations gaffes of his onstage career. “I happen to have a

　　special guest with me today via satellite downlink,” he said, and suddenly Bill

　　Gates’s face appeared on the huge screen looming over Jobs and the auditorium.

　　There was a thin smile on Gates’s face that flirted with being a smirk. The

　　audience gasped in horror, followed by some boos and catcalls. The scene was

　　such a brutal echo of the 1984 Big Brother ad that you half expected (and

　　hoped?) that an athletic woman would suddenly come running down the aisle and

　　vaporize the screenshot with a well-thrown hammer.

　　But it was all for real, and Gates, unaware of the jeering, began speaking on

　　the satellite link from Microsoft headquarters. “Some of the most exciting work

　　that I’ve done in my career has been the work that I’ve done with Steve on the

　　Macintosh,” he intoned in his high-pitched singsong. As he went on to tout the

　　new version of Microsoft Office that was being made for the Macintosh, the

　　audience quieted down and then slowly seemed to accept the new world order.

　　Gates even was able to rouse some applause when he said that the new Mac

　　versions of Word and Excel would be “in many ways more advanced than what we’ve

　　done on the Windows platform.”

　　Jobs realized that the image of Gates looming over him and the audience was a

　　mistake. “I wanted him to come to Boston,” Jobs later said. “That was my worst

　　and stupidest staging event ever. It was bad because it made me look small, and

　　Apple look small, and as if everything was in Bill’s hands.” Gates likewise was

　　embarrassed when he saw the videotape of the event. “I didn’t know that my face

　　was going to be blown up to looming proportions,” he said.

　　Jobs tried to reassure the audience with an impromptu sermon. “If we want to

　　move forward and see Apple healthy again, we have to let go of a few things

　　here,” he told the audience. “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to

　　win Microsoft has to lose. . . . I think if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac,

　　we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude.”

　　The Microsoft announcement, along with Jobs’s passionate reengagement with the

　　company, provided a much-needed jolt for Apple. By the end of the day, its stock

　　had skyrocketed $6.56, or 33%, to close at $26.31, twice the price of the day

　　Amelio resigned. The one-day jump added $830 million to Apple’s stock market

　　capitalization. The company was back from the edge of the grave.UnknownTHINK DIFFERENT

　　Jobs as iCEO

　　Enlisting Picasso

　　Here’s to the Crazy Ones

　　Lee Clow, the creative director at Chiat/Day who had done the great “1984” ad

　　for the launch of the Macintosh, was driving in Los Angeles in early July 1997

　　when his car phone rang. It was Jobs. “Hi, Lee, this is Steve,” he said. “Guess

　　what? Amelio just resigned. Can you come up here?”

　　Apple was going through a review to select a new agency, and Jobs was not

　　impressed by what he had seen. So he wanted Clow and his firm, by then called

　　TBWA\Chiat\Day, to compete for the business. “We have to prove that Apple is

　　still alive,” Jobs said, “and that it still stands for something special.”

　　Clow said that he didn’t pitch for accounts. “You know our work,” he said. But

　　Jobs begged him. It would be hard to reject all the others that were making

　　pitches, including BBDO and Arnold Worldwide, and bring back “an old crony,” as

　　Jobs put it. Clow agreed to fly up to Cupertino with something they could show.

　　Recounting the scene years later, Jobs started to cry.

　　This chokes me up, this really chokes me up. It was so clear that Lee loved

　　Apple so much. Here was the best guy in advertising. And he hadn’t pitched in

　　ten years. Yet here he was, and he was pitching his heart out, because he

　　loved Apple as much as we did. He and his team had come up with this brilliant

　　idea, “Think Different.” And it was ten times better than anything the other

　　agencies showed. It choked me up, and it still makes me cry to think about it,

　　both the fact that Lee cared so much and also how brilliant his “Think

　　Different” idea was. Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of

　　purity—purity of spirit and love—and I always cry. It always just reaches in

　　and grabs me. That was one of those moments. There was a purity about that I

　　will never forget. I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea, and I

　　still cry when I think about it.

　　Jobs and Clow agreed that Apple was one of the great brands of the world,

　　probably in the top five based on emotional appeal, but they needed to remind

　　folks what was distinctive about it. So they wanted a brand image campaign, not

　　a set of advertisements featuring products. It was designed to celebrate not

　　what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with the

　　computers. “This wasn’t about processor speed or memory,” Jobs recalled. “It was

　　about creativity.” It was directed not only at potential customers, but also at

　　Apple’s own employees: “We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to

　　remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are. That was the genesis of

　　that campaign.”

　　Clow and his team tried a variety of approaches that praised the “crazy ones”

　　who “think different.” They did one video with the Seal song “Crazy” (“We’re

　　never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy”), but couldn’t get the rights

　　to it. Then they tried versions using a recording of Robert Frost reading “The

　　Road Not Taken” and of Robin Williams’s speeches from Dead Poets Society.

　　Eventually they decided they needed to write their own text; their draft began,

　　“Here’s to the crazy ones.”

　　Jobs was as demanding as ever. When Clow’s team flew up with a version of the

　　text, he exploded at the young copywriter. “This is shit!” he yelled. “It’s

　　advertising agency shit and I hate it.” It was the first time the young

　　copywriter had met Jobs, and he stood there mute. He never went back. But those

　　who could stand up to Jobs, including Clow and his teammates Ken Segall and

　　Craig Tanimoto, were able to work with him to create a tone poem that he liked.

　　In its original sixty-second version it read:

　　Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The

　　round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re

　　not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote

　　them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you

　　can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race

　　forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because

　　the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the

　　ones who do.

　　Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines

　　himself, including “They push the human race forward.” By the time of the Boston

　　Macworld in early August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was

　　not ready, but Jobs used the concepts, and the “think different” phrase, in his

　　keynote speech there. “There’s a germ of a brilliant idea there,” he said at the

　　time. “Apple is about people who think outside the box, who want to use

　　computers to help them change the world.”

　　They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the

　　verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs

　　insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory”

　　or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later

　　explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s

　　grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the

　　same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different,

　　think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

　　In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get

　　Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do

　　ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who

　　would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be.

　　They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner

　　featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him

　　to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the

　　request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan.

　　In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most

　　memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white

　　portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words

　　“Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the

　　faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso,

　　Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause,

　　puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel

　　Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia

　　Earhart.

　　Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had

　　taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different

　　way. A photography buff, he became involved in making sure they had the perfect

　　iconic portraits. “This is not the right picture of Gandhi,” he erupted to Clow

　　at one point. Clow explained that the famous Margaret Bourke-White photograph of

　　Gandhi at the spinning wheel was owned by Time-Life Pictures and was not

　　available for commercial use. So Jobs called Norman Pearlstine, the editor in

　　chief of Time Inc., and badgered him into making an exception. He called Eunice

　　Shriver to convince her family to release a picture that he loved, of her

　　brother Bobby Kennedy touring Appalachia, and he talked to Jim Henson’s children

　　personally to get the right shot of the late Muppeteer.

　　He likewise called Yoko Ono for a picture of her late husband, John Lennon. She

　　sent him one, but it was not Jobs’s favorite. “Before it ran, I was in New York,

　　and I went to this small Japanese restaurant that I love, and let her know I

　　would be there,” he recalled. When he arrived, she came over to his table. “This

　　is a better one,” she said, handing him an envelope. “I thought I would see you,

　　so I had this with me.” It was the classic photo of her and John in bed

　　together, holding flowers, and it was the one that Apple ended up using. “I can

　　see why John fell in love with her,” Jobs recalled.

　　The narration by Richard Dreyfuss worked well, but Lee Clow had another idea.

　　What if Jobs did the voice-over himself? “You really believe this,” Clow told

　　him. “You should do it.” So Jobs sat in a studio, did a few takes, and soon

　　produced a voice track that everyone liked. The idea was that, if they used it,

　　they would not tell people who was speaking the words, just as they didn’t

　　caption the iconic pictures. Eventually people would figure out it was Jobs.

　　“This will be really powerful to have it in your voice,” Clow argued. “It will

　　be a way to reclaim the brand.”

　　Jobs couldn’t decide whether to use the version with his voice or to stick with

　　Dreyfuss. Finally, the night came when they had to ship the ad; it was due to

　　air, appropriately enough, on the television premiere of Toy Story. As was often

　　the case, Jobs did not like to be forced to make a decision. He told Clow to

　　ship both versions; this would give him until the morning to decide. When

　　morning came, Jobs called and told them to use the Dreyfuss version. “If we use

　　my voice, when people find out they will say it’s about me,” he told Clow. “It’s

　　not. It’s about Apple.”

　　Ever since he left the apple commune, Jobs had defined himself, and by extension

　　Apple, as a child of the counterculture. In ads such as “Think Different” and

　　“1984,” he positioned the Apple brand so that it reaffirmed his own rebel

　　streak, even after he became a billionaire, and it allowed other baby boomers

　　and their kids to do the same. “From when I first met him as a young guy, he’s

　　had the greatest intuition of the impact he wants his brand to have on people,”

　　said Clow.

　　Very few other companies or corporate leaders—perhaps none—could have gotten

　　away with the brilliant audacity of associating their brand with Gandhi,

　　Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to

　　define themselves as anticorporate, creative, innovative rebels simply by the

　　computer they used. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech

　　industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche,

　　Ferrari, Prius—because what I drive says something about me. People feel the

　　same way about an Apple product.”

　　Starting with the “Think Different” campaign, and continuing through the rest of

　　his years at Apple, Jobs held a freewheeling three-hour meeting every Wednesday

　　afternoon with his top agency, marketing, and communications people to kick

　　around messaging strategy. “There’s not a CEO on the planet who deals with

　　marketing the way Steve does,” said Clow. “Every Wednesday he approves each new

　　commercial, print ad, and billboard.” At the end of the meeting, he would often

　　take Clow and his two agency colleagues, Duncan Milner and James Vincent, to

　　Apple’s closely guarded design studio to see what products were in the works.

　　“He gets very passionate and emotional when he shows us what’s in development,”

　　said Vincent. By sharing with his marketing gurus his passion for the products

　　as they were being created, he was able to ensure that almost every ad they

　　produced was infused with his emotion.

　　iCEO

　　As he was finishing work on the “Think Different” ad, Jobs did some different

　　thinking of his own. He decided that he would officially take over running the

　　company, at least on a temporary basis. He had been the de facto leader since

　　Amelio’s ouster ten weeks earlier, but only as an advisor. Fred Anderson had the

　　titular role of interim CEO. On September 16, 1997, Jobs announced that he would

　　take over that title, which inevitably got abbreviated as iCEO. His commitment

　　was tentative: He took no salary and signed no contract. But he was not

　　tentative in his actions. He was in charge, and he did not rule by consensus.

　　That week he gathered his top managers and staff in the Apple auditorium for a

　　rally, followed by a picnic featuring beer and vegan food, to celebrate his new

　　role and the company’s new ads. He was wearing shorts, walking around the campus

　　barefoot, and had a stubble of beard. “I’ve been back about ten weeks, working

　　really hard,” he said, looking tired but deeply determined. “What we’re trying

　　to do is not highfalutin. We’re trying to get back to the basics of great

　　products, great marketing, and great distribution. Apple has drifted away from

　　doing the basics really well.”

　　For a few more weeks Jobs and the board kept looking for a permanent CEO.

　　Various names surfaced—George M. C. Fisher of Kodak, Sam Palmisano at IBM, Ed

　　Zander at Sun Microsystems—but most of the candidates were understandably

　　reluctant to consider becoming CEO if Jobs was going to remain an active board

　　member. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Zander declined to be

　　considered because he “didn’t want Steve looking over his shoulder,

　　second-guessing him on every decision.” At one point Jobs and Ellison pulled a

　　prank on a clueless computer consultant who was campaigning for the job; they

　　sent him an email saying that he had been selected, which caused both amusement

　　and embarrassment when stories appeared in the papers that they were just toying

　　with him.

　　By December it had become clear that Jobs’s iCEO status had evolved from interim

　　to indefinite. As Jobs continued to run the company, the board quietly

　　deactivated its search. “I went back to Apple and tried to hire a CEO, with the

　　help of a recruiting agency, for almost four months,” he recalled. “But they

　　didn’t produce the right people. That’s why I finally stayed. Apple was in no

　　shape to attract anybody good.”

　　The problem Jobs faced was that running two companies was brutal. Looking back

　　on it, he traced his health problems back to those days:

　　It was rough, really rough, the worst time in my life. I had a young family. I

　　had Pixar. I would go to work at 7 a.m. and I’d get back at 9 at night, and

　　the kids would be in bed. And I couldn’t speak, I literally couldn’t, I was so

　　exhausted. I couldn’t speak to Laurene. All I could do was watch a half hour

　　of TV and vegetate. It got close to killing me. I was driving up to Pixar and

　　down to Apple in a black Porsche convertible, and I started to get kidney

　　stones. I would rush to the hospital and the hospital would give me a shot of

　　Demerol in the butt and eventually I would pass it.

　　Despite the grueling schedule, the more that Jobs immersed himself in Apple, the

　　more he realized that he would not be able to walk away. When Michael Dell was

　　asked at a computer trade show in October 1997 what he would do if he were Steve

　　Jobs and taking over Apple, he replied, “I’d shut it down and give the money

　　back to the shareholders.” Jobs fired off an email to Dell. “CEOs are supposed

　　to have class,” it said. “I can see that isn’t an opinion you hold.” Jobs liked

　　to stoke up rivalries as a way to rally his team—he had done so with IBM and

　　Microsoft—and he did so with Dell. When he called together his managers to

　　institute a build-to-order system for manufacturing and distribution, Jobs used

　　as a backdrop a blown-up picture of Michael Dell with a target on his face.

　　“We’re coming after you, buddy,” he said to cheers from his troops.

　　One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve,

　　when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run

　　company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. “I

　　discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you

　　organize a company,” he recalled. “The whole notion of how you build a company

　　is fascinating. When I got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I

　　would be useless without the company, and that’s why I decided to stay and

　　rebuild it.”

　　Killing the Clones

　　One of the great debates about Apple was whether it should have licensed its

　　operating system more aggressively to other computer makers, the way Microsoft

　　licensed Windows. Wozniak had favored that approach from the beginning. “We had

　　the most beautiful operating system,” he said, “but to get it you had to buy our

　　hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake. What we should have done was

　　calculate an appropriate price to license the operating system.” Alan Kay, the

　　star of Xerox PARC who came to Apple as a fellow in 1984, also fought hard for

　　licensing the Mac OS software. “Software people are always multiplatform,

　　because you want to run on everything,” he recalled. “And that was a huge

　　battle, probably the largest battle I lost at Apple.”

　　Bill Gates, who was building a fortune by licensing Microsoft’s operating

　　system, had urged Apple to do the same in 1985, just as Jobs was being eased

　　out. Gates believed that, even if Apple took away some of Microsoft’s operating

　　system customers, Microsoft could make money by creating versions of its

　　applications software, such as Word and Excel, for the users of the Macintosh

　　and its clones. “I was trying to do everything to get them to be a strong

　　licensor,” he recalled. He sent a formal memo to Sculley making the case. “The

　　industry has reached the point where it is now impossible for Apple to create a

　　standard out of their innovative technology without support from, and the

　　resulting credibility of, other personal computer manufacturers,” he argued.

　　“Apple should license Macintosh technology to 3–5 significant manufacturers for

　　the development of ‘Mac Compatibles.’” Gates got no reply, so he wrote a second

　　memo suggesting some companies that would be good at cloning the Mac, and he

　　added, “I want to help in any way I can with the licensing. Please give me a

　　call.”

　　Apple resisted licensing out the Macintosh operating system until 1994, when CEO

　　Michael Spindler allowed two small companies, Power Computing and Radius, to

　　make Macintosh clones. When Gil Amelio took over in 1996, he added Motorola to

　　the list. It turned out to be a dubious business strategy: Apple got an $80

　　licensing fee for each computer sold, but instead of expanding the market, the

　　cloners cannibalized the sales of Apple’s own high-end computers, on which it

　　made up to $500 in profit.

　　Jobs’s objections to the cloning program were not just economic, however. He had

　　an inbred aversion to it. One of his core principles was that hardware and

　　software should be tightly integrated. He loved to control all aspects of his

　　life, and the only way to do that with computers was to take responsibility for

　　the user experience from end to end.

　　So upon his return to Apple he made killing the Macintosh clones a priority.

　　When a new version of the Mac operating system shipped in July 1997, weeks after

　　he had helped oust Amelio, Jobs did not allow the clone makers to upgrade to it.

　　The head of Power Computing, Stephen “King” Kahng, organized pro-cloning

　　protests when Jobs appeared at Boston Macworld that August and publicly warned

　　that the Macintosh OS would die if Jobs declined to keep licensing it out. “If

　　the platform goes closed, it is over,” Kahng said. “Total destruction. Closed is

　　the kiss of death.”

　　Jobs disagreed. He telephoned Ed Woolard to say he was getting Apple out of the

　　licensing business. The board acquiesced, and in September he reached a deal to

　　pay Power Computing $100 million to relinquish its license and give Apple access

　　to its database of customers. He soon terminated the licenses of the other

　　cloners as well. “It was the dumbest thing in the world to let companies making

　　crappier hardware use our operating system and cut into our sales,” he later

　　said.

　　Product Line Review

　　One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to do

　　is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies,

　　and it’s true for products.”

　　He went to work applying this principle as soon as he returned to Apple. One day

　　he was walking the halls and ran into a young Wharton School graduate who had

　　been Amelio’s assistant and who said he was wrapping up his work. “Well, good,

　　because I need someone to do grunt work,” Jobs told him. His new role was to

　　take notes as Jobs met with the dozens of product teams at Apple, asked them to

　　explain what they were doing, and forced them to justify going ahead with their

　　products or projects.

　　He also enlisted a friend, Phil Schiller, who had worked at Apple but was then

　　at the graphics software company Macromedia. “Steve would summon the teams into

　　the boardroom, which seats twenty, and they would come with thirty people and

　　try to show PowerPoints, which Steve didn’t want to see,” Schiller recalled. One

　　of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban

　　PowerPoints. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of

　　thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a

　　presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather

　　than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t

　　need PowerPoint.”

　　The product review revealed how unfocused Apple had become. The company was

　　churning out multiple versions of each product because of bureaucratic momentum

　　and to satisfy the whims of retailers. “It was insanity,” Schiller recalled.

　　“Tons of products, most of them crap, done by deluded teams.” Apple had a dozen

　　versions of the Macintosh, each with a different confusing number, ranging from

　　1400 to 9600. “I had people explaining this to me for three weeks,” Jobs said.

　　“I couldn’t figure it out.” He finally began asking simple questions, like,

　　“Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?”

　　When he couldn’t get simple answers, he began slashing away at models and

　　products. Soon he had cut 70% of them. “You are bright people,” he told one

　　group. “You shouldn’t be wasting your time on such crappy products.” Many of the

　　engineers were infuriated at his slash-and-burn tactics, which resulted in

　　massive layoffs. But Jobs later claimed that the good engineers, including some

　　whose projects were killed, were appreciative. He told one staff meeting in

　　September 1997, “I came out of the meeting with people who had just gotten their

　　products canceled and they were three feet off the ground with excitement

　　because they finally understood where in the heck we were going.”

　　After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted at one big product

　　strategy session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a

　　whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared

　　chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote

　　“Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their

　　job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. “The room

　　was in dumb silence,” Schiller recalled.

　　There was also a stunned silence when Jobs presented the plan to the September

　　meeting of the Apple board. “Gil had been urging us to approve more and more

　　products every meeting,” Woolard recalled. “He kept saying we need more

　　products. Steve came in and said we needed fewer. He drew a matrix with four

　　quadrants and said that this was where we should focus.” At first the board

　　pushed back. It was a risk, Jobs was told. “I can make it work,” he replied. The

　　board never voted on the new strategy. Jobs was in charge, and he forged ahead.

　　The result was that the Apple engineers and managers suddenly became sharply

　　focused on just four areas. For the professional desktop quadrant, they would

　　work on making the Power Macintosh G3. For the professional portable, there

　　would be the PowerBook G3. For the consumer desktop, work would begin on what

　　became the iMac. And for the consumer portable, they would focus on what would

　　become the iBook. The “i,” Jobs later explained, was to emphasize that the

　　devices would be seamlessly integrated with the Internet.

　　Apple’s sharper focus meant getting the company out of other businesses, such as

　　printers and servers. In 1997 Apple was selling StyleWriter color printers that

　　were basically a version of the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet. HP made most of its

　　money by selling the ink cartridges. “I don’t understand,” Jobs said at the

　　product review meeting. “You’re going to ship a million and not make money on

　　these? This is nuts.” He left the room and called the head of HP. Let’s tear up

　　our arrangement, Jobs proposed, and we will get out of the printer business and

　　just let you do it. Then he came back to the boardroom and announced the

　　decision. “Steve looked at the situation and instantly knew we needed to get

　　outside of the box,” Schiller recalled.

　　The most visible decision he made was to kill, once and for all, the Newton, the

　　personal digital assistant with the almost-good handwriting-recognition system.

　　Jobs hated it because it was Sculley’s pet project, because it didn’t work

　　perfectly, and because he had an aversion to stylus devices. He had tried to get

　　Amelio to kill it early in 1997 and succeeded only in convincing him to try to

　　spin off the division. By late 1997, when Jobs did his product reviews, it was

　　still around. He later described his thinking:

　　If Apple had been in a less precarious situation, I would have drilled down

　　myself to figure out how to make it work. I didn’t trust the people running

　　it. My gut was that there was some really good technology, but it was fucked

　　up by mismanagement. By shutting it down, I freed up some good engineers who

　　could work on new mobile devices. And eventually we got it right when we moved

　　on to iPhones and the iPad.

　　This ability to focus saved Apple. In his first year back, Jobs laid off more

　　than three thousand people, which salvaged the company’s balance sheet. For the

　　fiscal year that ended when Jobs became interim CEO in September 1997, Apple

　　lost $1.04 billion. “We were less than ninety days from being insolvent,” he

　　recalled. At the January 1998 San Francisco Macworld, Jobs took the stage where

　　Amelio had bombed a year earlier. He sported a full beard and a leather jacket

　　as he touted the new product strategy. And for the first time he ended the

　　presentation with a phrase that he would make his signature coda: “Oh, and one

　　more thing . . .” This time the “one more thing” was “Think Profit.” When he

　　said those words, the crowd erupted in applause. After two years of staggering

　　losses, Apple had enjoyed a profitable quarter, making $45 million. For the full

　　fiscal year of 1998, it would turn in a $309 million profit. Jobs was back, and

　　so was Apple.UnknownDESIGN PRINCIPLES

　　The Studio of Jobs and Ive

　　With Jony Ive and the sunflower iMac, 2002

　　Jony Ive

　　When Jobs gathered his top management for a pep talk just after he became iCEO

　　in September 1997, sitting in the audience was a sensitive and passionate

　　thirty-year-old Brit who was head of the company’s design team. Jonathan Ive,

　　known to all as Jony, was planning to quit. He was sick of the company’s focus

　　on profit maximization rather than product design. Jobs’s talk led him to

　　reconsider. “I remember very clearly Steve announcing that our goal is not just

　　to make money but to make great products,” Ive recalled. “The decisions you make

　　based on that philosophy are fundamentally different from the ones we had been

　　making at Apple.” Ive and Jobs would soon forge a bond that would lead to the

　　greatest industrial design collaboration of their era.

　　Ive grew up in Chingford, a town on the northeast edge of London. His father was

　　a silversmith who taught at the local college. “He’s a fantastic craftsman,” Ive

　　recalled. “His Christmas gift to me would be one day of his time in his college

　　workshop, during the Christmas break when no one else was there, helping me make

　　whatever I dreamed up.” The only condition was that Jony had to draw by hand

　　what they planned to make. “I always understood the beauty of things made by

　　hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put

　　into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.”

　　Ive enrolled in Newcastle Polytechnic and spent his spare time and summers

　　working at a design consultancy. One of his creations was a pen with a little

　　ball on top that was fun to fiddle with. It helped give the owner a playful

　　emotional connection to the pen. For his thesis he designed a microphone and

　　earpiece—in purest white plastic—to communicate with hearing-impaired kids. His

　　flat was filled with foam models he had made to help him perfect the design. He

　　also designed an ATM machine and a curved phone, both of which won awards from

　　the Royal Society of Arts. Unlike some designers, he didn’t just make beautiful

　　sketches; he also focused on how the engineering and inner components would

　　work. He had an epiphany in college when he was able to design on a Macintosh.

　　“I discovered the Mac and felt I had a connection with the people who were

　　making this product,” he recalled. “I suddenly understood what a company was, or

　　was supposed to be.”

　　After graduation Ive helped to build a design firm in London, Tangerine, which

　　got a consulting contract with Apple. In 1992 he moved to Cupertino to take a

　　job in the Apple design department. He became the head of the department in

　　1996, the year before Jobs returned, but wasn’t happy. Amelio had little

　　appreciation for design. “There wasn’t that feeling of putting care into a

　　product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made,” Ive said. “All

　　they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look

　　like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I

　　was about to quit.”

　　When Jobs took over and gave his pep talk, Ive decided to stick around. But Jobs

　　at first looked around for a world-class designer from the outside. He talked to

　　Richard Sapper, who designed the IBM ThinkPad, and Giorgetto Giugiaro, who

　　designed the Ferrari 250 and the Maserati Ghibli. But then he took a tour of

　　Apple’s design studio and bonded with the affable, eager, and very earnest Ive.

　　“We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Ive recalled. “We were on the

　　same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company.”

　　Ive reported, at least initially, to Jon Rubinstein, whom Jobs had brought in to

　　head the hardware division, but he developed a direct and unusually strong

　　relationship with Jobs. They began to have lunch together regularly, and Jobs

　　would end his day by dropping by Ive’s design studio for a chat. “Jony had a

　　special status,” said Laurene Powell. “He would come by our house, and our

　　families became close. Steve is never intentionally wounding to him. Most people

　　in Steve’s life are replaceable. But not Jony.”

　　Jobs described to me his respect for Ive:

　　The difference that Jony has made, not only at Apple but in the world, is

　　huge. He is a wickedly intelligent person in all ways. He understands business

　　concepts, marketing concepts. He picks stuff up just like that, click. He

　　understands what we do at our core better than anyone. If I had a spiritual

　　partner at Apple, it’s Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together

　　and then pull others in and say, “Hey, what do you think about this?” He gets

　　the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product.

　　And he understands that Apple is a product company. He’s not just a designer.

　　That’s why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone

　　else at Apple except me. There’s no one who can tell him what to do, or to

　　butt out. That’s the way I set it up.

　　Like most designers, Ive enjoyed analyzing the philosophy and the step-by-step

　　thinking that went into a particular design. For Jobs, the process was more

　　intuitive. He would point to models and sketches he liked and dump on the ones

　　he didn’t. Ive would then take the cues and develop the concepts Jobs blessed.

　　Ive was a fan of the German industrial designer Dieter Rams, who worked for the

　　electronics firm Braun. Rams preached the gospel of “Less but better,” Weniger

　　aber besser, and likewise Jobs and Ive wrestled with each new design to see how

　　much they could simplify it. Ever since Apple’s first brochure proclaimed

　　“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Jobs had aimed for the simplicity

　　that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. “It takes a lot of

　　hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the

　　underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”

　　In Ive, Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for true rather than surface

　　simplicity. Sitting in his design studio, Ive described his philosophy:

　　Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have

　　to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way

　　to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s

　　not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the

　　depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For

　　example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that

　　is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the

　　simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You

　　have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get

　　rid of the parts that are not essential.

　　That was the fundamental principle Jobs and Ive shared. Design was not just

　　about what a product looked like on the surface. It had to reflect the product’s

　　essence. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs told Fortune

　　shortly after retaking the reins at Apple. “But to me, nothing could be further

　　from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made

　　creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”

　　As a result, the process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related

　　to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple’s

　　Power Macs. “We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely

　　essential,” he said. “To do so required total collaboration between the

　　designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We

　　kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we

　　get it to perform the function of the other four parts?”

　　The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its

　　manufacturing was illustrated for Jobs and Ive when they were traveling in

　　France and went into a kitchen supply store. Ive picked up a knife he admired,

　　but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same. “We both noticed a

　　tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade,” Ive recalled. They talked

　　about how the knife’s good design had been ruined by the way it was

　　manufactured. “We don’t like to think of our knives as being glued together,”

　　Ive said. “Steve and I care about things like that, which ruin the purity and

　　detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think alike about

　　how products should be made to look pure and seamless.”

　　At most other companies, engineering tends to drive design. The engineers set

　　forth their specifications and requirements, and the designers then come up with

　　cases and shells that will accommodate them. For Jobs, the process tended to

　　work the other way. In the early days of Apple, Jobs had approved the design of

　　the case of the original Macintosh, and the engineers had to make their boards

　　and components fit.

　　After he was forced out, the process at Apple reverted to being engineer-driven.

　　“Before Steve came back, engineers would say ‘Here are the guts’—processor, hard

　　drive—and then it would go to the designers to put it in a box,” said Apple’s

　　marketing chief Phil Schiller. “When you do it that way, you come up with awful

　　products.” But when Jobs returned and forged his bond with Ive, the balance was

　　again tilted toward the designers. “Steve kept impressing on us that the design

　　was integral to what would make us great,” said Schiller. “Design once again

　　dictated the engineering, not just vice versa.”

　　On occasion this could backfire, such as when Jobs and Ive insisted on using a

　　solid piece of brushed aluminum for the edge of the iPhone 4 even when the

　　engineers worried that it would compromise the antenna. But usually the

　　distinctiveness of its designs—for the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the

　　iPad—would set Apple apart and lead to its triumphs in the years after Jobs

　　returned.

　　Inside the Studio

　　The design studio where Jony Ive reigns, on the ground floor of Two Infinite

　　Loop on the Apple campus, is shielded by tinted windows and a heavy clad, locked

　　door. Just inside is a glass-booth reception desk where two assistants guard

　　access. Even high-level Apple employees are not allowed in without special

　　permission. Most of my interviews with Jony Ive for this book were held

　　elsewhere, but one day in 2010 he arranged for me to spend an afternoon touring

　　the studio and talking about how he and Jobs collaborate there.

　　To the left of the entrance is a bullpen of desks with young designers; to the

　　right is the cavernous main room with six long steel tables for displaying and

　　playing with works in progress. Beyond the main room is a computer-aided design

　　studio, filled with workstations, that leads to a room with molding machines to

　　turn what’s on the screens into foam models. Beyond that is a robot-controlled

　　spray-painting chamber to make the models look real. The look is sparse and

　　industrial, with metallic gray décor. Leaves from the trees outside cast moving

　　patterns of light and shadows on the tinted windows. Techno and jazz play in the

　　background.

　　Almost every day when Jobs was healthy and in the office, he would have lunch

　　with Ive and then wander by the studio in the afternoon. As he entered, he could

　　survey the tables and see the products in the pipeline, sense how they fit into

　　Apple’s strategy, and inspect with his fingertips the evolving design of each.

　　Usually it was just the two of them alone, while the other designers glanced up

　　from their work but kept a respectful distance. If Jobs had a specific issue, he

　　might call over the head of mechanical design or another of Ive’s deputies. If

　　something excited him or sparked some thoughts about corporate strategy, he

　　might ask the chief operating officer Tim Cook or the marketing head Phil

　　Schiller to come over and join them. Ive described the usual process:

　　This great room is the one place in the company where you can look around and

　　see everything we have in the works. When Steve comes in, he will sit at one

　　of these tables. If we’re working on a new iPhone, for example, he might grab

　　a stool and start playing with different models and feeling them in his hands,

　　remarking on which ones he likes best. Then he will graze by the other tables,

　　just him and me, to see where all the other products are heading. He can get a

　　sense of the sweep of the whole company, the iPhone and iPad, the iMac and

　　laptop and everything we’re considering. That helps him see where the company

　　is spending its energy and how things connect. And he can ask, “Does doing

　　this make sense, because over here is where we are growing a lot?” or

　　questions like that. He gets to see things in relationship to each other,

　　which is pretty hard to do in a big company. Looking at the models on these

　　tables, he can see the future for the next three years.

　　Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk

　　around the tables and play with the models. He doesn’t like to read complex

　　drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He’s right. I get surprised when

　　we make a model and then realize it’s rubbish, even though based on the CAD

　　[computer-aided design] renderings it looked great.

　　He loves coming in here because it’s calm and gentle. It’s a paradise if

　　you’re a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no

　　huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we

　　iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don’t run into

　　major disagreements.

　　On this day Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and

　　connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest

　　variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd

　　that the head of design would fret over something like this, but Jobs got

　　involved as well. Ever since he had a special power supply made for the Apple

　　II, Jobs has cared about not only the engineering but also the design of such

　　parts. His name is listed on the patent for the white power brick used by the

　　MacBook as well as its magnetic connector with its satisfying click. In fact he

　　is listed as one of the inventors for 212 different Apple patents in the United

　　States as of the beginning of 2011.

　　Ive and Jobs have even obsessed over, and patented, the packaging for various

　　Apple products. U.S. patent D558572, for example, granted on January 1, 2008, is

　　for the iPod Nano box, with four drawings showing how the device is nestled in a

　　cradle when the box is opened. Patent D596485, issued on July 21, 2009, is for

　　the iPhone packaging, with its sturdy lid and little glossy plastic tray inside.

　　Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to “impute”—to understand that people do

　　judge a book by its cover—and therefore to make sure all the trappings and

　　packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it’s

　　an iPod Mini or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening up

　　the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in an inviting fashion.

　　“Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging,” said Ive. “I love the

　　process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the

　　product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.”

　　Ive, who has the sensitive temperament of an artist, at times got upset with

　　Jobs for taking too much credit, a habit that has bothered other colleagues over

　　the years. His personal feelings for Jobs were so intense that at times he got

　　easily bruised. “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say,

　　‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one,’” Ive said. “And later I

　　will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his

　　idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep

　　notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my

　　designs.” Ive also has bristled when outsiders portrayed Jobs as the only ideas

　　guy at Apple. “That makes us vulnerable as a company,” Ive said earnestly, his

　　voice soft. But then he paused to recognize the role Jobs in fact played. “In so

　　many other companies, ideas and great design get lost in the process,” he said.

　　“The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant,

　　nowhere, if Steve hadn’t been here to push us, work with us, and drive through

　　all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.”UnknownTHE iMAC

　　Hello (Again)

　　Back to the Future

　　The first great design triumph to come from the Jobs-Ive collaboration was the

　　iMac, a desktop computer aimed at the home consumer market that was introduced

　　in May 1998. Jobs had certain specifications. It should be an all-in-one

　　product, with keyboard and monitor and computer ready to use right out of the

　　box. It should have a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it

　　should sell for $1,200 or so. (Apple had no computer selling for less than

　　$2,000 at the time.) “He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984

　　Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance,” recalled Schiller. “That meant

　　design and engineering had to work together.”

　　The initial plan was to build a “network computer,” a concept championed by

　　Oracle’s Larry Ellison, which was an inexpensive terminal without a hard drive

　　that would mainly be used to connect to the Internet and other networks. But

　　Apple’s chief financial officer Fred Anderson led the push to make the product

　　more robust by adding a disk drive so it could become a full-fledged desktop

　　computer for the home. Jobs eventually agreed.

　　Jon Rubinstein, who was in charge of hardware, adapted the microprocessor and

　　guts of the PowerMac G3, Apple’s high-end professional computer, for use in the

　　proposed new machine. It would have a hard drive and a tray for compact disks,

　　but in a rather bold move, Jobs and Rubinstein decided not to include the usual

　　floppy disk drive. Jobs quoted the hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s maxim, “Skate

　　where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” He was a bit ahead of his time,

　　but eventually most computers eliminated floppy disks.

　　Ive and his top deputy, Danny Coster, began to sketch out futuristic designs.

　　Jobs brusquely rejected the dozen foam models they initially produced, but Ive

　　knew how to guide him gently. Ive agreed that none of them was quite right, but

　　he pointed out one that had promise. It was curved, playful looking, and did not

　　seem like an unmovable slab rooted to the table. “It has a sense that it’s just

　　arrived on your desktop or it’s just about to hop off and go somewhere,” he told

　　Jobs.

　　By the next showing Ive had refined the playful model. This time Jobs, with his

　　binary view of the world, raved that he loved it. He took the foam prototype and

　　began carrying it around the headquarters with him, showing it in confidence to

　　trusted lieutenants and board members. In its ads Apple was celebrating the

　　glories of being able to think different, yet until now nothing had been

　　proposed that was much different from existing computers. Finally, Jobs had

　　something new.

　　The plastic casing that Ive and Coster proposed was sea-green blue, later named

　　bondi blue after the color of the water at a beach in Australia, and it was

　　translucent so that you could see through to the inside of the machine. “We were

　　trying to convey a sense of the computer being changeable based on your needs,

　　to be like a chameleon,” said Ive. “That’s why we liked the translucency. You

　　could have color but it felt so unstatic. And it came across as cheeky.”

　　Both metaphorically and in reality, the translucency connected the inner

　　engineering of the computer to the outer design. Jobs had always insisted that

　　the rows of chips on the circuit boards look neat, even though they would never

　　be seen. Now they would be seen. The casing would make visible the care that had

　　gone into making all components of the computer and fitting them together. The

　　playful design would convey simplicity while also revealing the depths that true

　　simplicity entails.

　　Even the simplicity of the plastic shell itself involved great complexity. Ive

　　and his team worked with Apple’s Korean manufacturers to perfect the process of

　　making the cases, and they even went to a jelly bean factory to study how to

　　make translucent colors look enticing. The cost of each case was more than $60

　　per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would

　　probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent

　　case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no

　　such analysis.

　　Topping off the design was the handle nestled into the iMac. It was more playful

　　and semiotic than it was functional. This was a desktop computer; not many

　　people were really going to carry it around. But as Ive later explained:

　　Back then, people weren’t comfortable with technology. If you’re scared of

　　something, then you won’t touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch

　　it. So I thought, if there’s this handle on it, it makes a relationship

　　possible. It’s approachable. It’s intuitive. It gives you permission to touch.

　　It gives a sense of its deference to you. Unfortunately, manufacturing a

　　recessed handle costs a lot of money. At the old Apple, I would have lost the

　　argument. What was really great about Steve is that he saw it and said,

　　“That’s cool!” I didn’t explain all the thinking, but he intuitively got it.

　　He just knew that it was part of the iMac’s friendliness and playfulness.

　　Jobs had to fend off the objections of the manufacturing engineers, supported by

　　Rubinstein, who tended to raise practical cost considerations when faced with

　　Ive’s aesthetic desires and various design whims. “When we took it to the

　　engineers,” Jobs said, “they came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn’t do

　　it. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I

　　said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of

　　grudgingly did it.”

　　Jobs asked Lee Clow and Ken Segall and others from the TBWA\Chiat\Day ad team to

　　fly up to see what he had in the works. He brought them into the guarded design

　　studio and dramatically unveiled Ive’s translucent teardrop-shaped design, which

　　looked like something from The Jetsons, the animated TV show set in the future.

　　For a moment they were taken aback. “We were pretty shocked, but we couldn’t be

　　frank,” Segall recalled. “We were really thinking, ‘Jesus, do they know what

　　they are doing?’ It was so radical.” Jobs asked them to suggest names. Segall

　　came back with five options, one of them “iMac.” Jobs didn’t like any of them at

　　first, so Segall came up with another list a week later, but he said that the

　　agency still preferred “iMac.” Jobs replied, “I don’t hate it this week, but I

　　still don’t like it.” He tried silk-screening it on some of the prototypes, and

　　the name grew on him. And thus it became the iMac.

　　As the deadline for completing the iMac drew near, Jobs’s legendary temper

　　reappeared in force, especially when he was confronting manufacturing issues. At

　　one product review meeting, he learned that the process was going slowly. “He

　　did one of his displays of awesome fury, and the fury was absolutely pure,”

　　recalled Ive. He went around the table assailing everyone, starting with

　　Rubinstein. “You know we’re trying to save the company here,” he shouted, “and

　　you guys are screwing it up!”

　　Like the original Macintosh team, the iMac crew staggered to completion just in

　　time for the big announcement. But not before Jobs had one last explosion. When

　　it came time to rehearse for the launch presentation, Rubinstein cobbled

　　together two working prototypes. Jobs had not seen the final product before, and

　　when he looked at it onstage he saw a button on the front, under the display. He

　　pushed it and the CD tray opened. “What the fuck is this?!?” he asked, though

　　not as politely. “None of us said anything,” Schiller recalled, “because he

　　obviously knew what a CD tray was.” So Jobs continued to rail. It was supposed

　　to have a clean CD slot, he insisted, referring to the elegant slot drives that

　　were already to be found in upscale cars. “Steve, this is exactly the drive I

　　showed you when we talked about the components,” Rubinstein explained. “No,

　　there was never a tray, just a slot,” Jobs insisted. Rubinstein didn’t back

　　down. Jobs’s fury didn’t abate. “I almost started crying, because it was too

　　late to do anything about it,” Jobs later recalled.

　　They suspended the rehearsal, and for a while it seemed as if Jobs might cancel

　　the entire product launch. “Ruby looked at me as if to say, ‘Am I crazy?’”

　　Schiller recalled. “It was my first product launch with Steve and the first time

　　I saw his mind-set of ‘If it’s not right we’re not launching it.’” Finally, they

　　agreed to replace the tray with a slot drive for the next version of the iMac.

　　“I’m only going to go ahead with the launch if you promise we’re going to go to

　　slot mode as soon as possible,” Jobs said tearfully.

　　There was also a problem with the video he planned to show. In it, Jony Ive is

　　shown describing his design thinking and asking, “What computer would the

　　Jetsons have had? It was like, the future yesterday.” At that moment there was a

　　two-second snippet from the cartoon show, showing Jane Jetson looking at a video

　　screen, followed by another two-second clip of the Jetsons giggling by a

　　Christmas tree. At a rehearsal a production assistant told Jobs they would have

　　to remove the clips because Hanna-Barbera had not given permission to use them.

　　“Keep it in,” Jobs barked at him. The assistant explained that there were rules

　　against that. “I don’t care,” Jobs said. “We’re using it.” The clip stayed in.

　　Lee Clow was preparing a series of colorful magazine ads, and when he sent Jobs

　　the page proofs he got an outraged phone call in response. The blue in the ad,

　　Jobs insisted, was different from that of the iMac. “You guys don’t know what

　　you’re doing!” Jobs shouted. “I’m going to get someone else to do the ads,

　　because this is fucked up.” Clow argued back. Compare them, he said. Jobs, who

　　was not in the office, insisted he was right and continued to shout. Eventually

　　Clow got him to sit down with the original photographs. “I finally proved to him

　　that the blue was the blue was the blue.” Years later, on a Steve Jobs

　　discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone

　　who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs’s

　　home: “I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked

　　in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This

　　was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I’m pretty sure I could make

　　out, ‘Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!!’”

　　As always, Jobs was compulsive in preparing for the dramatic unveiling. Having

　　stopped one rehearsal because he was angry about the CD drive tray, he stretched

　　out the other rehearsals to make sure the show would be stellar. He repeatedly

　　went over the climactic moment when he would walk across the stage and proclaim,

　　“Say hello to the new iMac.” He wanted the lighting to be perfect so that the

　　translucence of the new machine would be vivid. But after a few run-throughs he

　　was still unsatisfied, an echo of his obsession with stage lighting that Sculley

　　had witnessed at the rehearsals for the original 1984 Macintosh launch. He

　　ordered the lights to be brighter and come on earlier, but that still didn’t

　　please him. So he jogged down the auditorium aisle and slouched into a center

　　seat, draping his legs over the seat in front. “Let’s keep doing it till we get

　　it right, okay?” he said. They made another attempt. “No, no,” Jobs complained.

　　“This isn’t working at all.” The next time, the lights were bright enough, but

　　they came on too late. “I’m getting tired of asking about this,” Jobs growled.

　　Finally, the iMac shone just right. “Oh! Right there! That’s great!” Jobs

　　yelled.

　　A year earlier Jobs had ousted Mike Markkula, his early mentor and partner, from

　　the board. But he was so proud of what he had wrought with the new iMac, and so

　　sentimental about its connection to the original Macintosh, that he invited

　　Markkula to Cupertino for a private preview. Markkula was impressed. His only

　　objection was to the new mouse that Ive had designed. It looked like a hockey

　　puck, Markkula said, and people would hate it. Jobs disagreed, but Markkula was

　　right. Otherwise the machine had turned out to be, as had its predecessor,

　　insanely great.

　　The Launch, May 6, 1998

　　With the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs had created a new kind

　　of theater: the product debut as an epochal event, climaxed by a

　　let-there-be-light moment in which the skies part, a light shines down, the

　　angels sing, and a chorus of the chosen faithful sings “Hallelujah.” For the

　　grand unveiling of the product that he hoped would save Apple and again

　　transform personal computing, Jobs symbolically chose the Flint Auditorium of De

　　Anza Community College in Cupertino, the same venue he had used in 1984. He

　　would be pulling out all the stops in order to dispel doubts, rally the troops,

　　enlist support in the developers’ community, and jump-start the marketing of the

　　new machine. But he was also doing it because he enjoyed playing impresario.

　　Putting on a great show piqued his passions in the same way as putting out a

　　great product.

　　Displaying his sentimental side, he began with a graceful shout-out to three

　　people he had invited to be up front in the audience. He had become estranged

　　from all of them, but now he wanted them rejoined. “I started the company with

　　Steve Wozniak in my parents’ garage, and Steve is here today,” he said, pointing

　　him out and prompting applause. “We were joined by Mike Markkula and soon after

　　that our first president, Mike Scott,” he continued. “Both of those folks are in

　　the audience today. And none of us would be here without these three guys.” His

　　eyes misted for a moment as the applause again built. Also in the audience were

　　Andy Hertzfeld and most of the original Mac team. Jobs gave them a smile. He

　　believed he was about to do them proud.

　　After showing the grid of Apple’s new product strategy and going through some

　　slides about the new computer’s performance, he was ready to unveil his new

　　baby. “This is what computers look like today,” he said as a picture of a beige

　　set of boxy components and monitor was projected on the big screen behind him.

　　“And I’d like to take the privilege of showing you what they are going to look

　　like from today on.” He pulled the cloth from the table at center stage to

　　reveal the new iMac, which gleamed and sparkled as the lights came up on cue. He

　　pressed the mouse, and as at the launch of the original Macintosh, the screen

　　flashed with fast-paced images of all the wondrous things the computer could do.

　　At the end, the word “hello” appeared in the same playful script that had

　　adorned the 1984 Macintosh, this time with the word “again” below it in

　　parentheses: Hello (again). There was thunderous applause. Jobs stood back and

　　proudly gazed at his new Macintosh. “It looks like it’s from another planet,” he

　　said, as the audience laughed. “A good planet. A planet with better designers.”

　　Once again Jobs had produced an iconic new product, this one a harbinger of a

　　new millennium. It fulfilled the promise of “Think Different.” Instead of beige

　　boxes and monitors with a welter of cables and a bulky setup manual, here was a

　　friendly and spunky appliance, smooth to the touch and as pleasing to the eye as

　　a robin’s egg. You could grab its cute little handle and lift it out of the

　　elegant white box and plug it right into a wall socket. People who had been

　　afraid of computers now wanted one, and they wanted to put it in a room where

　　others could admire and perhaps covet it. “A piece of hardware that blends

　　sci-fi shimmer with the kitsch whimsy of a cocktail umbrella,” Steven Levy wrote

　　in Newsweek, “it is not only the coolest-looking computer introduced in years,

　　but a chest-thumping statement that Silicon Valley’s original dream company is

　　no longer somnambulant.” Forbes called it “an industry-altering success,” and

　　John Sculley later came out of exile to gush, “He has implemented the same

　　simple strategy that made Apple so successful 15 years ago: make hit products

　　and promote them with terrific marketing.”

　　Carping was heard from only one familiar corner. As the iMac garnered kudos,

　　Bill Gates assured a gathering of financial analysts visiting Microsoft that

　　this would be a passing fad. “The one thing Apple’s providing now is leadership

　　in colors,” Gates said as he pointed to a Windows-based PC that he jokingly had

　　painted red. “It won’t take long for us to catch up with that, I don’t think.”

　　Jobs was furious, and he told a reporter that Gates, the man he had publicly

　　decried for being completely devoid of taste, was clueless about what made the

　　iMac so much more appealing than other computers. “The thing that our

　　competitors are missing is that they think it’s about fashion, and they think

　　it’s about surface appearance,” he said. “They say, We’ll slap a little color on

　　this piece of junk computer, and we’ll have one, too.”

　　The iMac went on sale in August 1998 for $1,299. It sold 278,000 units in its

　　first six weeks, and would sell 800,000 by the end of the year, making it the

　　fastest-selling computer in Apple history. Most notably, 32% of the sales went

　　to people who were buying a computer for the first time, and another 12% to

　　people who had been using Windows machines.

　　Ive soon came up with four new juicy-looking colors, in addition to bondi blue,

　　for the iMacs. Offering the same computer in five colors would of course create

　　huge challenges for manufacturing, inventory, and distribution. At most

　　companies, including even the old Apple, there would have been studies and

　　meetings to look at the costs and benefits. But when Jobs looked at the new

　　colors, he got totally psyched and summoned other executives over to the design

　　studio. “We’re going to do all sorts of colors!” he told them excitedly. When

　　they left, Ive looked at his team in amazement. “In most places that decision

　　would have taken months,” Ive recalled. “Steve did it in a half hour.”

　　There was one other important refinement that Jobs wanted for the iMac: getting

　　rid of that detested CD tray. “I’d seen a slot-load drive on a very high-end

　　Sony stereo,” he said, “so I went to the drive manufacturers and got them to do

　　a slot-load drive for us for the version of the iMac we did nine months later.”

　　Rubinstein tried to argue him out of the change. He predicted that new drives

　　would come along that could burn music onto CDs rather than merely play them,

　　and they would be available in tray form before they were made to work in slots.

　　“If you go to slots, you will always be behind on the technology,” Rubinstein

　　argued.

　　“I don’t care, that’s what I want,” Jobs snapped back. They were having lunch at

　　a sushi bar in San Francisco, and Jobs insisted that they continue the

　　conversation over a walk. “I want you to do the slot-load drive for me as a

　　personal favor,” Jobs asked. Rubinstein agreed, of course, but he turned out to

　　be right. Panasonic came out with a CD drive that could rip and burn music, and

　　it was available first for computers that had old-fashioned tray loaders. The

　　effects of this would ripple over the next few years: It would cause Apple to be

　　slow in catering to users who wanted to rip and burn their own music, but that

　　would then force Apple to be imaginative and bold in finding a way to leapfrog

　　over its competitors when Jobs finally realized that he had to get into the

　　music market.UnknownCEO

　　Still Crazy after All These Years

　　Tim Cook and Jobs, 2007

　　Tim Cook

　　When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and produced the “Think Different” ads and the

　　iMac in his first year, it confirmed what most people already knew: that he

　　could be creative and a visionary. He had shown that during his first round at

　　Apple. What was less clear was whether he could run a company. He had definitely

　　not shown that during his first round.

　　Jobs threw himself into the task with a detail-oriented realism that astonished

　　those who were used to his fantasy that the rules of this universe need not

　　apply to him. “He became a manager, which is different from being an executive

　　or visionary, and that pleasantly surprised me,” recalled Ed Woolard, the board

　　chair who lured him back.

　　His management mantra was “Focus.” He eliminated excess product lines and cut

　　extraneous features in the new operating system software that Apple was

　　developing. He let go of his control-freak desire to manufacture products in his

　　own factories and instead outsourced the making of everything from the circuit

　　boards to the finished computers. And he enforced on Apple’s suppliers a

　　rigorous discipline. When he took over, Apple had more than two months’ worth of

　　inventory sitting in warehouses, more than any other tech company. Like eggs and

　　milk, computers have a short shelf life, so this amounted to at least a $500

　　million hit to profits. By early 1998 he had halved that to a month.

　　Jobs’s successes came at a cost, since velvety diplomacy was still not part of

　　his repertoire. When he decided that a division of Airborne Express wasn’t

　　delivering spare parts quickly enough, he ordered an Apple manager to break the

　　contract. When the manager protested that doing so could lead to a lawsuit, Jobs

　　replied, “Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking

　　dime from this company, ever.” The manager quit, there was a lawsuit, and it

　　took a year to resolve. “My stock options would be worth $10 million had I

　　stayed,” the manager said, “but I knew I couldn’t have stood it—and he’d have

　　fired me anyway.” The new distributor was ordered to cut inventory 75%, and did.

　　“Under Steve Jobs, there’s zero tolerance for not performing,” its CEO said. At

　　another point, when VLSI Technology was having trouble delivering enough chips

　　on time, Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were

　　“fucking dickless assholes.” The company ended up getting the chips to Apple on

　　time, and its executives made jackets that boasted on the back, “Team FDA.”

　　After three months of working under Jobs, Apple’s head of operations decided he

　　could not bear the pressure, and he quit. For almost a year Jobs ran operations

　　himself, because all the prospects he interviewed “seemed like they were

　　old-wave manufacturing people,” he recalled. He wanted someone who could build

　　just-in-time factories and supply chains, as Michael Dell had done. Then, in

　　1998, he met Tim Cook, a courtly thirty-seven-year-old procurement and supply

　　chain manager at Compaq Computers, who not only would become his operations

　　manager but would grow into an indispensable backstage partner in running Apple.

　　As Jobs recalled:

　　Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what

　　we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way. I had

　　visited a lot of just-in-time factories in Japan, and I’d built one for the

　　Mac and at NeXT. I knew what I wanted, and I met Tim, and he wanted the same

　　thing. So we started to work together, and before long I trusted him to know

　　exactly what to do. He had the same vision I did, and we could interact at a

　　high strategic level, and I could just forget about a lot of things unless he

　　came and pinged me.

　　Cook, the son of a shipyard worker, was raised in Robertsdale, Alabama, a small

　　town between Mobile and Pensacola a half hour from the Gulf Coast. He majored in

　　industrial engineering at Auburn, got a business degree at Duke, and for the

　　next twelve years worked for IBM in the Research Triangle of North Carolina.

　　When Jobs interviewed him, he had recently taken a job at Compaq. He had always

　　been a very logical engineer, and Compaq then seemed a more sensible career

　　option, but he was snared by Jobs’s aura. “Five minutes into my initial

　　interview with Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join

　　Apple,” he later said. “My intuition told me that joining Apple would be a

　　once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius.” And so he did.

　　“Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically, but there are times when

　　relying on gut or intuition is most indispensable.”

　　At Apple his role became implementing Jobs’s intuition, which he accomplished

　　with a quiet diligence. Never married, he threw himself into his work. He was up

　　most days at 4:30 sending emails, then spent an hour at the gym, and was at his

　　desk shortly after 6. He scheduled Sunday evening conference calls to prepare

　　for each week ahead. In a company that was led by a CEO prone to tantrums and

　　withering blasts, Cook commanded situations with a calm demeanor, a soothing

　　Alabama accent, and silent stares. “Though he’s capable of mirth, Cook’s default

　　facial expression is a frown, and his humor is of the dry variety,” Adam

　　Lashinsky wrote in Fortune. “In meetings he’s known for long, uncomfortable

　　pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper off the energy

　　bars he constantly eats.”

　　At a meeting early in his tenure, Cook was told of a problem with one of Apple’s

　　Chinese suppliers. “This is really bad,” he said. “Someone should be in China

　　driving this.” Thirty minutes later he looked at an operations executive sitting

　　at the table and unemotionally asked, “Why are you still here?” The executive

　　stood up, drove directly to the San Francisco airport, and bought a ticket to

　　China. He became one of Cook’s top deputies.

　　Cook reduced the number of Apple’s key suppliers from a hundred to twenty-four,

　　forced them to cut better deals to keep the business, convinced many to locate

　　next to Apple’s plants, and closed ten of the company’s nineteen warehouses. By

　　reducing the places where inventory could pile up, he reduced inventory. Jobs

　　had cut inventory from two months’ worth of product down to one by early 1998.

　　By September of that year, Cook had gotten it down to six days. By the following

　　September, it was down to an amazing two days’ worth. In addition, he cut the

　　production process for making an Apple computer from four months to two. All of

　　this not only saved money, it also allowed each new computer to have the very

　　latest components available.

　　Mock Turtlenecks and Teamwork

　　On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman, Akio Morita,

　　why everyone in his company’s factories wore uniforms. “He looked very ashamed

　　and told me that after the war, no one had any clothes, and companies like Sony

　　had to give their workers something to wear each day,” Jobs recalled. Over the

　　years the uniforms developed their own signature style, especially at companies

　　such as Sony, and it became a way of bonding workers to the company. “I decided

　　that I wanted that type of bonding for Apple,” Jobs recalled.

　　Sony, with its appreciation for style, had gotten the famous designer Issey

　　Miyake to create one of its uniforms. It was a jacket made of ripstop nylon with

　　sleeves that could unzip to make it a vest. “So I called Issey and asked him to

　　design a vest for Apple,” Jobs recalled. “I came back with some samples and told

　　everyone it would be great if we would all wear these vests. Oh man, did I get

　　booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea.”

　　In the process, however, he became friends with Miyake and would visit him

　　regularly. He also came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself,

　　because of both its daily convenience (the rationale he claimed) and its ability

　　to convey a signature style. “So I asked Issey to make me some of his black

　　turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them.” Jobs noticed

　　my surprise when he told this story, so he gestured to them stacked up in the

　　closet. “That’s what I wear,” he said. “I have enough to last for the rest of my

　　life.”

　　Despite his autocratic nature—he never worshipped at the altar of consensus—Jobs

　　worked hard to foster a culture of collaboration at Apple. Many companies pride

　　themselves on having few meetings. Jobs had many: an executive staff session

　　every Monday, a marketing strategy session all Wednesday afternoon, and endless

　　product review sessions. Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations,

　　he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various

　　vantages and the perspectives of different departments.

　　Because he believed that Apple’s great advantage was its integration of the

　　whole widget—from design to hardware to software to content—he wanted all

　　departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used

　　were “deep collaboration” and “concurrent engineering.” Instead of a development

　　process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to

　　design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments

　　collaborated simultaneously. “Our method was to develop integrated products, and

　　that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative,” Jobs said.

　　This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top

　　leaders—Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive—rather than just the managers

　　of the department where they wanted to work. “Then we all get together without

　　the person and talk about whether they’ll fit in,” Jobs said. His goal was to be

　　vigilant against “the bozo explosion” that leads to a company’s being larded

　　with second-rate talent:

　　For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The

　　best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average

　　one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the

　　average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an

　　attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn’t

　　get along, they’d hate working with each other. But I realized that A players

　　like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players. At

　　Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that’s

　　what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process.

　　When we hire someone, even if they’re going to be in marketing, I will have

　　them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert

　　Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb

　　project. I wasn’t nearly as good as he was, but that’s what I aspired to do.

　　The process could be intimidating, but Jobs had an eye for talent. When they

　　were looking for people to design the graphical interface for Apple’s new

　　operating system, Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The

　　applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well. Later that day Jobs

　　bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just

　　show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little

　　demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom

　　of a screen. When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock,

　　the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. “I

　　said, ‘My God,’ and hired him on the spot,” Jobs recalled. The feature became a

　　lovable part of Mac OSX, and the designer went on to design such things as

　　inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes

　　the screen keep gliding for a moment after you’ve finished swiping).

　　Jobs’s experiences at NeXT had matured him, but they had not mellowed him much.

　　He still had no license plate on his Mercedes, and he still parked in the

　　handicapped spaces next to the front door, sometimes straddling two slots. It

　　became a running gag. Employees made signs saying, “Park Different,” and someone

　　painted over the handicapped wheelchair symbol with a Mercedes logo.

　　People were allowed, even encouraged, to challenge him, and sometimes he would

　　respect them for it. But you had to be prepared for him to attack you, even bite

　　your head off, as he processed your ideas. “You never win an argument with him

　　at the time, but sometimes you eventually win,” said James Vincent, the creative

　　young adman who worked with Lee Clow. “You propose something and he declares,

　　‘That’s a stupid idea,’ and later he comes back and says, ‘Here’s what we’re

　　going to do.’ And you want to say, ‘That’s what I told you two weeks ago and you

　　said that’s a stupid idea.’ But you can’t do that. Instead you say, ‘That’s a

　　great idea, let’s do that.’”

　　People also had to put up with Jobs’s occasional irrational or incorrect

　　assertions. To both family and colleagues, he was apt to declare, with great

　　conviction, some scientific or historical fact that had scant relationship to

　　reality. “There can be something he knows absolutely nothing about, and because

　　of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows

　　what he’s talking about,” said Ive, who described the trait as weirdly

　　endearing. Yet with his eye for detail, Jobs sometimes correctly pounced on tiny

　　things others had missed. Lee Clow recalled showing Jobs a cut of a commercial,

　　making some minor changes he requested, and then being assaulted with a tirade

　　about how the ad had been completely destroyed. “He discovered we had cut two

　　extra frames, something so fleeting it was nearly impossible to notice,” said

　　Clow. “But he wanted to be sure that an image hit at the exact moment as a beat

　　of the music, and he was totally right.”

　　From iCEO to CEO

　　Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years

　　to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to

　　commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and

　　no stock options. “I make 50 cents for showing up,” he liked to joke, “and the

　　other 50 cents is based on performance.” Since his return in July 1997, Apple

　　stock had gone from just under $14 to just over $102 at the peak of the Internet

　　bubble at the beginning of 2000. Woolard had begged him to take at least a

　　modest stock grant back in 1997, but Jobs had declined, saying, “I don’t want

　　the people I work with at Apple to think I am coming back to get rich.” Had he

　　accepted that modest grant, it would have been worth $400 million. Instead he

　　made $2.50 during that period.

　　The main reason he clung to his interim designation was a sense of uncertainty

　　about Apple’s future. But as 2000 approached, it was clear that Apple had

　　rebounded, and it was because of him. He took a long walk with Laurene and

　　discussed what to most people by now seemed a formality but to him was still a

　　big deal. If he dropped the interim designation, Apple could be the base for all

　　the things he envisioned, including the possibility of getting Apple into

　　products beyond computers. He decided to do so.

　　Woolard was thrilled, and he suggested that the board was willing to give him a

　　massive stock grant. “Let me be straight with you,” Jobs replied. “What I’d

　　rather have is an airplane. We just had a third kid. I don’t like flying

　　commercial. I like to take my family to Hawaii. When I go east, I’d like to have

　　pilots I know.” He was never the type of person who could display grace and

　　patience in a commercial airplane or terminal, even before the days of the TSA.

　　Board member Larry Ellison, whose plane Jobs sometimes used (Apple paid $102,000

　　to Ellison in 1999 for Jobs’s use of it), had no qualms. “Given what he’s

　　accomplished, we should give him five airplanes!” Ellison argued. He later said,

　　“It was the perfect thank-you gift for Steve, who had saved Apple and gotten

　　nothing in return.”

　　So Woolard happily granted Jobs’s wish, with a Gulfstream V, and also offered

　　him fourteen million stock options. Jobs gave an unexpected response. He wanted

　　more: twenty million options. Woolard was baffled and upset. The board had

　　authority from the stockholders to give out only fourteen million. “You said you

　　didn’t want any, and we gave you a plane, which you did want,” Woolard said.

　　“I hadn’t been insisting on options before,” Jobs replied, “but you suggested it

　　could be up to 5% of the company in options, and that’s what I now want.” It was

　　an awkward tiff in what should have been a celebratory period. In the end, a

　　complex solution was worked out that granted him ten million shares in January

　　2000 that were valued at the current price but timed to vest as if granted in

　　1997, plus another grant due in 2001. Making matters worse, the stock fell with

　　the burst of the Internet bubble. Jobs never exercised the options, and at the

　　end of 2001 he asked that they be replaced by a new grant with a lower strike

　　price. The wrestling over options would come back to haunt the company.

　　Even if he didn’t profit from the options, at least he got to enjoy the

　　airplane. Not surprisingly he fretted over how the interior would be designed.

　　It took him more than a year. He used Ellison’s plane as a starting point and

　　hired his designer. Pretty soon he was driving her crazy. For example, Ellison’s

　　had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button. Jobs insisted

　　that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished

　　stainless steel of the buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones.

　　But in the end he got the plane he wanted, and he loved it. “I look at his

　　airplane and mine, and everything he changed was better,” said Ellison.

　　At the January 2000 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh

　　operating system, OSX, which used some of the software that Apple had bought

　　from NeXT three years earlier. It was fitting, and not entirely coincidental,

　　that he was willing to incorporate himself back at Apple at the same moment as

　　the NeXT OS was incorporated into Apple’s. Avie Tevanian had taken the

　　UNIX-related Mach kernel of the NeXT operating system and turned it into the Mac

　　OS kernel, known as Darwin. It offered protected memory, advanced networking,

　　and preemptive multitasking. It was precisely what the Macintosh needed, and it

　　would be the foundation of the Mac OS henceforth. Some critics, including Bill

　　Gates, noted that Apple ended up not adopting the entire NeXT operating system.

　　There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap into a completely

　　new system but instead to evolve the existing one. Application software written

　　for the old Macintosh system was generally compatible with or easy to port to

　　the new one, and a Mac user who upgraded would notice a lot of new features but

　　not a whole new interface.

　　The fans at Macworld received the news with enthusiasm, of course, and they

　　especially cheered when Jobs showed off the dock and how the icons in it could

　　be magnified by passing the cursor over them. But the biggest applause came for

　　the announcement he reserved for his “Oh, and one more thing” coda. He spoke

　　about his duties at both Pixar and Apple, and said that he had become

　　comfortable that the situation could work. “So I am pleased to announce today

　　that I’m going to drop the interim title,” he said with a big smile. The crowd

　　jumped to its feet, screaming as if the Beatles had reunited. Jobs bit his lip,

　　adjusted his wire rims, and put on a graceful show of humility. “You guys are

　　making me feel funny now. I get to come to work every day and work with the most

　　talented people on the planet, at Apple and Pixar. But these jobs are team

　　sports. I accept your thanks on behalf of everybody at Apple.”UnknownAPPLE STORES

　　Genius Bars and Siena Sandstone

　　New York’s Fifth Avenue store

　　The Customer Experience

　　Jobs hated to cede control of anything, especially when it might affect the

　　customer experience. But he faced a problem. There was one part of the process

　　he didn’t control: the experience of buying an Apple product in a store.

　　The days of the Byte Shop were over. Industry sales were shifting from local

　　computer specialty shops to megachains and big box stores, where most clerks had

　　neither the knowledge nor the incentive to explain the distinctive nature of

　　Apple products. “All that the salesman cared about was a $50 spiff,” Jobs said.

　　Other computers were pretty generic, but Apple’s had innovative features and a

　　higher price tag. He didn’t want an iMac to sit on a shelf between a Dell and a

　　Compaq while an uninformed clerk recited the specs of each. “Unless we could

　　find ways to get our message to customers at the store, we were screwed.”

　　In great secrecy, Jobs began in late 1999 to interview executives who might be

　　able to develop a string of Apple retail stores. One of the candidates had a

　　passion for design and the boyish enthusiasm of a natural-born retailer: Ron

　　Johnson, the vice president for merchandising at Target, who was responsible for

　　launching distinctive-looking products, such as a teakettle designed by Michael

　　Graves. “Steve is very easy to talk to,” said Johnson in recalling their first

　　meeting. “All of a sudden there’s a torn pair of jeans and turtleneck, and he’s

　　off and running about why he needed great stores. If Apple is going to succeed,

　　he told me, we’re going to win on innovation. And you can’t win on innovation

　　unless you have a way to communicate to customers.”

　　When Johnson came back in January 2000 to be interviewed again, Jobs suggested

　　that they take a walk. They went to the sprawling 140-store Stanford Shopping

　　Mall at 8:30 a.m. The stores weren’t open yet, so they walked up and down the

　　entire mall repeatedly and discussed how it was organized, what role the big

　　department stores played relative to the other stores, and why certain specialty

　　shops were successful.

　　They were still walking and talking when the stores opened at 10, and they went

　　into Eddie Bauer. It had an entrance off the mall and another off the parking

　　lot. Jobs decided that Apple stores should have only one entrance, which would

　　make it easier to control the experience. And the Eddie Bauer store, they

　　agreed, was too long and narrow. It was important that customers intuitively

　　grasp the layout of a store as soon as they entered.

　　There were no tech stores in the mall, and Johnson explained why: The

　　conventional wisdom was that a consumer, when making a major and infrequent

　　purchase such as a computer, would be willing to drive to a less convenient

　　location, where the rent would be cheaper. Jobs disagreed. Apple stores should

　　be in malls and on Main Streets—in areas with a lot of foot traffic, no matter

　　how expensive. “We may not be able to get them to drive ten miles to check out

　　our products, but we can get them to walk ten feet,” he said. The Windows users,

　　in particular, had to be ambushed: “If they’re passing by, they will drop in out

　　of curiosity, if we make it inviting enough, and once we get a chance to show

　　them what we have, we will win.”

　　Johnson said that the size of a store signaled the importance of the brand. “Is

　　Apple as big of a brand as the Gap?” he asked. Jobs said it was much bigger.

　　Johnson replied that its stores should therefore be bigger. “Otherwise you won’t

　　be relevant.” Jobs described Mike Markkula’s maxim that a good company must

　　“impute”—it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from

　　packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company’s

　　stores. “The store will become the most powerful physical expression of the

　　brand,” he predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the

　　wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had created at

　　Seventy-second and Madison in Manhattan. “Whenever I buy a polo shirt, I think

　　of that mansion, which was a physical expression of Ralph’s ideals,” Johnson

　　said. “Mickey Drexler did that with the Gap. You couldn’t think of a Gap product

　　without thinking of the great Gap store with the clean space and wood floors and

　　white walls and folded merchandise.”

　　When they finished, they drove to Apple and sat in a conference room playing

　　with the company’s products. There weren’t many, not enough to fill the shelves

　　of a conventional store, but that was an advantage. The type of store they would

　　build, they decided, would benefit from having few products. It would be

　　minimalist and airy and offer a lot of places for people to try out things.

　　“Most people don’t know Apple products,” Johnson said. “They think of Apple as a

　　cult. You want to move from a cult to something cool, and having an awesome

　　store where people can try things will help that.” The stores would impute the

　　ethos of Apple products: playful, easy, creative, and on the bright side of the

　　line between hip and intimidating.

　　The Prototype

　　When Jobs finally presented the idea, the board was not thrilled. Gateway

　　Computers was going down in flames after opening suburban stores, and Jobs’s

　　argument that his would do better because they would be in more expensive

　　locations was not, on its face, reassuring. “Think different” and “Here’s to the

　　crazy ones” made for good advertising slogans, but the board was hesitant to

　　make them guidelines for corporate strategy. “I’m scratching my head and

　　thinking this is crazy,” recalled Art Levinson, the CEO of Genentech who joined

　　the Apple board in 2000. “We are a small company, a marginal player. I said that

　　I’m not sure I can support something like this.” Ed Woolard was also dubious.

　　“Gateway has tried this and failed, while Dell is selling direct to consumers

　　without stores and succeeding,” he argued. Jobs was not appreciative of too much

　　pushback from the board. The last time that happened, he had replaced most of

　　the members. This time, for personal reasons as well as being tired of playing

　　tug-of-war with Jobs, Woolard decided to step down. But before he did, the board

　　approved a trial run of four Apple stores.

　　Jobs did have one supporter on the board. In 1999 he had recruited the

　　Bronx-born retailing prince Millard “Mickey” Drexler, who as CEO of Gap had

　　transformed a sleepy chain into an icon of American casual culture. He was one

　　of the few people in the world who were as successful and savvy as Jobs on

　　matters of design, image, and consumer yearnings. In addition, he had insisted

　　on end-to-end control: Gap stores sold only Gap products, and Gap products were

　　sold almost exclusively in Gap stores. “I left the department store business

　　because I couldn’t stand not controlling my own product, from how it’s

　　manufactured to how it’s sold,” Drexler said. “Steve is just that way, which is

　　why I think he recruited me.”

　　Drexler gave Jobs a piece of advice: Secretly build a prototype of the store

　　near the Apple campus, furnish it completely, and then hang out there until you

　　feel comfortable with it. So Johnson and Jobs rented a vacant warehouse in

　　Cupertino. Every Tuesday for six months, they convened an all-morning

　　brainstorming session there, refining their retailing philosophy as they walked

　　the space. It was the store equivalent of Ive’s design studio, a haven where

　　Jobs, with his visual approach, could come up with innovations by touching and

　　seeing the options as they evolved. “I loved to wander over there on my own,

　　just checking it out,” Jobs recalled.

　　Sometimes he made Drexler, Larry Ellison, and other trusted friends come look.

　　“On too many weekends, when he wasn’t making me watch new scenes from Toy Story,

　　he made me go to the warehouse and look at the mockups for the store,” Ellison

　　said. “He was obsessed by every detail of the aesthetic and the service

　　experience. It got to the point where I said, ‘Steve I’m not coming to see you

　　if you’re going to make me go to the store again.’”

　　Ellison’s company, Oracle, was developing software for the handheld checkout

　　system, which avoided having a cash register counter. On each visit Jobs prodded

　　Ellison to figure out ways to streamline the process by eliminating some

　　unnecessary step, such as handing over the credit card or printing a receipt.

　　“If you look at the stores and the products, you will see Steve’s obsession with

　　beauty as simplicity—this Bauhaus aesthetic and wonderful minimalism, which goes

　　all the way to the checkout process in the stores,” said Ellison. “It means the

　　absolute minimum number of steps. Steve gave us the exact, explicit recipe for

　　how he wanted the checkout to work.”

　　When Drexler came to see the prototype, he had some criticisms: “I thought the

　　space was too chopped up and not clean enough. There were too many distracting

　　architectural features and colors.” He emphasized that a customer should be able

　　to walk into a retail space and, with one sweep of the eye, understand the flow.

　　Jobs agreed that simplicity and lack of distractions were keys to a great store,

　　as they were to a product. “After that, he nailed it,” said Drexler. “The vision

　　he had was complete control of the entire experience of his product, from how it

　　was designed and made to how it was sold.”

　　In October 2000, near what he thought was the end of the process, Johnson woke

　　up in the middle of a night before one of the Tuesday meetings with a painful

　　thought: They had gotten something fundamentally wrong. They were organizing the

　　store around each of Apple’s main product lines, with areas for the PowerMac,

　　iMac, iBook, and PowerBook. But Jobs had begun developing a new concept: the

　　computer as a hub for all your digital activity. In other words, your computer

　　might handle video and pictures from your cameras, and perhaps someday your

　　music player and songs, or your books and magazines. Johnson’s predawn

　　brainstorm was that the stores should organize displays not just around the

　　company’s four lines of computers, but also around things people might want to

　　do. “For example, I thought there should be a movie bay where we’d have various

　　Macs and PowerBooks running iMovie and showing how you can import from your

　　video camera and edit.”

　　Johnson arrived at Jobs’s office early that Tuesday and told him about his

　　sudden insight that they needed to reconfigure the stores. He had heard tales of

　　his boss’s intemperate tongue, but he had not yet felt its lash—until now. Jobs

　　erupted. “Do you know what a big change this is?” he yelled. “I’ve worked my ass

　　off on this store for six months, and now you want to change everything!” Jobs

　　suddenly got quiet. “I’m tired. I don’t know if I can design another store from

　　scratch.”

　　Johnson was speechless, and Jobs made sure he remained so. On the ride to the

　　prototype store, where people had gathered for the Tuesday meeting, he told

　　Johnson not to say a word, either to him or to the other members of the team. So

　　the seven-minute drive proceeded in silence. When they arrived, Jobs had

　　finished processing the information. “I knew Ron was right,” he recalled. So to

　　Johnson’s surprise, Jobs opened the meeting by saying, “Ron thinks we’ve got it

　　all wrong. He thinks it should be organized not around products but instead

　　around what people do.” There was a pause, then Jobs continued. “And you know,

　　he’s right.” He said they would redo the layout, even though it would likely

　　delay the planned January rollout by three or four months. “We’ve only got one

　　chance to get it right.”

　　Jobs liked to tell the story—and he did so to his team that day—about how

　　everything that he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the

　　rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was

　　not perfect. He talked about doing it on Toy Story, when the character of Woody

　　had evolved into being a jerk, and on a couple of occasions with the original

　　Macintosh. “If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll

　　fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.”

　　When the revised prototype was finally completed in January 2001, Jobs allowed

　　the board to see it for the first time. He explained the theories behind the

　　design by sketching on a whiteboard; then he loaded board members into a van for

　　the two-mile trip. When they saw what Jobs and Johnson had built, they

　　unanimously approved going ahead. It would, the board agreed, take the

　　relationship between retailing and brand image to a new level. It would also

　　ensure that consumers did not see Apple computers as merely a commodity product

　　like Dell or Compaq.

　　Most outside experts disagreed. “Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking

　　quite so differently,” Business Week wrote in a story headlined “Sorry Steve,

　　Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work.” Apple’s former chief financial officer,

　　Joseph Graziano, was quoted as saying, “Apple’s problem is it still believes the

　　way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese

　　and crackers.” And the retail consultant David Goldstein declared, “I give them

　　two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive

　　mistake.”

　　Wood, Stone, Steel, Glass

　　On May 19, 2001, the first Apple store opened in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, with

　　gleaming white counters, bleached wood floors, and a huge “Think Different”

　　poster of John and Yoko in bed. The skeptics were wrong. Gateway stores had been

　　averaging 250 visitors a week. By 2004 Apple stores were averaging 5,400 per

　　week. That year the stores had $1.2 billion in revenue, setting a record in the

　　retail industry for reaching the billion-dollar milestone. Sales in each store

　　were tabulated every four minutes by Ellison’s software, giving instant

　　information on how to integrate manufacturing, supply, and sales channels.

　　As the stores flourished, Jobs stayed involved in every aspect. Lee Clow

　　recalled, “In one of our marketing meetings just as the stores were opening,

　　Steve made us spend a half hour deciding what hue of gray the restroom signs

　　should be.” The architectural firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed the

　　signature stores, but Jobs made all of the major decisions.

　　Jobs particularly focused on the staircases, which echoed the one he had built

　　at NeXT. When he visited a store as it was being constructed, he invariably

　　suggested changes to the staircase. His name is listed as the lead inventor on

　　two patent applications on the staircases, one for the see-through look that

　　features all-glass treads and glass supports melded together with titanium, the

　　other for the engineering system that uses a monolithic unit of glass containing

　　multiple glass sheets laminated together for supporting loads.

　　In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he had visited

　　Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of Florence’s sidewalks. In 2002,

　　when he came to the conclusion that the light wood floors in the stores were

　　beginning to look somewhat pedestrian—a concern that it’s hard to imagine

　　bedeviling someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer—Jobs wanted to use that

　　stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the color and texture

　　using concrete, which would have been ten times cheaper, but Jobs insisted that

　　it had to be authentic. The gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a

　　fine-grained texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola

　　outside of Florence. “We select only 3% of what comes out of the mountain,

　　because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity,” said Johnson.

　　“Steve felt very strongly that we had to get the color right and it had to be a

　　material with high integrity.” So designers in Florence picked out just the

　　right quarried stone, oversaw cutting it into the proper tiles, and made sure

　　each tile was marked with a sticker to ensure that it was laid out next to its

　　companion tiles. “Knowing that it’s the same stone that Florence uses for its

　　sidewalks assures you that it can stand the test of time,” said Johnson.

　　Another notable feature of the stores was the Genius Bar. Johnson came up with

　　the idea on a two-day retreat with his team. He had asked them all to describe

　　the best service they’d ever enjoyed. Almost everyone mentioned some nice

　　experience at a Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first

　　five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training program and came up with

　　the idea of replicating something between a concierge desk and a bar. “What if

　　we staffed the bar with the smartest Mac people,” he said to Jobs. “We could

　　call it the Genius Bar.”

　　Jobs called the idea crazy. He even objected to the name. “You can’t call them

　　geniuses,” he said. “They’re geeks. They don’t have the people skills to deliver

　　on something called the genius bar.” Johnson thought he had lost, but the next

　　day he ran into Apple’s general counsel, who said, “By the way, Steve just told

　　me to trademark the name ‘genius bar.’”

　　Many of Jobs’s passions came together for Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue store, which

　　opened in 2006: a cube, a signature staircase, glass, and making a maximum

　　statement through minimalism. “It was really Steve’s store,” said Johnson. Open

　　24/7, it vindicated the strategy of finding signature high-traffic locations by

　　attracting fifty thousand visitors a week during its first year. (Remember

　　Gateway’s draw: 250 visitors a week.) “This store grosses more per square foot

　　than any store in the world,” Jobs proudly noted in 2010. “It also grosses more

　　in total—absolute dollars, not just per square foot—than any store in New York.

　　That includes Saks and Bloomingdale’s.”

　　Jobs was able to drum up excitement for store openings with the same flair he

　　used for product releases. People began to travel to store openings and spend

　　the night outside so they could be among the first in. “My then 14-year-old son

　　suggested my first overnighter at Palo Alto, and the experience turned into an

　　interesting social event,” wrote Gary Allen, who started a website that caters

　　to Apple store fans. “He and I have done several overnighters, including five in

　　other countries, and have met so many great people.”

　　In July 2011, a decade after the first ones opened, there were 326 Apple stores.

　　The biggest was in London’s Covent Garden, the tallest in Tokyo’s Ginza. The

　　average annual revenue per store was $34 million, and the total net sales in

　　fiscal 2010 were $9.8 billion. But the stores did even more. They directly

　　accounted for only 15% of Apple’s revenue, but by creating buzz and brand

　　awareness they indirectly helped boost everything the company did.

　　Even as he was fighting the effects of cancer in 2011, Jobs spent time

　　envisioning future store projects, such as the one he wanted to build in New

　　York City’s Grand Central Terminal. One afternoon he showed me a picture of the

　　Fifth Avenue store and pointed to the eighteen pieces of glass on each side.

　　“This was state of the art in glass technology at the time,” he said. “We had to

　　build our own autoclaves to make the glass.” Then he pulled out a drawing in

　　which the eighteen panes were replaced by four huge panes. That is what he

　　wanted to do next, he said. Once again, it was a challenge at the intersection

　　of aesthetics and technology. “If we wanted to do it with our current

　　technology, we would have to make the cube a foot shorter,” he said. “And I

　　didn’t want to do that. So we have to build some new autoclaves in China.”

　　Ron Johnson was not thrilled by the idea. He thought the eighteen panes actually

　　looked better than four panes would. “The proportions we have today work

　　magically with the colonnade of the GM Building,” he said. “It glitters like a

　　jewel box. I think if we get the glass too transparent, it will almost go away

　　to a fault.” He debated the point with Jobs, but to no avail. “When technology

　　enables something new, he wants to take advantage of that,” said Johnson. “Plus,

　　for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can

　　build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at

　　the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his

　　products and his stores.”UnknownTHE DIGITAL HUB

　　From iTunes to the iPod

　　The original iPod, 2001

　　Connecting the Dots

　　Once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees on a retreat, which he called

　　“The Top 100.” They were picked based on a simple guideline: the people you

　　would bring if you could take only a hundred people with you on a lifeboat to

　　your next company. At the end of each retreat, Jobs would stand in front of a

　　whiteboard (he loved whiteboards because they gave him complete control of a

　　situation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the ten things we should

　　be doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs

　　would write them down, and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much

　　jockeying, the group would come up with a list of ten. Then Jobs would slash the

　　bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”

　　By 2001 Apple had revived its personal computer offerings. It was now time to

　　think different. A set of new possibilities topped the what-next list on his

　　whiteboard that year.

　　At the time, a pall had descended on the digital realm. The dot-com bubble had

　　burst, and the NASDAQ had fallen more than 50% from its peak. Only three tech

　　companies had ads during the January 2001 Super Bowl, compared to seventeen the

　　year before. But the sense of deflation went deeper. For the twenty-five years

　　since Jobs and Wozniak had founded Apple, the personal computer had been the

　　centerpiece of the digital revolution. Now experts were predicting that its

　　central role was ending. It had “matured into something boring,” wrote the Wall

　　Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. Jeff Weitzen, the CEO of Gateway, proclaimed,

　　“We’re clearly migrating away from the PC as the centerpiece.”

　　It was at that moment that Jobs launched a new grand strategy that would

　　transform Apple—and with it the entire technology industry. The personal

　　computer, instead of edging toward the sidelines, would become a “digital hub”

　　that coordinated a variety of devices, from music players to video recorders to

　　cameras. You’d link and sync all these devices with your computer, and it would

　　manage your music, pictures, video, text, and all aspects of what Jobs dubbed

　　your “digital lifestyle.” Apple would no longer be just a computer

　　company—indeed it would drop that word from its name—but the Macintosh would be

　　reinvigorated by becoming the hub for an astounding array of new gadgets,

　　including the iPod and iPhone and iPad.

　　When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was

　　musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be

　　less innovative. “People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a

　　record, and they never get out of them,” he said. At age forty-five, Jobs was

　　now about to get out of his groove.

　　FireWire

　　Jobs’s vision that your computer could become your digital hub went back to a

　　technology called FireWire, which Apple developed in the early 1990s. It was a

　　high-speed serial port that moved digital files such as video from one device to

　　another. Japanese camcorder makers adopted it, and Jobs decided to include it on

　　the updated versions of the iMac that came out in October 1999. He began to see

　　that FireWire could be part of a system that moved video from cameras onto a

　　computer, where it could be edited and distributed.

　　To make this work, the iMac needed to have great video editing software. So Jobs

　　went to his old friends at Adobe, the digital graphics company, and asked them

　　to make a new Mac version of Adobe Premiere, which was popular on Windows

　　computers. Adobe’s executives stunned Jobs by flatly turning him down. The

　　Macintosh, they said, had too few users to make it worthwhile. Jobs was furious

　　and felt betrayed. “I put Adobe on the map, and they screwed me,” he later

　　claimed. Adobe made matters even worse when it also didn’t write its other

　　popular programs, such as Photoshop, for the Mac OSX, even though the Macintosh

　　was popular among designers and other creative people who used those

　　applications.

　　Jobs never forgave Adobe, and a decade later he got into a public war with the

　　company by not permitting Adobe Flash to run on the iPad. He took away a

　　valuable lesson that reinforced his desire for end-to-end control of all key

　　elements of a system: “My primary insight when we were screwed by Adobe in 1999

　　was that we shouldn’t get into any business where we didn’t control both the

　　hardware and the software, otherwise we’d get our head handed to us.”

　　So starting in 1999 Apple began to produce application software for the Mac,

　　with a focus on people at the intersection of art and technology. These included

　　Final Cut Pro, for editing digital video; iMovie, which was a simpler consumer

　　version; iDVD, for burning video or music onto a disc; iPhoto, to compete with

　　Adobe Photoshop; GarageBand, for creating and mixing music; iTunes, for managing

　　your songs; and the iTunes Store, for buying songs.

　　The idea of the digital hub quickly came into focus. “I first understood this

　　with the camcorder,” Jobs said. “Using iMovie makes your camcorder ten times

　　more valuable.” Instead of having hundreds of hours of raw footage you would

　　never really sit through, you could edit it on your computer, make elegant

　　dissolves, add music, and roll credits, listing yourself as executive producer.

　　It allowed people to be creative, to express themselves, to make something

　　emotional. “That’s when it hit me that the personal computer was going to morph

　　into something else.”

　　Jobs had another insight: If the computer served as the hub, it would allow the

　　portable devices to become simpler. A lot of the functions that the devices

　　tried to do, such as editing the video or pictures, they did poorly because they

　　had small screens and could not easily accommodate menus filled with lots of

　　functions. Computers could handle that more easily.

　　And one more thing . . . What Jobs also saw was that this worked best when

　　everything—the device, computer, software, applications, FireWire—was all

　　tightly integrated. “I became even more of a believer in providing end-to-end

　　solutions,” he recalled.

　　The beauty of this realization was that there was only one company that was

　　well-positioned to provide such an integrated approach. Microsoft wrote

　　software, Dell and Compaq made hardware, Sony produced a lot of digital devices,

　　Adobe developed a lot of applications. But only Apple did all of these things.

　　“We’re the only company that owns the whole widget—the hardware, the software

　　and the operating system,” he explained to Time. “We can take full

　　responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guys

　　can’t do.”

　　Apple’s first integrated foray into the digital hub strategy was video. With

　　FireWire, you could get your video onto your Mac, and with iMovie you could edit

　　it into a masterpiece. Then what? You’d want to burn some DVDs so you and your

　　friends could watch it on a TV. “So we spent a lot of time working with the

　　drive manufacturers to get a consumer drive that could burn a DVD,” he said. “We

　　were the first to ever ship that.” As usual Jobs focused on making the product

　　as simple as possible for the user, and this was the key to its success. Mike

　　Evangelist, who worked at Apple on software design, recalled demonstrating to

　　Jobs an early version of the interface. After looking at a bunch of screenshots,

　　Jobs jumped up, grabbed a marker, and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard.

　　“Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video

　　into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s

　　what we’re going to make.” Evangelist was dumbfounded, but it led to the

　　simplicity of what became iDVD. Jobs even helped design the “Burn” button icon.

　　Jobs knew digital photography was also about to explode, so Apple developed ways

　　to make the computer the hub of your photos. But for the first year at least, he

　　took his eye off one really big opportunity. HP and a few others were producing

　　a drive that burned music CDs, but Jobs decreed that Apple should focus on video

　　rather than music. In addition, his angry insistence that the iMac get rid of

　　its tray disk drive and use instead a more elegant slot drive meant that it

　　could not include the first CD burners, which were initially made for the tray

　　format. “We kind of missed the boat on that,” he recalled. “So we needed to

　　catch up real fast.”

　　The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas

　　first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

　　iTunes

　　It didn’t take Jobs long to realize that music was going to be huge. By 2000

　　people were ripping music onto their computers from CDs, or downloading it from

　　file-sharing services such as Napster, and burning playlists onto their own

　　blank disks. That year the number of blank CDs sold in the United States was 320

　　million. There were only 281 million people in the country. That meant some

　　people were really into burning CDs, and Apple wasn’t catering to them. “I felt

　　like a dope,” he told Fortune. “I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard

　　to catch up.”

　　Jobs added a CD burner to the iMac, but that wasn’t enough. His goal was to make

　　it simple to transfer music from a CD, manage it on your computer, and then burn

　　playlists. Other companies were already making music-management applications,

　　but they were clunky and complex. One of Jobs’s talents was spotting markets

　　that were filled with second-rate products. He looked at the music apps that

　　were available—including Real Jukebox, Windows Media Player, and one that HP was

　　including with its CD burner—and came to a conclusion: “They were so complicated

　　that only a genius could figure out half of their features.”

　　That is when Bill Kincaid came in. A former Apple software engineer, he was

　　driving to a track in Willows, California, to race his Formula Ford sports car

　　while (a bit incongruously) listening to National Public Radio. He heard a

　　report about a portable music player called the Rio that played a digital song

　　format called MP3. He perked up when the reporter said something like, “Don’t

　　get excited, Mac users, because it won’t work with Macs.” Kincaid said to

　　himself, “Ha! I can fix that!”

　　To help him write a Rio manager for the Mac, he called his friends Jeff Robbin

　　and Dave Heller, also former Apple software engineers. Their product, known as

　　SoundJam, offered Mac users an interface for the Rio and software for managing

　　the songs on their computer. In July 2000, when Jobs was pushing his team to

　　come up with music-management software, Apple swooped in and bought SoundJam,

　　bringing its founders back into the Apple fold. (All three stayed with the

　　company, and Robbin continued to run the music software development team for the

　　next decade. Jobs considered Robbin so valuable he once allowed a Time reporter

　　to meet him only after extracting the promise that the reporter would not print

　　his last name.)

　　Jobs personally worked with them to transform SoundJam into an Apple product. It

　　was laden with all sorts of features, and consequently a lot of complex screens.

　　Jobs pushed them to make it simpler and more fun. Instead of an interface that

　　made you specify whether you were searching for an artist, song, or album, Jobs

　　insisted on a simple box where you could type in anything you wanted. From

　　iMovie the team adopted the sleek brushed-metal look and also a name. They

　　dubbed it iTunes.

　　Jobs unveiled iTunes at the January 2001 Macworld as part of the digital hub

　　strategy. It would be free to all Mac users, he announced. “Join the music

　　revolution with iTunes, and make your music devices ten times more valuable,” he

　　concluded to great applause. As his advertising slogan would later put it: Rip.

　　Mix. Burn.

　　That afternoon Jobs happened to be meeting with John Markoff of the New York

　　Times. The interview was going badly, but at the end Jobs sat down at his Mac

　　and showed off iTunes. “It reminds me of my youth,” he said as the psychedelic

　　patterns danced on the screen. That led him to reminisce about dropping acid.

　　Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his

　　life, Jobs told Markoff. People who had never taken acid would never fully

　　understand him.

　　The iPod

　　The next step for the digital hub strategy was to make a portable music player.

　　Jobs realized that Apple had the opportunity to design such a device in tandem

　　with the iTunes software, allowing it to be simpler. Complex tasks could be

　　handled on the computer, easy ones on the device. Thus was born the iPod, the

　　device that would begin the transformation of Apple from being a computer maker

　　into being the world’s most valuable company.

　　Jobs had a special passion for the project because he loved music. The music

　　players that were already on the market, he told his colleagues, “truly sucked.”

　　Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, and the rest of the team agreed. As they were

　　building iTunes, they spent time with the Rio and other players while merrily

　　trashing them. “We would sit around and say, ‘These things really stink,’”

　　Schiller recalled. “They held about sixteen songs, and you couldn’t figure out

　　how to use them.”

　　Jobs began pushing for a portable music player in the fall of 2000, but

　　Rubinstein responded that the necessary components were not available yet. He

　　asked Jobs to wait. After a few months Rubinstein was able to score a suitable

　　small LCD screen and rechargeable lithium-polymer battery. The tougher challenge

　　was finding a disk drive that was small enough but had ample memory to make a

　　great music player. Then, in February 2001, he took one of his regular trips to

　　Japan to visit Apple’s suppliers.

　　At the end of a routine meeting with Toshiba, the engineers mentioned a new

　　product they had in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny,

　　1.8-inch drive (the size of a silver dollar) that would hold five gigabytes of

　　storage (about a thousand songs), and they were not sure what to do with it.

　　When the Toshiba engineers showed it to Rubinstein, he knew immediately what it

　　could be used for. A thousand songs in his pocket! Perfect. But he kept a poker

　　face. Jobs was also in Japan, giving the keynote speech at the Tokyo Macworld

　　conference. They met that night at the Hotel Okura, where Jobs was staying. “I

　　know how to do it now,” Rubinstein told him. “All I need is a $10 million

　　check.” Jobs immediately authorized it. So Rubinstein started negotiating with

　　Toshiba to have exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make, and he

　　began to look around for someone who could lead the development team.

　　Tony Fadell was a brash entrepreneurial programmer with a cyberpunk look and an

　　engaging smile who had started three companies while still at the University of

　　Michigan. He had gone to work at the handheld device maker General Magic (where

　　he met Apple refugees Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson), and then spent some

　　awkward time at Philips Electronics, where he bucked the staid culture with his

　　short bleached hair and rebellious style. He had come up with some ideas for

　　creating a better digital music player, which he had shopped around

　　unsuccessfully to RealNetworks, Sony, and Philips. One day he was in Colorado,

　　skiing with an uncle, and his cell phone rang while he was riding on the

　　chairlift. It was Rubinstein, who told him that Apple was looking for someone

　　who could work on a “small electronic device.” Fadell, not lacking in

　　confidence, boasted that he was a wizard at making such devices. Rubinstein

　　invited him to Cupertino.

　　Fadell assumed that he was being hired to work on a personal digital assistant,

　　some successor to the Newton. But when he met with Rubinstein, the topic quickly

　　turned to iTunes, which had been out for three months. “We’ve been trying to

　　hook up the existing MP3 players to iTunes and they’ve been horrible, absolutely

　　horrible,” Rubinstein told him. “We think we should make our own version.”

　　Fadell was thrilled. “I was passionate about music. I was trying to do some of

　　that at RealNetworks, and I was pitching an MP3 player to Palm.” He agreed to

　　come aboard, at least as a consultant. After a few weeks Rubinstein insisted

　　that if he was to lead the team, he had to become a full-time Apple employee.

　　But Fadell resisted; he liked his freedom. Rubinstein was furious at what he

　　considered Fadell’s whining. “This is one of those life decisions,” he told

　　Fadell. “You’ll never regret it.”

　　He decided to force Fadell’s hand. He gathered a roomful of the twenty or so

　　people who had been assigned to the project. When Fadell walked in, Rubinstein

　　told him, “Tony, we’re not doing this project unless you sign on full-time. Are

　　you in or out? You have to decide right now.”

　　Fadell looked Rubinstein in the eye, then turned to the audience and said, “Does

　　this always happen at Apple, that people are put under duress to sign an offer?”

　　He paused for a moment, said yes, and grudgingly shook Rubinstein’s hand. “It

　　left some very unsettling feeling between Jon and me for many years,” Fadell

　　recalled. Rubinstein agreed: “I don’t think he ever forgave me for that.”

　　Fadell and Rubinstein were fated to clash because they both thought that they

　　had fathered the iPod. As Rubinstein saw it, he had been given the mission by

　　Jobs months earlier, found the Toshiba disk drive, and figured out the screen,

　　battery, and other key elements. He had then brought in Fadell to put it

　　together. He and others who resented Fadell’s visibility began to refer to him

　　as “Tony Baloney.” But from Fadell’s perspective, before he came to Apple he had

　　already come up with plans for a great MP3 player, and he had been shopping it

　　around to other companies before he had agreed to come to Apple. The issue of

　　who deserved the most credit for the iPod, or should get the title Podfather,

　　would be fought over the years in interviews, articles, web pages, and even

　　Wikipedia entries.

　　But for the next few months they were too busy to bicker. Jobs wanted the iPod

　　out by Christmas, and this meant having it ready to unveil in October. They

　　looked around for other companies that were designing MP3 players that could

　　serve as the foundation for Apple’s work and settled on a small company named

　　PortalPlayer. Fadell told the team there, “This is the project that’s going to

　　remold Apple, and ten years from now, it’s going to be a music business, not a

　　computer business.” He convinced them to sign an exclusive deal, and his group

　　began to modify PortalPlayer’s deficiencies, such as its complex interfaces,

　　short battery life, and inability to make a playlist longer than ten songs.

　　That’s It!

　　There are certain meetings that are memorable both because they mark a historic

　　moment and because they illuminate the way a leader operates. Such was the case

　　with the gathering in Apple’s fourth-floor conference room in April 2001, where

　　Jobs decided on the fundamentals of the iPod. There to hear Fadell present his

　　proposals to Jobs were Rubinstein, Schiller, Ive, Jeff Robbin, and marketing

　　director Stan Ng. Fadell didn’t know Jobs, and he was understandably

　　intimidated. “When he walked into the conference room, I sat up and thought,

　　‘Whoa, there’s Steve!’ I was really on guard, because I’d heard how brutal he

　　could be.”

　　The meeting started with a presentation of the potential market and what other

　　companies were doing. Jobs, as usual, had no patience. “He won’t pay attention

　　to a slide deck for more than a minute,” Fadell said. When a slide showed other

　　possible players in the market, he waved it away. “Don’t worry about Sony,” he

　　said. “We know what we’re doing, and they don’t.” After that, they quit showing

　　slides, and instead Jobs peppered the group with questions. Fadell took away a

　　lesson: “Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through. He once told

　　me, ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

　　Instead Jobs liked to be shown physical objects that he could feel, inspect, and

　　fondle. So Fadell brought three different models to the conference room;

　　Rubinstein had coached him on how to reveal them sequentially so that his

　　preferred choice would be the pièce de résistance. They hid the mockup of that

　　option under a wooden bowl at the center of the table.

　　Fadell began his show-and-tell by taking the various parts they were using out

　　of a box and spreading them on the table. There were the 1.8-inch drive, LCD

　　screen, boards, and batteries, all labeled with their cost and weight. As he

　　displayed them, they discussed how the prices or sizes might come down over the

　　next year or so. Some of the pieces could be put together, like Lego blocks, to

　　show the options.

　　Then Fadell began unveiling his models, which were made of Styrofoam with

　　fishing leads inserted to give them the proper weight. The first had a slot for

　　a removable memory card for music. Jobs dismissed it as complicated. The second

　　had dynamic RAM memory, which was cheap but would lose all of the songs if the

　　battery ran out. Jobs was not pleased. Next Fadell put a few of the pieces

　　together to show what a device with the 1.8-inch hard drive would be like. Jobs

　　seemed intrigued. The show climaxed with Fadell lifting the bowl and revealing a

　　fully assembled model of that alternative. “I was hoping to be able to play more

　　with the Lego parts, but Steve settled right on the hard-drive option just the

　　way we had modeled it,” Fadell recalled. He was rather stunned by the process.

　　“I was used to being at Philips, where decisions like this would take meeting

　　after meeting, with a lot of PowerPoint presentations and going back for more

　　study.”

　　Next it was Phil Schiller’s turn. “Can I bring out my idea now?” he asked. He

　　left the room and returned with a handful of iPod models, all of which had the

　　same device on the front: the soon-to-be-famous trackwheel. “I had been thinking

　　of how you go through a playlist,” he recalled. “You can’t press a button

　　hundreds of times. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a wheel?” By turning

　　the wheel with your thumb, you could scroll through songs. The longer you kept

　　turning, the faster the scrolling got, so you could zip through hundreds easily.

　　Jobs shouted, “That’s it!” He got Fadell and the engineers working on it.

　　Once the project was launched, Jobs immersed himself in it daily. His main

　　demand was “Simplify!” He would go over each screen of the user interface and

　　apply a rigid test: If he wanted a song or a function, he should be able to get

　　there in three clicks. And the click should be intuitive. If he couldn’t figure

　　out how to navigate to something, or if it took more than three clicks, he would

　　be brutal. “There would be times when we’d rack our brains on a user interface

　　problem, and think we’d considered every option, and he would go, ‘Did you think

　　of this?’” said Fadell. “And then we’d all go, ‘Holy shit.’ He’d redefine the

　　problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.”

　　Every night Jobs would be on the phone with ideas. Fadell and the others would

　　call each other up, discuss Jobs’s latest suggestion, and conspire on how to

　　nudge him to where they wanted him to go, which worked about half the time. “We

　　would have this swirling thing of Steve’s latest idea, and we would all try to

　　stay ahead of it,” said Fadell. “Every day there was something like that,

　　whether it was a switch here, or a button color, or a pricing strategy issue.

　　With his style, you needed to work with your peers, watch each other’s back.”

　　One key insight Jobs had was that as many functions as possible should be

　　performed using iTunes on your computer rather than on the iPod. As he later

　　recalled:

　　In order to make the iPod really easy to use—and this took a lot of arguing on

　　my part—we needed to limit what the device itself would do. Instead we put

　　that functionality in iTunes on the computer. For example, we made it so you

　　couldn’t make playlists using the device. You made playlists on iTunes, and

　　then you synced with the device. That was controversial. But what made the Rio

　　and other devices so brain-dead was that they were complicated. They had to do

　　things like make playlists, because they weren’t integrated with the jukebox

　　software on your computer. So by owning the iTunes software and the iPod

　　device, that allowed us to make the computer and the device work together, and

　　it allowed us to put the complexity in the right place.

　　The most Zen of all simplicities was Jobs’s decree, which astonished his

　　colleagues, that the iPod would not have an on-off switch. It became true of

　　most Apple devices. There was no need for one. Apple’s devices would go dormant

　　if they were not being used, and they would wake up when you touched any key.

　　But there was no need for a switch that would go “Click—you’re off. Good-bye.”

　　Suddenly everything had fallen into place: a drive that would hold a thousand

　　songs; an interface and scroll wheel that would let you navigate a thousand

　　songs; a FireWire connection that could sync a thousand songs in under ten

　　minutes; and a battery that would last through a thousand songs. “We suddenly

　　were looking at one another and saying, ‘This is going to be so cool,’” Jobs

　　recalled. “We knew how cool it was, because we knew how badly we each wanted one

　　personally. And the concept became so beautifully simple: a thousand songs in

　　your pocket.” One of the copywriters suggested they call it a “Pod.” Jobs was

　　the one who, borrowing from the iMac and iTunes names, modified that to iPod.

　　The Whiteness of the Whale

　　Jony Ive had been playing with the foam model of the iPod and trying to conceive

　　what the finished product should look like when an idea occurred to him on a

　　morning drive from his San Francisco home to Cupertino. Its face should be pure

　　white, he told his colleague in the car, and it should connect seamlessly to a

　　polished stainless steel back. “Most small consumer products have this

　　disposable feel to them,” said Ive. “There is no cultural gravity to them. The

　　thing I’m proudest of about the iPod is that there is something about it that

　　makes it feel significant, not disposable.”

　　The white would be not just white, but pure white. “Not only the device, but the

　　headphones and the wires and even the power block,” he recalled. “Pure white.”

　　Others kept arguing that the headphones, of course, should be black, like all

　　headphones. “But Steve got it immediately, and embraced white,” said Ive. “There

　　would be a purity to it.” The sinuous flow of the white earbud wires helped make

　　the iPod an icon. As Ive described it:

　　There was something very significant and nondisposable about it, yet there was

　　also something very quiet and very restrained. It wasn’t wagging its tail in

　　your face. It was restrained, but it was also crazy, with those flowing

　　headphones. That’s why I like white. White isn’t just a neutral color. It is

　　so pure and quiet. Bold and conspicuous and yet so inconspicuous as well.

　　Lee Clow’s advertising team at TBWA\Chiat\Day wanted to celebrate the iconic

　　nature of the iPod and its whiteness rather than create more traditional

　　product-introduction ads that showed off the device’s features. James Vincent, a

　　lanky young Brit who had played in a band and worked as a DJ, had recently

　　joined the agency, and he was a natural to help focus Apple’s advertising on hip

　　millennial-generation music lovers rather than rebel baby boomers. With the help

　　of the art director Susan Alinsangan, they created a series of billboards and

　　posters for the iPod, and they spread the options on Jobs’s conference room

　　table for his inspection.

　　At the far right end they placed the most traditional options, which featured

　　straightforward photos of the iPod on a white background. At the far left end

　　they placed the most graphic and iconic treatments, which showed just a

　　silhouette of someone dancing while listening to an iPod, its white earphone

　　wires waving with the music. “It understood your emotional and intensely

　　personal relationship with the music,” Vincent said. He suggested to Duncan

　　Milner, the creative director, that they all stand firmly at the far left end,

　　to see if they could get Jobs to gravitate there. When he walked in, he went

　　immediately to the right, looking at the stark product pictures. “This looks

　　great,” he said. “Let’s talk about these.” Vincent, Milner, and Clow did not

　　budge from the other end. Finally, Jobs looked up, glanced at the iconic

　　treatments, and said, “Oh, I guess you like this stuff.” He shook his head. “It

　　doesn’t show the product. It doesn’t say what it is.” Vincent proposed that they

　　use the iconic images but add the tagline, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” That

　　would say it all. Jobs glanced back toward the right end of the table, then

　　finally agreed. Not surprisingly he was soon claiming that it was his idea to

　　push for the more iconic ads. “There were some skeptics around who asked, ‘How’s

　　this going to actually sell an iPod?’” Jobs recalled. “That’s when it came in

　　handy to be the CEO, so I could push the idea through.”

　　Jobs realized that there was yet another advantage to the fact that Apple had an

　　integrated system of computer, software, and device. It meant that sales of the

　　iPod would drive sales of the iMac. That, in turn, meant that he could take

　　money that Apple was spending on iMac advertising and shift it to spending on

　　iPod ads—getting a double bang for the buck. A triple bang, actually, because

　　the ads would lend luster and youthfulness to the whole Apple brand. He

　　recalled:

　　I had this crazy idea that we could sell just as many Macs by advertising the

　　iPod. In addition, the iPod would position Apple as evoking innovation and

　　youth. So I moved $75 million of advertising money to the iPod, even though

　　the category didn’t justify one hundredth of that. That meant that we

　　completely dominated the market for music players. We outspent everybody by a

　　factor of about a hundred.

　　The television ads showed the iconic silhouettes dancing to songs picked by

　　Jobs, Clow, and Vincent. “Finding the music became our main fun at our weekly

　　marketing meetings,” said Clow. “We’d play some edgy cut, Steve would say, ‘I

　　hate that,’ and James would have to talk him into it.” The ads helped popularize

　　many new bands, most notably the Black Eyed Peas; the ad with “Hey Mama” is the

　　classic of the silhouettes genre. When a new ad was about to go into production,

　　Jobs would often have second thoughts, call up Vincent, and insist that he

　　cancel it. “It sounds a bit poppy” or “It sounds a bit trivial,” he would say.

　　“Let’s call it off.” James would get flustered and try to talk him around. “Hold

　　on, it’s going to be great,” he would argue. Invariably Jobs would relent, the

　　ad would be made, and he would love it.

　　Jobs unveiled the iPod on October 23, 2001, at one of his signature product

　　launch events. “Hint: It’s not a Mac,” the invitation teased. When it came time

　　to reveal the product, after he described its technical capabilities, Jobs did

　　not do his usual trick of walking over to a table and pulling off a velvet

　　cloth. Instead he said, “I happen to have one right here in my pocket.” He

　　reached into his jeans and pulled out the gleaming white device. “This amazing

　　little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.” He

　　slipped it back in and ambled offstage to applause.

　　Initially there was some skepticism among tech geeks, especially about the $399

　　price. In the blogosphere, the joke was that iPod stood for “idiots price our

　　devices.” However, consumers soon made it a hit. More than that, the iPod became

　　the essence of everything Apple was destined to be: poetry connected to

　　engineering, arts and creativity intersecting with technology, design that’s

　　bold and simple. It had an ease of use that came from being an integrated

　　end-to-end system, from computer to FireWire to device to software to content

　　management. When you took an iPod out of the box, it was so beautiful that it

　　seemed to glow, and it made all other music players look as if they had been

　　designed and manufactured in Uzbekistan.

　　Not since the original Mac had a clarity of product vision so propelled a

　　company into the future. “If anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the

　　earth, I would hold up this as a good example,” Jobs told Newsweek’s Steve Levy

　　at the time. Wozniak, who had long been skeptical of integrated systems, began

　　to revise his philosophy. “Wow, it makes sense that Apple was the one to come up

　　with it,” Wozniak enthused after the iPod came out. “After all, Apple’s whole

　　history is making both the hardware and the software, with the result that the

　　two work better together.”

　　The day that Levy got his press preview of the iPod, he happened to be meeting

　　Bill Gates at a dinner, and he showed it to him. “Have you seen this yet?” Levy

　　asked. Levy noted, “Gates went into a zone that recalls those science fiction

　　films where a space alien, confronted with a novel object, creates some sort of

　　force tunnel between him and the object, allowing him to suck directly into his

　　brain all possible information about it.” Gates played with the scroll wheel and

　　pushed every button combination, while his eyes stared fixedly at the screen.

　　“It looks like a great product,” he finally said. Then he paused and looked

　　puzzled. “It’s only for Macintosh?” he asked.UnknownTHE iTUNES STORE

　　I’m the Pied Piper

　　Warner Music

　　At the beginning of 2002 Apple faced a challenge. The seamless connection

　　between your iPod, iTunes software, and computer made it easy to manage the

　　music you already owned. But to get new music, you had to venture out of this

　　cozy environment and go buy a CD or download the songs online. The latter

　　endeavor usually meant foraying into the murky domains of file-sharing and

　　piracy services. So Jobs wanted to offer iPod users a way to download songs that

　　was simple, safe, and legal.

　　The music industry also faced a challenge. It was being plagued by a bestiary of

　　piracy services—Napster, Grokster, Gnutella, Kazaa—that enabled people to get

　　songs for free. Partly as a result, legal sales of CDs were down 9% in 2002.

　　The executives at the music companies were desperately scrambling, with the

　　elegance of second-graders playing soccer, to agree on a common standard for

　　copy-protecting digital music. Paul Vidich of Warner Music and his corporate

　　colleague Bill Raduchel of AOL Time Warner were working with Sony in that

　　effort, and they hoped to get Apple to be part of their consortium. So a group

　　of them flew to Cupertino in January 2002 to see Jobs.

　　It was not an easy meeting. Vidich had a cold and was losing his voice, so his

　　deputy, Kevin Gage, began the presentation. Jobs, sitting at the head of the

　　conference table, fidgeted and looked annoyed. After four slides, he waved his

　　hand and broke in. “You have your heads up your asses,” he pointed out. Everyone

　　turned to Vidich, who struggled to get his voice working. “You’re right,” he

　　said after a long pause. “We don’t know what to do. You need to help us figure

　　it out.” Jobs later recalled being slightly taken aback, and he agreed that

　　Apple would work with the Warner-Sony effort.

　　If the music companies had been able to agree on a standardized encoding method

　　for protecting music files, then multiple online stores could have proliferated.

　　That would have made it hard for Jobs to create an iTunes Store that allowed

　　Apple to control how online sales were handled. Sony, however, handed Jobs that

　　opportunity when it decided, after the January 2002 Cupertino meeting, to pull

　　out of the talks because it favored its own proprietary format, from which it

　　would get royalties.

　　“You know Steve, he has his own agenda,” Sony’s CEO Nobuyuki Idei explained to

　　Red Herring editor Tony Perkins. “Although he is a genius, he doesn’t share

　　everything with you. This is a difficult person to work with if you are a big

　　company. . . . It is a nightmare.” Howard Stringer, then head of Sony North

　　America, added about Jobs: “Trying to get together would frankly be a waste of

　　time.”

　　Instead Sony joined with Universal to create a subscription service called

　　Pressplay. Meanwhile, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI teamed up with

　　RealNetworks to create MusicNet. Neither would license its songs to the rival

　　service, so each offered only about half the music available. Both were

　　subscription services that allowed customers to stream songs but not keep them,

　　so you lost access to them if your subscription lapsed. They had complicated

　　restrictions and clunky interfaces. Indeed they would earn the dubious

　　distinction of becoming number nine on PC World’s list of “the 25 worst tech

　　products of all time.” The magazine declared, “The services’ stunningly

　　brain-dead features showed that the record companies still didn’t get it.”

　　At this point Jobs could have decided simply to indulge piracy. Free music meant

　　more valuable iPods. Yet because he really liked music, and the artists who made

　　it, he was opposed to what he saw as the theft of creative products. As he later

　　told me:

　　From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created

　　intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we’d be out of

　　business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new

　　software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to

　　disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s

　　a simpler reason: It’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts

　　your own character.

　　He knew, however, that the best way to stop piracy—in fact the only way—was to

　　offer an alternative that was more attractive than the brain-dead services that

　　music companies were concocting. “We believe that 80% of the people stealing

　　stuff don’t want to be, there’s just no legal alternative,” he told Andy Langer

　　of Esquire. “So we said, ‘Let’s create a legal alternative to this.’ Everybody

　　wins. Music companies win. The artists win. Apple wins. And the user wins,

　　because he gets a better service and doesn’t have to be a thief.”

　　So Jobs set out to create an “iTunes Store” and to persuade the five top record

　　companies to allow digital versions of their songs to be sold there. “I’ve never

　　spent so much of my time trying to convince people to do the right thing for

　　themselves,” he recalled. Because the companies were worried about the pricing

　　model and unbundling of albums, Jobs pitched that his new service would be only

　　on the Macintosh, a mere 5% of the market. They could try the idea with little

　　risk. “We used our small market share to our advantage by arguing that if the

　　store turned out to be destructive it wouldn’t destroy the entire universe,” he

　　recalled.

　　Jobs’s proposal was to sell digital songs for 99 cents—a simple and impulsive

　　purchase. The record companies would get 70 cents of that. Jobs insisted that

　　this would be more appealing than the monthly subscription model preferred by

　　the music companies. He believed that people had an emotional connection to the

　　songs they loved. They wanted to own “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Shelter from

　　the Storm,” not just rent them. As he told Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone at the

　　time, “I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription

　　model and it might not be successful.”

　　Jobs also insisted that the iTunes Store would sell individual songs, not just

　　entire albums. That ended up being the biggest cause of conflict with the record

　　companies, which made money by putting out albums that had two or three great

　　songs and a dozen or so fillers; to get the song they wanted, consumers had to

　　buy the whole album. Some musicians objected on artistic grounds to Jobs’s plan

　　to disaggregate albums. “There’s a flow to a good album,” said Trent Reznor of

　　Nine Inch Nails. “The songs support each other. That’s the way I like to make

　　music.” But the objections were moot. “Piracy and online downloads had already

　　deconstructed the album,” recalled Jobs. “You couldn’t compete with piracy

　　unless you sold the songs individually.”

　　At the heart of the problem was a chasm between the people who loved technology

　　and those who loved artistry. Jobs loved both, as he had demonstrated at Pixar

　　and Apple, and he was thus positioned to bridge the gap. He later explained:

　　When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don’t

　　understand creativity. They don’t appreciate intuitive thinking, like the

　　ability of an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have

　　a feel for which five might be successful. And they think that creative people

　　just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they’ve not

　　seen how driven and disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are.

　　On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology.

　　They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that would be

　　like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We’d get second-rate A&R

　　people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people.

　　I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires

　　intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real

　　discipline.

　　Jobs had a long relationship with Barry Schuler, the CEO of the AOL unit of Time

　　Warner, and began to pick his brain about how to get the music labels into the

　　proposed iTunes Store. “Piracy is flipping everyone’s circuit breakers,” Schuler

　　told him. “You should use the argument that because you have an integrated

　　end-to-end service, from iPods to the store, you can best protect how the music

　　is used.”

　　One day in March 2002, Schuler got a call from Jobs and decided to conference-in

　　Vidich. Jobs asked Vidich if he would come to Cupertino and bring the head of

　　Warner Music, Roger Ames. This time Jobs was charming. Ames was a sardonic, fun,

　　and clever Brit, a type (such as James Vincent and Jony Ive) that Jobs tended to

　　like. So the Good Steve was on display. At one point early in the meeting, Jobs

　　even played the unusual role of diplomat. Ames and Eddy Cue, who ran iTunes for

　　Apple, got into an argument over why radio in England was not as vibrant as in

　　the United States, and Jobs stepped in, saying, “We know about tech, but we

　　don’t know as much about music, so let’s not argue.”

　　Ames had just lost a boardroom battle to have his corporation’s AOL division

　　improve its own fledgling music download service. “When I did a digital download

　　using AOL, I could never find the song on my shitty computer,” he recalled. So

　　when Jobs demonstrated a prototype of the iTunes Store, Ames was impressed.

　　“Yes, yes, that’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for,” he said. He agreed that

　　Warner Music would sign up, and he offered to help enlist other music companies.

　　Jobs flew east to show the service to other Time Warner execs. “He sat in front

　　of a Mac like a kid with a toy,” Vidich recalled. “Unlike any other CEO, he was

　　totally engaged with the product.” Ames and Jobs began to hammer out the details

　　of the iTunes Store, including the number of times a track could be put on

　　different devices and how the copy-protection system would work. They soon were

　　in agreement and set out to corral other music labels.

　　Herding Cats

　　The key player to enlist was Doug Morris, head of the Universal Music Group. His

　　domain included must-have artists such as U2, Eminem, and Mariah Carey, as well

　　as powerful labels such as Motown and Interscope-Geffen-A&M. Morris was eager to

　　talk. More than any other mogul, he was upset about piracy and fed up with the

　　caliber of the technology people at the music companies. “It was like the Wild

　　West,” Morris recalled. “No one was selling digital music, and it was awash with

　　piracy. Everything we tried at the record companies was a failure. The

　　difference in skill sets between the music folks and technologists is just

　　huge.”

　　As Ames walked with Jobs to Morris’s office on Broadway he briefed Jobs on what

　　to say. It worked. What impressed Morris was that Jobs tied everything together

　　in a way that made things easy for the consumer and also safe for the record

　　companies. “Steve did something brilliant,” said Morris. “He proposed this

　　complete system: the iTunes Store, the music-management software, the iPod

　　itself. It was so smooth. He had the whole package.”

　　Morris was convinced that Jobs had the technical vision that was lacking at the

　　music companies. “Of course we have to rely on Steve Jobs to do this,” he told

　　his own tech vice president, “because we don’t have anyone at Universal who

　　knows anything about technology.” That did not make Universal’s technologists

　　eager to work with Jobs, and Morris had to keep ordering them to surrender their

　　objections and make a deal quickly. They were able to add a few more

　　restrictions to FairPlay, the Apple system of digital rights management, so that

　　a purchased song could not be spread to too many devices. But in general, they

　　went along with the concept of the iTunes Store that Jobs had worked out with

　　Ames and his Warner colleagues.

　　Morris was so smitten with Jobs that he called Jimmy Iovine, the fast-talking

　　and brash chief of Interscope-Geffen-A&M. Iovine and Morris were best friends

　　who had spoken every day for the past thirty years. “When I met Steve, I thought

　　he was our savior, so I immediately brought Jimmy in to get his impression,”

　　Morris recalled.

　　Jobs could be extraordinarily charming when he wanted to be, and he turned it on

　　when Iovine flew out to Cupertino for a demo. “See how simple it is?” he asked

　　Iovine. “Your tech folks are never going to do this. There’s no one at the music

　　companies who can make it simple enough.”

　　Iovine called Morris right away. “This guy is unique!” he said. “You’re right.

　　He’s got a turnkey solution.” They complained about how they had spent two years

　　working with Sony, and it hadn’t gone anywhere. “Sony’s never going to figure

　　things out,” he told Morris. They agreed to quit dealing with Sony and join with

　　Apple instead. “How Sony missed this is completely mind-boggling to me, a

　　historic fuckup,” Iovine said. “Steve would fire people if the divisions didn’t

　　work together, but Sony’s divisions were at war with one another.”

　　Indeed Sony provided a clear counterexample to Apple. It had a consumer

　　electronics division that made sleek products and a music division with beloved

　　artists (including Bob Dylan). But because each division tried to protect its

　　own interests, the company as a whole never got its act together to produce an

　　end-to-end service.

　　Andy Lack, the new head of Sony music, had the unenviable task of negotiating

　　with Jobs about whether Sony would sell its music in the iTunes Store. The

　　irrepressible and savvy Lack had just come from a distinguished career in

　　television journalism—a producer at CBS News and president of NBC—and he knew

　　how to size people up and keep his sense of humor. He realized that, for Sony,

　　selling its songs in the iTunes Store was both insane and necessary—which seemed

　　to be the case with a lot of decisions in the music business. Apple would make

　　out like a bandit, not just from its cut on song sales, but from driving the

　　sale of iPods. Lack believed that since the music companies would be responsible

　　for the success of the iPod, they should get a royalty from each device sold.

　　Jobs would agree with Lack in many of their conversations and claim that he

　　wanted to be a true partner with the music companies. “Steve, you’ve got me if

　　you just give me something for every sale of your device,” Lack told him in his

　　booming voice. “It’s a beautiful device. But our music is helping to sell it.

　　That’s what true partnership means to me.”

　　“I’m with you,” Jobs replied on more than one occasion. But then he would go to

　　Doug Morris and Roger Ames to lament, in a conspiratorial fashion, that Lack

　　just didn’t get it, that he was clueless about the music business, that he

　　wasn’t as smart as Morris and Ames. “In classic Steve fashion, he would agree to

　　something, but it would never happen,” said Lack. “He would set you up and then

　　pull it off the table. He’s pathological, which can be useful in negotiations.

　　And he’s a genius.”

　　Lack knew that he could not win his case unless he got support from others in

　　the industry. But Jobs used flattery and the lure of Apple’s marketing clout to

　　keep the other record labels in line. “If the industry had stood together, we

　　could have gotten a license fee, giving us the dual revenue stream we

　　desperately needed,” Lack said. “We were the ones making the iPod sell, so it

　　would have been equitable.” That, of course, was one of the beauties of Jobs’s

　　end-to-end strategy: Sales of songs on iTunes would drive iPod sales, which

　　would drive Macintosh sales. What made it all the more infuriating to Lack was

　　that Sony could have done the same, but it never could get its hardware and

　　software and content divisions to row in unison.

　　Jobs tried hard to seduce Lack. During one visit to New York, he invited Lack to

　　his penthouse at the Four Seasons hotel. Jobs had already ordered a breakfast

　　spread—oatmeal and berries for them both—and was “beyond solicitous,” Lack

　　recalled. “But Jack Welch taught me not to fall in love. Morris and Ames could

　　be seduced. They would say, ‘You don’t get it, you’re supposed to fall in love,’

　　and they did. So I ended up isolated in the industry.”

　　Even after Sony agreed to sell its music in the iTunes Store, the relationship

　　remained contentious. Each new round of renewals or changes would bring a

　　showdown. “With Andy, it was mostly about his big ego,” Jobs claimed. “He never

　　really understood the music business, and he could never really deliver. I

　　thought he was sometimes a dick.” When I told him what Jobs said, Lack

　　responded, “I fought for Sony and the music industry, so I can see why he

　　thought I was a dick.”

　　Corralling the record labels to go along with the iTunes plan was not enough,

　　however. Many of their artists had carve-outs in their contracts that allowed

　　them personally to control the digital distribution of their music or prevent

　　their songs from being unbundled from their albums and sold singly. So Jobs set

　　about cajoling various top musicians, which he found fun but also a lot harder

　　than he expected.

　　Before the launch of iTunes, Jobs met with almost two dozen major artists,

　　including Bono, Mick Jagger, and Sheryl Crow. “He would call me at home,

　　relentless, at ten at night, to say he still needed to get to Led Zeppelin or

　　Madonna,” Ames recalled. “He was determined, and nobody else could have

　　convinced some of these artists.”

　　Perhaps the oddest meeting was when Dr. Dre came to visit Jobs at Apple

　　headquarters. Jobs loved the Beatles and Dylan, but he admitted that the appeal

　　of rap eluded him. Now Jobs needed Eminem and other rappers to agree to be sold

　　in the iTunes Store, so he huddled with Dr. Dre, who was Eminem’s mentor. After

　　Jobs showed him the seamless way the iTunes Store would work with the iPod, Dr.

　　Dre proclaimed, “Man, somebody finally got it right.”

　　On the other end of the musical taste spectrum was the trumpeter Wynton

　　Marsalis. He was on a West Coast fund-raising tour for Jazz at Lincoln Center

　　and was meeting with Jobs’s wife, Laurene. Jobs insisted that he come over to

　　the house in Palo Alto, and he proceeded to show off iTunes. “What do you want

　　to search for?” he asked Marsalis. Beethoven, the trumpeter replied. “Watch what

　　it can do!” Jobs kept insisting when Marsalis’s attention would wander. “See how

　　the interface works.” Marsalis later recalled, “I don’t care much about

　　computers, and kept telling him so, but he goes on for two hours. He was a man

　　possessed. After a while, I started looking at him and not the computer, because

　　I was so fascinated with his passion.”

　　Jobs unveiled the iTunes Store on April 28, 2003, at San Francisco’s Moscone

　　Center. With hair now closely cropped and receding, and a studied unshaven look,

　　Jobs paced the stage and described how Napster “demonstrated that the Internet

　　was made for music delivery.” Its offspring, such as Kazaa, he said, offered

　　songs for free. How do you compete with that? To answer that question, he began

　　by describing the downsides of using these free services. The downloads were

　　unreliable and the quality was often bad. “A lot of these songs are encoded by

　　seven-year-olds, and they don’t do a great job.” In addition, there were no

　　previews or album art. Then he added, “Worst of all it’s stealing. It’s best not

　　to mess with karma.”

　　Why had these piracy sites proliferated, then? Because, Jobs said, there was no

　　alternative. The subscription services, such as Pressplay and MusicNet, “treat

　　you like a criminal,” he said, showing a slide of an inmate in striped prison

　　garb. Then a slide of Bob Dylan came on the screen. “People want to own the

　　music they love.”

　　After a lot of negotiating with the record companies, he said, “they were

　　willing to do something with us to change the world.” The iTunes Store would

　　start with 200,000 tracks, and it would grow each day. By using the store, he

　　said, you can own your songs, burn them on CDs, be assured of the download

　　quality, get a preview of a song before you download it, and use it with your

　　iMovies and iDVDs to “make the soundtrack of your life.” The price? Just 99

　　cents, he said, less than a third of what a Starbucks latte cost. Why was it

　　worth it? Because to get the right song from Kazaa took about fifteen minutes,

　　rather than a minute. By spending an hour of your time to save about four

　　dollars, he calculated, “you’re working for under the minimum wage!” And one

　　more thing . . . “With iTunes, it’s not stealing anymore. It’s good karma.”

　　Clapping the loudest for that line were the heads of the record labels in the

　　front row, including Doug Morris sitting next to Jimmy Iovine, in his usual

　　baseball cap, and the whole crowd from Warner Music. Eddy Cue, who was in charge

　　of the store, predicted that Apple would sell a million songs in six months.

　　Instead the iTunes Store sold a million songs in six days. “This will go down in

　　history as a turning point for the music industry,” Jobs declared.

　　Microsoft

　　“We were smoked.”

　　That was the blunt email sent to four colleagues by Jim Allchin, the Microsoft

　　executive in charge of Windows development, at 5 p.m. the day he saw the iTunes

　　Store. It had only one other line: “How did they get the music companies to go

　　along?”

　　Later that evening a reply came from David Cole, who was running Microsoft’s

　　online business group. “When Apple brings this to Windows (I assume they won’t

　　make the mistake of not bringing it to Windows), we will really be smoked.” He

　　said that the Windows team needed “to bring this kind of solution to market,”

　　adding, “That will require focus and goal alignment around an end-to-end service

　　which delivers direct user value, something we don’t have today.” Even though

　　Microsoft had its own Internet service (MSN), it was not used to providing

　　end-to-end service the way Apple was.

　　Bill Gates himself weighed in at 10:46 that night. His subject line, “Apple’s

　　Jobs again,” indicated his frustration. “Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a

　　few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market

　　things as revolutionary are amazing things,” he said. He too expressed surprise

　　that Jobs had been able to convince the music companies to go along with his

　　store. “This is very strange to me. The music companies’ own operations offer a

　　service that is truly unfriendly to the user. Somehow they decide to give Apple

　　the ability to do something pretty good.”

　　Gates also found it strange that no one else had created a service that allowed

　　people to buy songs rather than subscribe on a monthly basis. “I am not saying

　　this strangeness means we messed up—at least if we did, so did Real and

　　Pressplay and MusicNet and basically everyone else,” he wrote. “Now that Jobs

　　has done it we need to move fast to get something where the user interface and

　　Rights are as good. . . . I think we need some plan to prove that, even though

　　Jobs has us a bit flat footed again, we can move quick and both match and do

　　stuff better.” It was an astonishing private admission: Microsoft had again been

　　caught flat-footed, and it would again try to catch up by copying Apple. But

　　like Sony, Microsoft could never make it happen, even after Jobs showed the way.

　　Instead Apple continued to smoke Microsoft in the way that Cole had predicted:

　　It ported the iTunes software and store to Windows. But that took some internal

　　agonizing. First, Jobs and his team had to decide whether they wanted the iPod

　　to work with Windows computers. Jobs was initially opposed. “By keeping the iPod

　　for Mac only, it was driving the sales of Macs even more than we expected,” he

　　recalled. But lined up against him were all four of his top executives:

　　Schiller, Rubinstein, Robbin, and Fadell. It was an argument about what the

　　future of Apple should be. “We felt we should be in the music player business,

　　not just in the Mac business,” said Schiller.

　　Jobs always wanted Apple to create its own unified utopia, a magical walled

　　garden where hardware and software and peripheral devices worked well together

　　to create a great experience, and where the success of one product drove sales

　　of all the companions. Now he was facing pressure to have his hottest new

　　product work with Windows machines, and it went against his nature. “It was a

　　really big argument for months,” Jobs recalled, “me against everyone else.” At

　　one point he declared that Windows users would get to use iPods “over my dead

　　body.” But still his team kept pushing. “This needs to get to the PC,” said

　　Fadell.

　　Finally Jobs declared, “Until you can prove to me that it will make business

　　sense, I’m not going to do it.” That was actually his way of backing down. If

　　you put aside emotion and dogma, it was easy to prove that it made business

　　sense to allow Windows users to buy iPods. Experts were called in, sales

　　scenarios developed, and everyone concluded this would bring in more profits.

　　“We developed a spreadsheet,” said Schiller. “Under all scenarios, there was no

　　amount of cannibalization of Mac sales that would outweigh the sales of iPods.”

　　Jobs was sometimes willing to surrender, despite his reputation, but he never

　　won any awards for gracious concession speeches. “Screw it,” he said at one

　　meeting where they showed him the analysis. “I’m sick of listening to you

　　assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.”

　　That left another question: When Apple allowed the iPod to be compatible with

　　Windows machines, should it also create a version of iTunes to serve as the

　　music-management software for those Windows users? As usual, Jobs believed the

　　hardware and software should go together: The user experience depended on the

　　iPod working in complete sync (so to speak) with iTunes software on the

　　computer. Schiller was opposed. “I thought that was crazy, since we don’t make

　　Windows software,” Schiller recalled. “But Steve kept arguing, ‘If we’re going

　　to do it, we should do it right.’”

　　Schiller prevailed at first. Apple decided to allow the iPod to work with

　　Windows by using software from MusicMatch, an outside company. But the software

　　was so clunky that it proved Jobs’s point, and Apple embarked on a fast-track

　　effort to produce iTunes for Windows. Jobs recalled:

　　To make the iPod work on PCs, we initially partnered with another company that

　　had a jukebox, gave them the secret sauce to connect to the iPod, and they did

　　a crappy job. That was the worst of all worlds, because this other company was

　　controlling a big piece of the user experience. So we lived with this crappy

　　outside jukebox for about six months, and then we finally got iTunes written

　　for Windows. In the end, you just don’t want someone else to control a big

　　part of the user experience. People may disagree with me, but I am pretty

　　consistent about that.

　　Porting iTunes to Windows meant going back to all of the music companies—which

　　had made deals to be in iTunes based on the assurance that it would be for only

　　the small universe of Macintosh users—and negotiate again. Sony was especially

　　resistant. Andy Lack thought it another example of Jobs changing the terms after

　　a deal was done. It was. But by then the other labels were happy about how the

　　iTunes Store was working and went along, so Sony was forced to capitulate.

　　Jobs announced the launch of iTunes for Windows in October 2003. “Here’s a

　　feature that people thought we’d never add until this happened,” he said, waving

　　his hand at the giant screen behind him. “Hell froze over,” proclaimed the

　　slide. The show included iChat appearances and videos from Mick Jagger, Dr. Dre,

　　and Bono. “It’s a very cool thing for musicians and music,” Bono said of the

　　iPod and iTunes. “That’s why I’m here to kiss the corporate ass. I don’t kiss

　　everybody’s.”

　　Jobs was never prone to understatement. To the cheers of the crowd, he declared,

　　“iTunes for Windows is probably the best Windows app ever written.”

　　Microsoft was not grateful. “They’re pursuing the same strategy that they

　　pursued in the PC business, controlling both the hardware and software,” Bill

　　Gates told Business Week. “We’ve always done things a little bit differently

　　than Apple in terms of giving people choice.” It was not until three years

　　later, in November 2006, that Microsoft was finally able to release its own

　　answer to the iPod. It was called the Zune, and it looked like an iPod, though a

　　bit clunkier. Two years later it had achieved a market share of less than 5%.

　　Jobs was brutal about the cause of the Zune’s uninspired design and market

　　weakness:

　　The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was

　　crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way

　　we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for

　　ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend

　　or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re

　　not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status

　　quo as much.

　　Mr. Tambourine Man

　　Andy Lack’s first annual meeting at Sony was in April 2003, the same week that

　　Apple launched the iTunes Store. He had been made head of the music division

　　four months earlier, and had spent much of that time negotiating with Jobs. In

　　fact he arrived in Tokyo directly from Cupertino, carrying the latest version of

　　the iPod and a description of the iTunes Store. In front of the two hundred

　　managers gathered, he pulled the iPod out of his pocket. “Here it is,” he said

　　as CEO Nobuyuki Idei and Sony’s North America head Howard Stringer looked on.

　　“Here’s the Walkman killer. There’s no mystery meat. The reason you bought a

　　music company is so that you could be the one to make a device like this. You

　　can do better.”

　　But Sony couldn’t. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman, it had a

　　great record company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer

　　devices. It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs’s strategy of integration

　　of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly

　　because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organized into

　　divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal

　　of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work

　　together was usually elusive.

　　Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled

　　all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company,

　　with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own

　　P&L,” said Tim Cook. “We run one P&L for the company.”

　　In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it

　　built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital

　　songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs’s business

　　rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t

　　cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone

　　might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a

　　laptop, that did not deter him.

　　That July, Sony appointed a veteran of the music industry, Jay Samit, to create

　　its own iTunes-like service, called Sony Connect, which would sell songs online

　　and allow them to play on Sony’s portable music devices. “The move was

　　immediately understood as a way to unite the sometimes conflicting electronics

　　and content divisions,” the New York Times reported. “That internal battle was

　　seen by many as the reason Sony, the inventor of the Walkman and the biggest

　　player in the portable audio market, was being trounced by Apple.” Sony Connect

　　launched in May 2004. It lasted just over three years before Sony shut it down.

　　Microsoft was willing to license its Windows Media software and digital rights

　　format to other companies, just as it had licensed out its operating system in

　　the 1980s. Jobs, on the other hand, would not license out Apple’s FairPlay to

　　other device makers; it worked only on an iPod. Nor would he allow other online

　　stores to sell songs for use on iPods. A variety of experts said this would

　　eventually cause Apple to lose market share, as it did in the computer wars of

　　the 1980s. “If Apple continues to rely on a proprietary architecture,” the

　　Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen told Wired, “the iPod will

　　likely become a niche product.” (Other than in this case, Christensen was one of

　　the world’s most insightful business analysts, and Jobs was deeply influenced by

　　his book The Innovator’s Dilemma.) Bill Gates made the same argument. “There’s

　　nothing unique about music,” he said. “This story has played out on the PC.”

　　Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, tried to circumvent Apple’s

　　restrictions in July 2004 with a service called Harmony. He had attempted to

　　convince Jobs to license Apple’s FairPlay format to Harmony, but when that

　　didn’t happen, Glaser just reverse-engineered it and used it with the songs that

　　Harmony sold. Glaser’s strategy was that the songs sold by Harmony would play on

　　any device, including an iPod or a Zune or a Rio, and he launched a marketing

　　campaign with the slogan “Freedom of Choice.” Jobs was furious and issued a

　　release saying that Apple was “stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics

　　and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod.” RealNetworks responded by

　　launching an Internet petition that demanded “Hey Apple! Don’t break my iPod.”

　　Jobs kept quiet for a few months, but in October he released a new version of

　　the iPod software that caused songs bought through Harmony to become inoperable.

　　“Steve is a one-of-a-kind guy,” Glaser said. “You know that about him when you

　　do business with him.”

　　In the meantime Jobs and his team—Rubinstein, Fadell, Robbin, Ive—were able to

　　keep coming up with new versions of the iPod that extended Apple’s lead. The

　　first major revision, announced in January 2004, was the iPod Mini. Far smaller

　　than the original iPod—just the size of a business card—it had less capacity and

　　was about the same price. At one point Jobs decided to kill it, not seeing why

　　anyone would want to pay the same for less. “He doesn’t do sports, so he didn’t

　　relate to how it would be great on a run or in the gym,” said Fadell. In fact

　　the Mini was what truly launched the iPod to market dominance, by eliminating

　　the competition from smaller flash-drive players. In the eighteen months after

　　it was introduced, Apple’s market share in the portable music player market shot

　　from 31% to 74%.

　　The iPod Shuffle, introduced in January 2005, was even more revolutionary. Jobs

　　learned that the shuffle feature on the iPod, which played songs in random

　　order, had become very popular. People liked to be surprised, and they were also

　　too lazy to keep setting up and revising their playlists. Some users even became

　　obsessed with figuring out whether the song selection was truly random, and if

　　so, why their iPod kept coming back to, say, the Neville Brothers. That feature

　　led to the iPod Shuffle. As Rubinstein and Fadell were working on creating a

　　flash player that was small and inexpensive, they kept doing things like making

　　the screen tinier. At one point Jobs came in with a crazy suggestion: Get rid of

　　the screen altogether. “What?!?” Fadell responded. “Just get rid of it,” Jobs

　　insisted. Fadell asked how users would navigate the songs. Jobs’s insight was

　　that you wouldn’t need to navigate; the songs would play randomly. After all,

　　they were songs you had chosen. All that was needed was a button to skip over a

　　song if you weren’t in the mood for it. “Embrace uncertainty,” the ads read.

　　As competitors stumbled and Apple continued to innovate, music became a larger

　　part of Apple’s business. In January 2007 iPod sales were half of Apple’s

　　revenues. The device also added luster to the Apple brand. But an even bigger

　　success was the iTunes Store. Having sold one million songs in the first six

　　days after it was introduced in April 2003, the store went on to sell seventy

　　million songs in its first year. In February 2006 the store sold its one

　　billionth song when Alex Ostrovsky, sixteen, of West Bloomfield, Michigan,

　　bought Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” and got a congratulatory call from Jobs,

　　bestowing upon him ten iPods, an iMac, and a $10,000 music gift certificate.

　　The success of the iTunes Store also had a more subtle benefit. By 2011 an

　　important new business had emerged: being the service that people trusted with

　　their online identity and payment information. Along with Amazon, Visa, PayPal,

　　American Express, and a few other services, Apple had built up databases of

　　people who trusted them with their email address and credit card information to

　　facilitate safe and easy shopping. This allowed Apple to sell, for example, a

　　magazine subscription through its online store; when that happened, Apple, not

　　the magazine publisher, would have a direct relationship with the subscriber. As

　　the iTunes Store sold videos, apps, and subscriptions, it built up a database of

　　225 million active users by June 2011, which positioned Apple for the next age

　　of digital commerce.UnknownMUSIC MAN

　　The Sound Track of His Life

　　Jimmy Iovine, Bono, Jobs, and The Edge, 2004

　　On His iPod

　　As the iPod phenomenon grew, it spawned a question that was asked of

　　presidential candidates, B-list celebrities, first dates, the queen of England,

　　and just about anyone else with white earbuds: “What’s on your iPod?” The parlor

　　game took off when Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a piece in the New York Times in

　　early 2005 dissecting the answer that President George W. Bush gave when she

　　asked him that question. “Bush’s iPod is heavy on traditional country singers,”

　　she reported. “He has selections by Van Morrison, whose ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is a

　　Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably ‘Centerfield.’” She got a

　　Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, to analyze the selection, and he commented, “One

　　thing that’s interesting is that the president likes artists who don’t like

　　him.”

　　“Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total

　　stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book,” Steven Levy

　　wrote in The Perfect Thing. “All somebody needs to do is scroll through your

　　library on that click wheel, and, musically speaking, you’re naked. It’s not

　　just what you like—it’s who you are.” So one day, when we were sitting in his

　　living room listening to music, I asked Jobs to let me see his. As we sat there,

　　he flicked through his favorite songs.

　　Not surprisingly, there were all six volumes of Dylan’s bootleg series,

　　including the tracks Jobs had first started worshipping when he and Wozniak were

　　able to score them on reel-to-reel tapes years before the series was officially

　　released. In addition, there were fifteen other Dylan albums, starting with his

　　first, Bob Dylan (1962), but going only up to Oh Mercy (1989). Jobs had spent a

　　lot of time arguing with Andy Hertzfeld and others that Dylan’s subsequent

　　albums, indeed any of his albums after Blood on the Tracks (1975), were not as

　　powerful as his early performances. The one exception he made was Dylan’s track

　　“Things Have Changed” from the 2000 movie Wonder Boys. Notably his iPod did not

　　include Empire Burlesque (1985), the album that Hertzfeld had brought him the

　　weekend he was ousted from Apple.

　　The other great trove on his iPod was the Beatles. He included songs from seven

　　of their albums: A Hard Day’s Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical

　　Mystery Tour, Meet the Beatles! and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The

　　solo albums missed the cut. The Rolling Stones clocked in next, with six albums:

　　Emotional Rescue, Flashpoint, Jump Back, Some Girls, Sticky Fingers, and Tattoo

　　You. In the case of the Dylan and the Beatles albums, most were included in

　　their entirety. But true to his belief that albums can and should be

　　disaggregated, those of the Stones and most other artists on his iPod included

　　only three or four cuts. His onetime girlfriend Joan Baez was amply represented

　　by selections from four albums, including two different versions of “Love Is

　　Just a Four-Letter Word.”

　　His iPod selections were those of a kid from the seventies with his heart in the

　　sixties. There were Aretha, B. B. King, Buddy Holly, Buffalo Springfield, Don

　　McLean, Donovan, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix,

　　Johnny Cash, John Mellencamp, Simon and Garfunkel, and even The Monkees (“I’m a

　　Believer”) and Sam the Sham (“Wooly Bully”). Only about a quarter of the songs

　　were from more contemporary artists, such as 10,000 Maniacs, Alicia Keys, Black

　　Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Dido, Green Day, John Mayer (a friend of both his and

　　Apple), Moby (likewise), U2, Seal, and Talking Heads. As for classical music,

　　there were a few recordings of Bach, including the Brandenburg Concertos, and

　　three albums by Yo-Yo Ma.

　　Jobs told Sheryl Crow in May 2003 that he was downloading some Eminem tracks,

　　admitting, “He’s starting to grow on me.” James Vincent subsequently took him to

　　an Eminem concert. Even so, the rapper missed making it onto Jobs’s iPod. As

　　Jobs said to Vincent after the concert, “I don’t know . . .” He later told me,

　　“I respect Eminem as an artist, but I just don’t want to listen to his music,

　　and I can’t relate to his values the way I can to Dylan’s.”

　　His favorites did not change over the years. When the iPad 2 came out in March

　　2011, he transferred his favorite music to it. One afternoon we sat in his

　　living room as he scrolled through the songs on his new iPad and, with a mellow

　　nostalgia, tapped on ones he wanted to hear.

　　We went through the usual Dylan and Beatles favorites, then he became more

　　reflective and tapped on a Gregorian chant, “Spiritus Domini,” performed by

　　Benedictine monks. For a minute or so he zoned out, almost in a trance. “That’s

　　really beautiful,” he murmured. He followed with Bach’s Second Brandenburg

　　Concerto and a fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach, he declared, was his

　　favorite classical composer. He was particularly fond of listening to the

　　contrasts between the two versions of the “Goldberg Variations” that Glenn Gould

　　recorded, the first in 1955 as a twenty-two-year-old little-known pianist and

　　the second in 1981, a year before he died. “They’re like night and day,” Jobs

　　said after playing them sequentially one afternoon. “The first is an exuberant,

　　young, brilliant piece, played so fast it’s a revelation. The later one is so

　　much more spare and stark. You sense a very deep soul who’s been through a lot

　　in life. It’s deeper and wiser.” Jobs was on his third medical leave that

　　afternoon when he played both versions, and I asked which he liked better.

　　“Gould liked the later version much better,” he said. “I used to like the

　　earlier, exuberant one. But now I can see where he was coming from.”

　　He then jumped from the sublime to the sixties: Donovan’s “Catch the Wind.” When

　　he noticed me look askance, he protested, “Donovan did some really good stuff,

　　really.” He punched up “Mellow Yellow,” and then admitted that perhaps it was

　　not the best example. “It sounded better when we were young.”

　　I asked what music from our childhood actually held up well these days. He

　　scrolled down the list on his iPad and called up the Grateful Dead’s 1969 song

　　“Uncle John’s Band.” He nodded along with the lyrics: “When life looks like Easy

　　Street, there is danger at your door.” For a moment we were back at that

　　tumultuous time when the mellowness of the sixties was ending in discord. “Whoa,

　　oh, what I want to know is, are you kind?”

　　Then he turned to Joni Mitchell. “She had a kid she put up for adoption,” he

　　said. “This song is about her little girl.” He tapped on “Little Green,” and we

　　listened to the mournful melody and lyrics that describe the feelings of a

　　mother who gives up a child. “So you sign all the papers in the family name /

　　You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed.” I asked whether he still

　　often thought about being put up for adoption. “No, not much,” he said. “Not too

　　often.”

　　These days, he said, he thought more about getting older than about his birth.

　　That led him to play Joni Mitchell’s greatest song, “Both Sides Now,” with its

　　lyrics about being older and wiser: “I’ve looked at life from both sides now, /

　　From win and lose, and still somehow, / It’s life’s illusions I recall, / I

　　really don’t know life at all.” As Glenn Gould had done with Bach’s “Goldberg

　　Variations,” Mitchell had recorded “Both Sides Now” many years apart, first in

　　1969 and then in an excruciatingly haunting slow version in 2000. He played the

　　latter. “It’s interesting how people age,” he noted.

　　Some people, he added, don’t age well even when they are young. I asked who he

　　had in mind. “John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, and

　　I’m just afraid he’s blowing it big time,” Jobs replied. Jobs liked Mayer and

　　occasionally had him over for dinner in Palo Alto. When he was twenty-seven,

　　Mayer appeared at the January 2004 Macworld, where Jobs introduced GarageBand,

　　and he became a fixture at the event most years. Jobs punched up Mayer’s hit

　　“Gravity.” The lyrics are about a guy filled with love who inexplicably dreams

　　of ways to throw it away: “Gravity is working against me, / And gravity wants to

　　bring me down.” Jobs shook his head and commented, “I think he’s a really good

　　kid underneath, but he’s just been out of control.”

　　At the end of the listening session, I asked him a well-worn question: the

　　Beatles or the Stones? “If the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set

　　of master tapes, I would grab the Beatles,” he answered. “The hard one would be

　　between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have replicated the Stones.

　　No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles.” As he was ruminating about how

　　fortunate we were to have all of them when we were growing up, his son, then

　　eighteen, came in the room. “Reed doesn’t understand,” Jobs lamented. Or perhaps

　　he did. He was wearing a Joan Baez T-shirt, with the words “Forever Young” on

　　it.

　　Bob Dylan

　　The only time Jobs can ever recall being tongue-tied was in the presence of Bob

　　Dylan. He was playing near Palo Alto in October 2004, and Jobs was recovering

　　from his first cancer surgery. Dylan was not a gregarious man, not a Bono or a

　　Bowie. He was never Jobs’s friend, nor did he care to be. He did, however,

　　invite Jobs to visit him at his hotel before the concert. Jobs recalled:

　　We sat on the patio outside his room and talked for two hours. I was really

　　nervous, because he was one of my heroes. And I was also afraid that he

　　wouldn’t be really smart anymore, that he’d be a caricature of himself, like

　　happens to a lot of people. But I was delighted. He was as sharp as a tack. He

　　was everything I’d hoped. He was really open and honest. He was just telling

　　me about his life and about writing his songs. He said, “They just came

　　through me, it wasn’t like I was having to compose them. That doesn’t happen

　　anymore, I just can’t write them that way anymore.” Then he paused and said to

　　me with his raspy voice and little smile, “But I still can sing them.”

　　The next time Dylan played nearby, he invited Jobs to drop by his tricked-up

　　tour bus just before the concert. When Dylan asked what his favorite song was,

　　Jobs said “One Too Many Mornings.” So Dylan sang it that night. After the

　　concert, as Jobs was walking out the back, the tour bus came by and screeched to

　　a stop. The door flipped open. “So, did you hear my song I sang for you?” Dylan

　　rasped. Then he drove off. When Jobs tells the tale, he does a pretty good

　　impression of Dylan’s voice. “He’s one of my all-time heroes,” Jobs recalled.

　　“My love for him has grown over the years, it’s ripened. I can’t figure out how

　　he did it when he was so young.”

　　A few months after seeing him in concert, Jobs came up with a grandiose plan.

　　The iTunes Store should offer a digital “boxed set” of every Dylan song every

　　recorded, more than seven hundred in all, for $199. Jobs would be the curator of

　　Dylan for the digital age. But Andy Lack of Sony, which was Dylan’s label, was

　　in no mood to make a deal without some serious concessions regarding iTunes. In

　　addition, Lack felt the price was too low and would cheapen Dylan. “Bob is a

　　national treasure,” said Lack, “and Steve wanted him on iTunes at a price that

　　commoditized him.” It got to the heart of the problems that Lack and other

　　record executives were having with Jobs: He was getting to set the price points,

　　not them. So Lack said no.

　　“Okay, then I will call Dylan directly,” Jobs said. But it was not the type of

　　thing that Dylan ever dealt with, so it fell to his agent, Jeff Rosen, to sort

　　things out.

　　“It’s a really bad idea,” Lack told Rosen, showing him the numbers. “Bob is

　　Steve’s hero. He’ll sweeten the deal.” Lack had both a professional and a

　　personal desire to fend Jobs off, even to yank his chain a bit. So he made an

　　offer to Rosen. “I will write you a check for a million dollars tomorrow if you

　　hold off for the time being.” As Lack later explained, it was an advance against

　　future royalties, “one of those accounting things record companies do.” Rosen

　　called back forty-five minutes later and accepted. “Andy worked things out with

　　us and asked us not to do it, which we didn’t,” he recalled. “I think Andy gave

　　us some sort of an advance to hold off doing it.”

　　By 2006, however, Lack had stepped aside as the CEO of what was by then Sony

　　BMG, and Jobs reopened negotiations. He sent Dylan an iPod with all of his songs

　　on it, and he showed Rosen the type of marketing campaign that Apple could

　　mount. In August he announced a grand deal. It allowed Apple to sell the $199

　　digital boxed set of all the songs Dylan ever recorded, plus the exclusive right

　　to offer Dylan’s new album, Modern Times, for pre-release orders. “Bob Dylan is

　　one of the most respected poets and musicians of our time, and he is a personal

　　hero of mine,” Jobs said at the announcement. The 773-track set included

　　forty-two rarities, such as a 1961 tape of “Wade in the Water” made in a

　　Minnesota hotel, a 1962 version of “Handsome Molly” from a live concert at the

　　Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, the truly awesome rendition of “Mr.

　　Tambourine Man” from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival (Jobs’s favorite), and an

　　acoustic version of “Outlaw Blues” from 1965.

　　As part of the deal, Dylan appeared in a television ad for the iPod, featuring

　　his new album, Modern Times. This was one of the most astonishing cases of

　　flipping the script since Tom Sawyer persuaded his friends to whitewash the

　　fence. In the past, getting celebrities to do an ad required paying them a lot

　　of money. But by 2006 the tables were turned. Major artists wanted to appear in

　　iPod ads; the exposure would guarantee success. James Vincent had predicted this

　　a few years earlier, when Jobs said he had contacts with many musicians and

　　could pay them to appear in ads. “No, things are going to soon change,” Vincent

　　replied. “Apple is a different kind of brand, and it’s cooler than the brand of

　　most artists. We should talk about the opportunity we offer the bands, not pay

　　them.”

　　Lee Clow recalled that there was actually some resistance among the younger

　　staffers at Apple and the ad agency to using Dylan. “They wondered whether he

　　was still cool enough,” Clow said. Jobs would hear none of that. He was thrilled

　　to have Dylan.

　　Jobs became obsessed by every detail of the Dylan commercial. Rosen flew to

　　Cupertino so that they could go through the album and pick the song they wanted

　　to use, which ended up being “Someday Baby.” Jobs approved a test video that

　　Clow made using a stand-in for Dylan, which was then shot in Nashville with

　　Dylan himself. But when it came back, Jobs hated it. It wasn’t distinctive

　　enough. He wanted a new style. So Clow hired another director, and Rosen was

　　able to convince Dylan to retape the entire commercial. This time it was done

　　with a gently backlit cowboy-hatted Dylan sitting on a stool, strumming and

　　singing, while a hip woman in a newsboy cap dances with her iPod. Jobs loved it.

　　The ad showed the halo effect of the iPod’s marketing: It helped Dylan win a

　　younger audience, just as the iPod had done for Apple computers. Because of the

　　ad, Dylan’s album was number one on the Billboard chart its first week, topping

　　hot-selling albums by Christina Aguilera and Outkast. It was the first time

　　Dylan had reached the top spot since Desire in 1976, thirty years earlier. Ad

　　Age headlined Apple’s role in propelling Dylan. “The iTunes spot wasn’t just a

　　run-of-the-mill celebrity-endorsement deal in which a big brand signs a big

　　check to tap into the equity of a big star,” it reported. “This one flipped the

　　formula, with the all-powerful Apple brand giving Mr. Dylan access to younger

　　demographics and helping propel his sales to places they hadn’t been since the

　　Ford administration.”

　　The Beatles

　　Among Jobs’s prized CDs was a bootleg that contained a dozen or so taped

　　sessions of the Beatles revising “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It became the

　　musical score to his philosophy of how to perfect a product. Andy Hertzfeld had

　　found the CD and made a copy of it for Jobs in 1986, though Jobs sometimes told

　　folks that it had come from Yoko Ono. Sitting in the living room of his Palo

　　Alto home one day, Jobs rummaged around in some glass-enclosed bookcases to find

　　it, then put it on while describing what it had taught him:

　　It’s a complex song, and it’s fascinating to watch the creative process as

　　they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was

　　always my favorite Beatle. [He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take

　　and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little

　　detour they took? It didn’t work, so they went back and started from where

　　they were. It’s so raw in this version. It actually makes them sound like mere

　　mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this

　　version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet

　　they just didn’t stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going and

　　going. This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could

　　just tell how much they worked at this.

　　They did a bundle of work between each of these recordings. They kept sending

　　it back to make it closer to perfect. [As he listens to the third take, he

　　points out how the instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build

　　stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we’d make of a new

　　notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining

　　and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a

　　function operates. It’s a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and

　　soon it’s like, “Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?”

　　It was thus understandable that Jobs was driven to distraction by the fact that

　　the Beatles were not on iTunes.

　　His struggle with Apple Corps, the Beatles’ business holding company, stretched

　　more than three decades, causing too many journalists to use the phrase “long

　　and winding road” in stories about the relationship. It began in 1978, when

　　Apple Computers, soon after its launch, was sued by Apple Corps for trademark

　　infringement, based on the fact that the Beatles’ former recording label was

　　called Apple. The suit was settled three years later, when Apple Computers paid

　　Apple Corps $80,000. The settlement had what seemed back then an innocuous

　　stipulation: The Beatles would not produce any computer equipment and Apple

　　would not market any music products.

　　The Beatles kept their end of the bargain; none of them ever produced any

　　computers. But Apple ended up wandering into the music business. It got sued

　　again in 1991, when the Mac incorporated the ability to play musical files, then

　　again in 2003, when the iTunes Store was launched. The legal issues were finally

　　resolved in 2007, when Apple made a deal to pay Apple Corps $500 million for all

　　worldwide rights to the name, and then licensed back to the Beatles the right to

　　use Apple Corps for their record and business holdings.

　　Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For

　　that to happen, the Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of

　　their songs, had to negotiate their own differences over how to handle the

　　digital rights. “The Beatles all want to be on iTunes,” Jobs later recalled,

　　“but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can’t

　　get divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes

　　was something I very much hoped I would live to resolve.” As it turned out, he

　　would.

　　Bono

　　Bono, the lead singer of U2, deeply appreciated Apple’s marketing muscle. He was

　　confident that his Dublin-based band was still the best in the world, but in

　　2004 it was trying, after almost thirty years together, to reinvigorate its

　　image. It had produced an exciting new album with a song that the band’s lead

　　guitarist, The Edge, declared to be “the mother of all rock tunes.” Bono knew he

　　needed to find a way to get it some traction, so he placed a call to Jobs.

　　“I wanted something specific from Apple,” Bono recalled. “We had a song called

　　‘Vertigo’ that featured an aggressive guitar riff that I knew would be

　　contagious, but only if people were exposed to it many, many times.” He was

　　worried that the era of promoting a song through airplay on the radio was over.

　　So Bono visited Jobs at home in Palo Alto, walked around the garden, and made an

　　unusual pitch. Over the years U2 had spurned offers as high as $23 million to be

　　in commercials. Now he wanted Jobs to use the band in an iPod commercial for

　　free—or at least as part of a mutually beneficial package. “They had never done

　　a commercial before,” Jobs later recalled. “But they were getting ripped off by

　　free downloading, they liked what we were doing with iTunes, and they thought we

　　could promote them to a younger audience.”

　　Any other CEO would have jumped into a mosh pit to have U2 in an ad, but Jobs

　　pushed back a bit. Apple didn’t feature recognizable people in the iPod ads,

　　just silhouettes. (The Dylan ad had not yet been made.) “You have silhouettes of

　　fans,” Bono replied, “so couldn’t the next phase be silhouettes of artists?”

　　Jobs said it sounded like an idea worth exploring. Bono left a copy of the

　　unreleased album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, for Jobs to hear. “He was the

　　only person outside the band who had it,” Bono said.

　　A round of meetings ensued. Jobs flew down to talk to Jimmy Iovine, whose

　　Interscope records distributed U2, at his house in the Holmby Hills section of

　　Los Angeles. The Edge was there, along with U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness.

　　Another meeting took place in Jobs’s kitchen, with McGuinness writing down the

　　deal points in the back of his diary. U2 would appear in the commercial, and

　　Apple would vigorously promote the album in multiple venues, ranging from

　　billboards to the iTunes homepage. The band would get no direct fee, but it

　　would get royalties from the sale of a special U2 edition of the iPod. Bono

　　believed, like Lack, that the musicians should get a royalty on each iPod sold,

　　and this was his small attempt to assert the principle in a limited way for his

　　band. “Bono and I asked Steve to make us a black one,” Iovine recalled. “We

　　weren’t just doing a commercial sponsorship, we were making a co-branding deal.”

　　“We wanted our own iPod, something distinct from the regular white ones,” Bono

　　recalled. “We wanted black, but Steve said, ‘We’ve tried other colors than

　　white, and they don’t work.’” A few days later Jobs relented and accepted the

　　idea, tentatively.

　　The commercial interspersed high-voltage shots of the band in partial silhouette

　　with the usual silhouette of a dancing woman listening to an iPod. But even as

　　it was being shot in London, the agreement with Apple was unraveling. Jobs began

　　having second thoughts about the idea of a special black iPod, and the royalty

　　rates were not fully pinned down. He called James Vincent, at Apple’s ad agency,

　　and told him to call London and put things on hold. “I don’t think it’s going to

　　happen,” Jobs said. “They don’t realize how much value we are giving them, it’s

　　going south. Let’s think of some other ad to do.” Vincent, a lifelong U2 fan,

　　knew how big the ad would be, both for the band and Apple, and begged for the

　　chance to call Bono to try to get things on track. Jobs gave him Bono’s mobile

　　number, and he reached the singer in his kitchen in Dublin.

　　Bono was also having a few second thoughts. “I don’t think this is going to

　　work,” he told Vincent. “The band is reluctant.” Vincent asked what the problem

　　was. “When we were teenagers in Dublin, we said we would never do naff stuff,”

　　Bono replied. Vincent, despite being British and familiar with rock slang, said

　　he didn’t know what that meant. “Doing rubbishy things for money,” Bono

　　explained. “We are all about our fans. We feel like we’d be letting them down if

　　we went in an ad. It doesn’t feel right. I’m sorry we wasted your time.”

　　Vincent asked what more Apple could do to make it work. “We are giving you the

　　most important thing we have to give, and that’s our music,” said Bono. “And

　　what are you giving us back? Advertising, and our fans will think it’s for you.

　　We need something more.” Vincent replied that the offer of the special U2

　　edition of the iPod and the royalty arrangement was a huge deal. “That’s the

　　most prized thing we have to give,” he told Bono.

　　The singer said he was ready to try to put the deal back together, so Vincent

　　immediately called Jony Ive, another big U2 fan (he had first seen them in

　　concert in Newcastle in 1983), and described the situation. Then he called Jobs

　　and suggested he send Ive to Dublin to show what the black iPod would look like.

　　Jobs agreed. Vincent called Bono back, and asked if he knew Jony Ive, unaware

　　that they had met before and admired each other. “Know Jony Ive?” Bono laughed.

　　“I love that guy. I drink his bathwater.”

　　“That’s a bit strong,” Vincent replied, “but how about letting him come visit

　　and show how cool your iPod would be?”

　　“I’m going to pick him up myself in my Maserati,” Bono answered. “He’s going to

　　stay at my house, I’m going to take him out, and I will get him really drunk.”

　　The next day, as Ive headed toward Dublin, Vincent had to fend off Jobs, who was

　　still having second thoughts. “I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing,” he

　　said. “We don’t want to do this for anyone else.” He was worried about setting

　　the precedent of artists getting a royalty from each iPod sold. Vincent assured

　　him that the U2 deal would be special.

　　“Jony arrived in Dublin and I put him up at my guest house, a serene place over

　　a railway track with a view of the sea,” Bono recalled. “He shows me this

　　beautiful black iPod with a deep red click wheel, and I say okay, we’ll do it.”

　　They went to a local pub, hashed out some of the details, and then called Jobs

　　in Cupertino to see if he would agree. Jobs haggled for a while over each detail

　　of the finances, and over the design, before he finally embraced the deal. That

　　impressed Bono. “It’s actually amazing that a CEO cares that much about detail,”

　　he said. When it was resolved, Ive and Bono settled into some serious drinking.

　　Both are comfortable in pubs. After a few pints, they decided to call Vincent

　　back in California. He was not home, so Bono left a message on his answering

　　machine, which Vincent made sure never to erase. “I’m sitting here in bubbling

　　Dublin with your friend Jony,” it said. “We’re both a bit drunk, and we’re happy

　　with this wonderful iPod and I can’t even believe it exists and I’m holding it

　　in my hand. Thank you!”

　　Jobs rented a theater in San Jose for the unveiling of the TV commercial and

　　special iPod. Bono and The Edge joined him onstage. The album sold 840,000

　　copies in its first week and debuted at number one on the Billboard chart. Bono

　　told the press afterward that he had done the commercial without charge because

　　“U2 will get as much value out of the commercial as Apple will.” Jimmy Iovine

　　added that it would allow the band to “reach a younger audience.”

　　What was remarkable was that associating with a computer and electronics company

　　was the best way for a rock band to seem hip and appeal to young people. Bono

　　later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil.

　　“Let’s have a look,” he told Greg Kot, the Chicago Tribune music critic. “The

　　‘devil’ here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in

　　rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most

　　beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That’s the

　　iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”

　　Bono got Jobs to do another deal with him in 2006, this one for his Product Red

　　campaign that raised money and awareness to fight AIDS in Africa. Jobs was never

　　much interested in philanthropy, but he agreed to do a special red iPod as part

　　of Bono’s campaign. It was not a wholehearted commitment. He balked, for

　　example, at using the campaign’s signature treatment of putting the name of the

　　company in parentheses with the word “red” in superscript after it, as in

　　(APPLE)RED. “I don’t want Apple in parentheses,” Jobs insisted. Bono replied,

　　“But Steve, that’s how we show unity for our cause.” The conversation got

　　heated—to the F-you stage—before they agreed to sleep on it. Finally Jobs

　　compromised, sort of. Bono could do what he wanted in his ads, but Jobs would

　　never put Apple in parentheses on any of his products or in any of his stores.

　　The iPod was labeled (PRODUCT)RED, not (APPLE)RED.

　　“Steve can be sparky,” Bono recalled, “but those moments have made us closer

　　friends, because there are not many people in your life where you can have those

　　robust discussions. He’s very opinionated. After our shows, I talk to him and

　　he’s always got an opinion.” Jobs and his family occasionally visited Bono and

　　his wife and four kids at their home near Nice on the French Riviera. On one

　　vacation, in 2008, Jobs chartered a boat and moored it near Bono’s home. They

　　ate meals together, and Bono played tapes of the songs U2 was preparing for what

　　became the No Line on the Horizon album. But despite the friendship, Jobs was

　　still a tough negotiator. They tried to make a deal for another ad and special

　　release of the song “Get On Your Boots,” but they could not come to terms. When

　　Bono hurt his back in 2010 and had to cancel a tour, Powell sent him a gift

　　basket with a DVD of the comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, the book Mozart’s

　　Brain and the Fighter Pilot, honey from her beehives, and pain cream. Jobs wrote

　　a note and attached it to the last item, saying, “Pain Cream—I love this stuff.”

　　Yo-Yo Ma

　　There was one classical musician Jobs revered both as a person and as a

　　performer: Yo-Yo Ma, the versatile virtuoso who is as sweet and profound as the

　　tones he creates on his cello. They had met in 1981, when Jobs was at the Aspen

　　Design Conference and Ma was at the Aspen Music Festival. Jobs tended to be

　　deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma

　　to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the

　　Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733

　　Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. “This is what I would have played for your

　　wedding,” he told them. Jobs teared up and told him, “You playing is the best

　　argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really

　　believe a human alone can do this.” On a subsequent visit Ma allowed Jobs’s

　　daughter Erin to hold the cello while they sat around the kitchen. By that time

　　Jobs had been struck by cancer, and he made Ma promise to play at his funeral.UnknownPIXAR’S FRIENDS

　　. . . and Foes

　　A Bug’s Life

　　When Apple developed the iMac, Jobs drove with Jony Ive to show it to the folks

　　at Pixar. He felt that the machine had the spunky personality that would appeal

　　to the creators of Buzz Lightyear and Woody, and he loved the fact that Ive and

　　John Lasseter shared the talent to connect art with technology in a playful way.

　　Pixar was a haven where Jobs could escape the intensity in Cupertino. At Apple,

　　the managers were often excitable and exhausted, Jobs tended to be volatile, and

　　people felt nervous about where they stood with him. At Pixar, the storytellers

　　and illustrators seemed more serene and behaved more gently, both with each

　　other and even with Jobs. In other words, the tone at each place was set at the

　　top, by Jobs at Apple, but by Lasseter at Pixar.

　　Jobs reveled in the earnest playfulness of moviemaking and got passionate about

　　the algorithms that enabled such magic as allowing computer-generated raindrops

　　to refract sunbeams or blades of grass to wave in the wind. But he was able to

　　restrain himself from trying to control the creative process. It was at Pixar

　　that he learned to let other creative people flourish and take the lead. Largely

　　it was because he loved Lasseter, a gentle artist who, like Ive, brought out the

　　best in Jobs.

　　Jobs’s main role at Pixar was deal making, in which his natural intensity was an

　　asset. Soon after the release of Toy Story, he clashed with Jeffrey Katzenberg,

　　who had left Disney in the summer of 1994 and joined with Steven Spielberg and

　　David Geffen to start DreamWorks SKG. Jobs believed that his Pixar team had told

　　Katzenberg, while he was still at Disney, about its proposed second movie, A

　　Bug’s Life, and that he had then stolen the idea of an animated insect movie

　　when he decided to produce Antz at DreamWorks. “When Jeffrey was still running

　　Disney animation, we pitched him on A Bug’s Life,” Jobs said. “In sixty years of

　　animation history, nobody had thought of doing an animated movie about insects,

　　until Lasseter. It was one of his brilliant creative sparks. And Jeffrey left

　　and went to DreamWorks and all of a sudden had this idea for an animated movie

　　about—Oh!—insects. And he pretended he’d never heard the pitch. He lied. He lied

　　through his teeth.”

　　Actually, not. The real story is a bit more interesting. Katzenberg never heard

　　the Bug’s Life pitch while at Disney. But after he left for DreamWorks, he

　　stayed in touch with Lasseter, occasionally pinging him with one of his typical

　　“Hey buddy, how you doing just checking in” quick phone calls. So when Lasseter

　　happened to be at the Technicolor facility on the Universal lot, where

　　DreamWorks was also located, he called Katzenberg and dropped by with a couple

　　of colleagues. When Katzenberg asked what they were doing next, Lasseter told

　　him. “We described to him A Bug’s Life, with an ant as the main character, and

　　told him the whole story of him organizing the other ants and enlisting a group

　　of circus performer insects to fight off the grasshoppers,” Lasseter recalled.

　　“I should have been wary. Jeffrey kept asking questions about when it would be

　　released.”

　　Lasseter began to get worried when, in early 1996, he heard rumors that

　　DreamWorks might be making its own computer-animated movie about ants. He called

　　Katzenberg and asked him point-blank. Katzenberg hemmed, hawed, and asked where

　　Lasseter had heard that. Lasseter asked again, and Katzenberg admitted it was

　　true. “How could you?” yelled Lasseter, who very rarely raised his voice.

　　“We had the idea long ago,” said Katzenberg, who explained that it had been

　　pitched to him by a development director at DreamWorks.

　　“I don’t believe you,” Lasseter replied.

　　Katzenberg conceded that he had sped up Antz as a way to counter his former

　　colleagues at Disney. DreamWorks’ first major picture was to be Prince of Egypt,

　　which was scheduled to be released for Thanksgiving 1998, and he was appalled

　　when he heard that Disney was planning to release Pixar’s A Bug’s Life that same

　　weekend. So he had rushed Antz into production to force Disney to change the

　　release date of A Bug’s Life.

　　“Fuck you,” replied Lasseter, who did not normally use such language. He didn’t

　　speak to Katzenberg for another thirteen years.

　　Jobs was furious, and he was far more practiced than Lasseter at giving vent to

　　his emotions. He called Katzenberg and started yelling. Katzenberg made an

　　offer: He would delay production of Antz if Jobs and Disney would move A Bug’s

　　Life so that it didn’t compete with Prince of Egypt. “It was a blatant extortion

　　attempt, and I didn’t go for it,” Jobs recalled. He told Katzenberg there was

　　nothing he could do to make Disney change the release date.

　　“Of course you can,” Katzenberg replied. “You can move mountains. You taught me

　　how!” He said that when Pixar was almost bankrupt, he had come to its rescue by

　　giving it the deal to do Toy Story. “I was the one guy there for you back then,

　　and now you’re allowing them to use you to screw me.” He suggested that if Jobs

　　wanted to, he could simply slow down production on A Bug’s Life without telling

　　Disney. If he did, Katzenberg said, he would put Antz on hold. “Don’t even go

　　there,” Jobs replied.

　　Katzenberg had a valid gripe. It was clear that Eisner and Disney were using the

　　Pixar movie to get back at him for leaving Disney and starting a rival animation

　　studio. “Prince of Egypt was the first thing we were making, and they scheduled

　　something for our announced release date just to be hostile,” he said. “My view

　　was like that of the Lion King, that if you stick your hand in my cage and paw

　　me, watch out.”

　　No one backed down, and the rival ant movies provoked a press frenzy. Disney

　　tried to keep Jobs quiet, on the theory that playing up the rivalry would serve

　　to help Antz, but he was a man not easily muzzled. “The bad guys rarely win,” he

　　told the Los Angeles Times. In response, DreamWorks’ savvy marketing maven,

　　Terry Press, suggested, “Steve Jobs should take a pill.”

　　Antz was released at the beginning of October 1998. It was not a bad movie.

　　Woody Allen voiced the part of a neurotic ant living in a conformist society who

　　yearns to express his individualism. “This is the kind of Woody Allen comedy

　　Woody Allen no longer makes,” Time wrote. It grossed a respectable $91 million

　　domestically and $172 million worldwide.

　　A Bug’s Life came out six weeks later, as planned. It had a more epic plot,

　　which reversed Aesop’s tale of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” plus a greater

　　technical virtuosity, which allowed such startling details as the view of grass

　　from a bug’s vantage point. Time was much more effusive about it. “Its design

　　work is so stellar—a wide-screen Eden of leaves and labyrinths populated by

　　dozens of ugly, buggy, cuddly cutups—that it makes the DreamWorks film seem, by

　　comparison, like radio,” wrote Richard Corliss. It did twice as well as Antz at

　　the box office, grossing $163 million domestically and $363 million worldwide.

　　(It also beat Prince of Egypt.)

　　A few years later Katzenberg ran into Jobs and tried to smooth things over. He

　　insisted that he had never heard the pitch for A Bug’s Life while at Disney; if

　　he had, his settlement with Disney would have given him a share of the profits,

　　so it’s not something he would lie about. Jobs laughed, and accepted as much. “I

　　asked you to move your release date, and you wouldn’t, so you can’t be mad at me

　　for protecting my child,” Katzenberg told him. He recalled that Jobs “got really

　　calm and Zen-like” and said he understood. But Jobs later said that he never

　　really forgave Katzenberg:

　　Our film toasted his at the box office. Did that feel good? No, it still felt

　　awful, because people started saying how everyone in Hollywood was doing

　　insect movies. He took the brilliant originality away from John, and that can

　　never be replaced. That’s unconscionable, so I’ve never trusted him, even

　　after he tried to make amends. He came up to me after he was successful with

　　Shrek and said, “I’m a changed man, I’m finally at peace with myself,” and all

　　this crap. And it was like, give me a break, Jeffrey.

　　For his part, Katzenberg was much more gracious. He considered Jobs one of the

　　“true geniuses in the world,” and he learned to respect him despite their

　　volatile dealings.

　　More important than beating Antz was showing that Pixar was not a one-hit

　　wonder. A Bug’s Life grossed as much as Toy Story had, proving that the first

　　success was not a fluke. “There’s a classic thing in business, which is the

　　second-product syndrome,” Jobs later said. It comes from not understanding what

　　made your first product so successful. “I lived through that at Apple. My

　　feeling was, if we got through our second film, we’d make it.”

　　Steve’s Own Movie

　　Toy Story 2, which came out in November 1999, was even bigger, with a $485

　　million gross worldwide. Given that Pixar’s success was now assured, it was time

　　to start building a showcase headquarters. Jobs and the Pixar facilities team

　　found an abandoned Del Monte fruit cannery in Emeryville, an industrial

　　neighborhood between Berkeley and Oakland, just across the Bay Bridge from San

　　Francisco. They tore it down, and Jobs commissioned Peter Bohlin, the architect

　　of the Apple stores, to design a new building for the sixteen-acre plot.

　　Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to

　　the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. “Steve had this firm

　　belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture,” said

　　Pixar’s president Ed Catmull. Jobs controlled the creation of the building as if

　　he were a director sweating each scene of a film. “The Pixar building was

　　Steve’s own movie,” Lasseter said.

　　Lasseter had originally wanted a traditional Hollywood studio, with separate

　　buildings for various projects and bungalows for development teams. But the

　　Disney folks said they didn’t like their new campus because the teams felt

　　isolated, and Jobs agreed. In fact he decided they should go to the other

　　extreme: one huge building around a central atrium designed to encourage random

　　encounters.

　　Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too

　　well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face

　　meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be

　　developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from

　　spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask

　　what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of

　　ideas.”

　　So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned

　　collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of

　　innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we

　　designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the

　　central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and

　　main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium, the café and the mailboxes were

　　there, the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it, and the

　　six-hundred-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it.

　　“Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalled. “I kept running into

　　people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted

　　collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

　　Jobs even went so far as to decree that there be only two huge bathrooms in the

　　building, one for each gender, connected to the atrium. “He felt that very, very

　　strongly,” recalled Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s general manager. “Some of us felt that

　　was going too far. One pregnant woman said she shouldn’t be forced to walk for

　　ten minutes just to go to the bathroom, and that led to a big fight.” It was one

　　of the few times that Lasseter disagreed with Jobs. They reached a compromise:

　　there would be two sets of bathrooms on either side of the atrium on both of the

　　two floors.

　　Because the building’s steel beams were going to be visible, Jobs pored over

　　samples from manufacturers across the country to see which had the best color

　　and texture. He chose a mill in Arkansas, told it to blast the steel to a pure

　　color, and made sure the truckers used caution not to nick any of it. He also

　　insisted that all the beams be bolted together, not welded. “We sandblasted the

　　steel and clear-coated it, so you can actually see what it’s like,” he recalled.

　　“When the steelworkers were putting up the beams, they would bring their

　　families on the weekend to show them.”

　　The wackiest piece of serendipity was “The Love Lounge.” One of the animators

　　found a small door on the back wall when he moved into his office. It opened to

　　a low corridor that you could crawl through to a room clad in sheet metal that

　　provided access to the air-conditioning valves. He and his colleagues

　　commandeered the secret room, festooned it with Christmas lights and lava lamps,

　　and furnished it with benches upholstered in animal prints, tasseled pillows, a

　　fold-up cocktail table, liquor bottles, bar equipment, and napkins that read

　　“The Love Lounge.” A video camera installed in the corridor allowed occupants to

　　monitor who might be approaching.

　　Lasseter and Jobs brought important visitors there and had them sign the wall.

　　The signatures include Michael Eisner, Roy Disney, Tim Allen, and Randy Newman.

　　Jobs loved it, but since he wasn’t a drinker he sometimes referred to it as the

　　Meditation Room. It reminded him, he said, of the one that he and Daniel Kottke

　　had at Reed, but without the acid.

　　The Divorce

　　In testimony before a Senate committee in February 2002, Michael Eisner blasted

　　the ads that Jobs had created for Apple’s iTunes. “There are computer companies

　　that have full-page ads and billboards that say: Rip, mix, burn,” he declared.

　　“In other words, they can create a theft and distribute it to all their friends

　　if they buy this particular computer.”

　　This was not a smart comment. It misunderstood the meaning of “rip” and assumed

　　it involved ripping someone off, rather than importing files from a CD to a

　　computer. More significantly, it truly pissed off Jobs, as Eisner should have

　　known. That too was not smart. Pixar had recently released the fourth movie in

　　its Disney deal, Monsters, Inc., which turned out to be the most successful of

　　them all, with $525 million in worldwide gross. Disney’s Pixar deal was again

　　coming up for renewal, and Eisner had not made it easier by publicly poking a

　　stick at his partner’s eye. Jobs was so incredulous he called a Disney executive

　　to vent: “Do you know what Michael just did to me?”

　　Eisner and Jobs came from different backgrounds and opposite coasts, but they

　　were similar in being strong-willed and without much inclination to find

　　compromises. They both had a passion for making good products, which often meant

　　micromanaging details and not sugarcoating their criticisms. Watching Eisner

　　take repeated rides on the Wildlife Express train through Disney World’s Animal

　　Kingdom and coming up with smart ways to improve the customer experience was

　　like watching Jobs play with the interface of an iPod and find ways it could be

　　simplified. Watching them manage people was a less edifying experience.

　　Both were better at pushing people than being pushed, which led to an unpleasant

　　atmosphere when they started trying to do it to each other. In a disagreement,

　　they tended to assert that the other party was lying. In addition, neither

　　Eisner nor Jobs seemed to believe that he could learn anything from the other;

　　nor would it have occurred to either even to fake a bit of deference by

　　pretending to have anything to learn. Jobs put the onus on Eisner:

　　The worst thing, to my mind, was that Pixar had successfully reinvented

　　Disney’s business, turning out great films one after the other while Disney

　　turned out flop after flop. You would think the CEO of Disney would be curious

　　how Pixar was doing that. But during the twenty-year relationship, he visited

　　Pixar for a total of about two and a half hours, only to give little

　　congratulatory speeches. He was never curious. I was amazed. Curiosity is very

　　important.

　　That was overly harsh. Eisner had been up to Pixar a bit more than that,

　　including visits when Jobs wasn’t with him. But it was true that he showed

　　little curiosity about the artistry or technology at the studio. Jobs likewise

　　didn’t spend much time trying to learn from Disney’s management.

　　The open sniping between Jobs and Eisner began in the summer of 2002. Jobs had

　　always admired the creative spirit of the great Walt Disney, especially because

　　he had nurtured a company to last for generations. He viewed Walt’s nephew Roy

　　as an embodiment of this historic legacy and spirit. Roy was still on the Disney

　　board, despite his own growing estrangement from Eisner, and Jobs let him know

　　that he would not renew the Pixar-Disney deal as long as Eisner was still the

　　CEO.

　　Roy Disney and Stanley Gold, his close associate on the Disney board, began

　　warning other directors about the Pixar problem. That prompted Eisner to send

　　the board an intemperate email in late August 2002. He was confident that Pixar

　　would eventually renew its deal, he said, partly because Disney had rights to

　　the Pixar movies and characters that had been made thus far. Plus, he said,

　　Disney would be in a better negotiating position in a year, after Pixar finished

　　Finding Nemo. “Yesterday we saw for the second time the new Pixar movie, Finding

　　Nemo, that comes out next May,” he wrote. “This will be a reality check for

　　those guys. It’s okay, but nowhere near as good as their previous films. Of

　　course they think it is great.” There were two major problems with this email:

　　It leaked to the Los Angeles Times, provoking Jobs to go ballistic, and Eisner’s

　　assessment of the movie was wrong, very wrong.

　　Finding Nemo became Pixar’s (and Disney’s) biggest hit thus far. It easily beat

　　out The Lion King to become, for the time being, the most successful animated

　　movie in history. It grossed $340 million domestically and $868 million

　　worldwide. Until 2010 it was also the most popular DVD of all time, with forty

　　million copies sold, and spawned some of the most popular rides at Disney theme

　　parks. In addition, it was a richly textured, subtle, and deeply beautiful

　　artistic achievement that won the Oscar for best animated feature. “I liked the

　　film because it was about taking risks and learning to let those you love take

　　risks,” Jobs said. Its success added $183 million to Pixar’s cash reserves,

　　giving it a hefty war chest of $521 million for the final showdown with Disney.

　　Shortly after Finding Nemo was finished, Jobs made Eisner an offer that was so

　　one-sided it was clearly meant to be rejected. Instead of a fifty-fifty split on

　　revenues, as in the existing deal, Jobs proposed a new arrangement in which

　　Pixar would own outright the films it made and the characters in them, and it

　　would merely pay Disney a 7.5% fee to distribute the movies. Plus, the last two

　　films under the existing deal—The Incredibles and Cars were the ones in the

　　works—would shift to the new distribution deal.

　　Eisner, however, held one powerful trump card. Even if Pixar didn’t renew,

　　Disney had the right to make sequels of Toy Story and the other movies that

　　Pixar had made, and it owned all the characters, from Woody to Nemo, just as it

　　owned Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Eisner was already planning—or

　　threatening—to have Disney’s own animation studio do a Toy Story 3, which Pixar

　　had declined to do. “When you see what that company did putting out Cinderella

　　II, you shudder at what would have happened,” Jobs said.

　　Eisner was able to force Roy Disney off the board in November 2003, but that

　　didn’t end the turmoil. Disney released a scathing open letter. “The company has

　　lost its focus, its creative energy, and its heritage,” he wrote. His litany of

　　Eisner’s alleged failings included not building a constructive relationship with

　　Pixar. By this point Jobs had decided that he no longer wanted to work with

　　Eisner. So in January 2004 he publicly announced that he was cutting off

　　negotiations with Disney.

　　Jobs was usually disciplined in not making public the strong opinions that he

　　shared with friends around his Palo Alto kitchen table. But this time he did not

　　hold back. In a conference call with reporters, he said that while Pixar was

　　producing hits, Disney animation was making “embarrassing duds.” He scoffed at

　　Eisner’s notion that Disney made any creative contribution to the Pixar films:

　　“The truth is there has been little creative collaboration with Disney for

　　years. You can compare the creative quality of our films with the creative

　　quality of Disney’s last three films and judge each company’s creative ability

　　yourselves.” In addition to building a better creative team, Jobs had pulled off

　　the remarkable feat of building a brand that was now as big a draw for

　　moviegoers as Disney’s. “We think the Pixar brand is now the most powerful and

　　trusted brand in animation.” When Jobs called to give him a heads-up, Roy Disney

　　replied, “When the wicked witch is dead, we’ll be together again.”

　　John Lasseter was aghast at the prospect of breaking up with Disney. “I was

　　worried about my children, what they would do with the characters we’d created,”

　　he recalled. “It was like a dagger to my heart.” When he told his top staff in

　　the Pixar conference room, he started crying, and he did so again when he

　　addressed the eight hundred or so Pixar employees gathered in the studio’s

　　atrium. “It’s like you have these dear children and you have to give them up to

　　be adopted by convicted child molesters.” Jobs came to the atrium stage next and

　　tried to calm things down. He explained why it might be necessary to break with

　　Disney, and he assured them that Pixar as an institution had to keep looking

　　forward to be successful. “He has the absolute ability to make you believe,”

　　said Oren Jacob, a longtime technologist at the studio. “Suddenly, we all had

　　the confidence that, whatever happened, Pixar would flourish.”

　　Bob Iger, Disney’s chief operating officer, had to step in and do damage

　　control. He was as sensible and solid as those around him were volatile. His

　　background was in television; he had been president of the ABC Network, which

　　was acquired in 1996 by Disney. His reputation was as a corporate suit, and he

　　excelled at deft management, but he also had a sharp eye for talent, a

　　good-humored ability to understand people, and a quiet flair that he was secure

　　enough to keep muted. Unlike Eisner and Jobs, he had a disciplined calm, which

　　helped him deal with large egos. “Steve did some grandstanding by announcing

　　that he was ending talks with us,” Iger later recalled. “We went into crisis

　　mode, and I developed some talking points to settle things down.”

　　Eisner had presided over ten great years at Disney, when Frank Wells served as

　　his president. Wells freed Eisner from many management duties so he could make

　　his suggestions, usually valuable and often brilliant, on ways to improve each

　　movie project, theme park ride, television pilot, and countless other products.

　　But after Wells was killed in a helicopter crash in 1994, Eisner never found the

　　right manager. Katzenberg had demanded Wells’s job, which is why Eisner ousted

　　him. Michael Ovitz became president in 1995; it was not a pretty sight, and he

　　was gone in less than two years. Jobs later offered his assessment:

　　For his first ten years as CEO, Eisner did a really good job. For the last ten

　　years, he really did a bad job. And the change came when Frank Wells died.

　　Eisner is a really good creative guy. He gives really good notes. So when

　　Frank was running operations, Eisner could be like a bumblebee going from

　　project to project trying to make them better. But when Eisner had to run

　　things, he was a terrible manager. Nobody liked working for him. They felt

　　they had no authority. He had this strategic planning group that was like the

　　Gestapo, in that you couldn’t spend any money, not even a dime, without them

　　approving it. Even though I broke with him, I had to respect his achievements

　　in the first ten years. And there was a part of him I actually liked. He’s a

　　fun guy to be around at times—smart, witty. But he had a dark side to him. His

　　ego got the better of him. Eisner was reasonable and fair to me at first, but

　　eventually, over the course of dealing with him for a decade, I came to see a

　　dark side to him.

　　Eisner’s biggest problem in 2004 was that he did not fully fathom how messed up

　　his animation division was. Its two most recent movies, Treasure Planet and

　　Brother Bear, did no honor to the Disney legacy, or to its balance sheets. Hit

　　animation movies were the lifeblood of the company; they spawned theme park

　　rides, toys, and television shows. Toy Story had led to a movie sequel, a Disney

　　on Ice show, a Toy Story Musical performed on Disney cruise ships, a

　　direct-to-video film featuring Buzz Lightyear, a computer storybook, two video

　　games, a dozen action toys that sold twenty-five million units, a clothing line,

　　and nine different attractions at Disney theme parks. This was not the case for

　　Treasure Planet.

　　“Michael didn’t understand that Disney’s problems in animation were as acute as

　　they were,” Iger later explained. “That manifested itself in the way he dealt

　　with Pixar. He never felt he needed Pixar as much as he really did.” In

　　addition, Eisner loved to negotiate and hated to compromise, which was not

　　always the best combination when dealing with Jobs, who was the same way. “Every

　　negotiation needs to be resolved by compromises,” Iger said. “Neither one of

　　them is a master of compromise.”

　　The impasse was ended on a Saturday night in March 2005, when Iger got a phone

　　call from former senator George Mitchell and other Disney board members. They

　　told him that, starting in a few months, he would replace Eisner as Disney’s

　　CEO. When Iger got up the next morning, he called his daughters and then Steve

　　Jobs and John Lasseter. He said, very simply and clearly, that he valued Pixar

　　and wanted to make a deal. Jobs was thrilled. He liked Iger and even marveled at

　　a small connection they had: his former girlfriend Jennifer Egan and Iger’s

　　wife, Willow Bay, had been roommates at Penn.

　　That summer, before Iger officially took over, he and Jobs got to have a trial

　　run at making a deal. Apple was coming out with an iPod that would play video as

　　well as music. It needed television shows to sell, and Jobs did not want to be

　　too public in negotiating for them because, as usual, he wanted the product to

　　be secret until he unveiled it onstage. Iger, who had multiple iPods and used

　　them throughout the day, from his 5 a.m. workouts to late at night, had already

　　been envisioning what it could do for television shows. So he immediately

　　offered ABC’s most popular shows, Desperate Housewives and Lost. “We negotiated

　　that deal in a week, and it was complicated,” Iger said. “It was important

　　because Steve got to see how I worked, and because it showed everyone that

　　Disney could in fact work with Steve.”

　　For the announcement of the video iPod, Jobs rented a theater in San Jose, and

　　he invited Iger to be his surprise guest onstage. “I had never been to one of

　　his announcements, so I had no idea what a big deal it was,” Iger recalled. “It

　　was a real breakthrough for our relationship. He saw I was pro-technology and

　　willing to take risks.” Jobs did his usual virtuoso performance, running through

　　all the features of the new iPod, how it was “one of the best things we’ve ever

　　done,” and how the iTunes Store would now be selling music videos and short

　　films. Then, as was his habit, he ended with “And yes, there is one more thing:”

　　The iPod would be selling TV shows. There was huge applause. He mentioned that

　　the two most popular shows were on ABC. “And who owns ABC? Disney! I know these

　　guys,” he exulted.

　　When Iger then came onstage, he looked as relaxed and as comfortable as Jobs.

　　“One of the things that Steve and I are incredibly excited about is the

　　intersection between great content and great technology,” he said. “It’s great

　　to be here to announce an extension of our relation with Apple,” he added. Then,

　　after the proper pause, he said, “Not with Pixar, but with Apple.”

　　But it was clear from their warm embrace that a new Pixar-Disney deal was once

　　again possible. “It signaled my way of operating, which was ‘Make love not

　　war,’” Iger recalled. “We had been at war with Roy Disney, Comcast, Apple, and

　　Pixar. I wanted to fix all that, Pixar most of all.”

　　Iger had just come back from opening the new Disneyland in Hong Kong, with

　　Eisner at his side in his last big act as CEO. The ceremonies included the usual

　　Disney parade down Main Street. Iger realized that the only characters in the

　　parade that had been created in the past decade were Pixar’s. “A lightbulb went

　　off,” he recalled. “I’m standing next to Michael, but I kept it completely to

　　myself, because it was such an indictment of his stewardship of animation during

　　that period. After ten years of The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and

　　Aladdin, there were then ten years of nothing.”

　　Iger went back to Burbank and had some financial analysis done. He discovered

　　that they had actually lost money on animation in the past decade and had

　　produced little that helped ancillary products. At his first meeting as the new

　　CEO, he presented the analysis to the board, whose members expressed some anger

　　that they had never been told this. “As animation goes, so goes our company,” he

　　told the board. “A hit animated film is a big wave, and the ripples go down to

　　every part of our business—from characters in a parade, to music, to parks, to

　　video games, TV, Internet, consumer products. If I don’t have wave makers, the

　　company is not going to succeed.” He presented them with some choices. They

　　could stick with the current animation management, which he didn’t think would

　　work. They could get rid of management and find someone else, but he said he

　　didn’t know who that would be. Or they could buy Pixar. “The problem is, I don’t

　　know if it’s for sale, and if it is, it’s going to be a huge amount of money,”

　　he said. The board authorized him to explore a deal.

　　Iger went about it in an unusual way. When he first talked to Jobs, he admitted

　　the revelation that had occurred to him in Hong Kong and how it convinced him

　　that Disney badly needed Pixar. “That’s why I just loved Bob Iger,” recalled

　　Jobs. “He just blurted it out. Now that’s the dumbest thing you can do as you

　　enter a negotiation, at least according to the traditional rule book. He just

　　put his cards out on the table and said, ‘We’re screwed.’ I immediately liked

　　the guy, because that’s how I worked too. Let’s just immediately put all the

　　cards on the table and see where they fall.” (In fact that was not usually

　　Jobs’s mode of operation. He often began negotiations by proclaiming that the

　　other company’s products or services sucked.)

　　Jobs and Iger took a lot of walks—around the Apple campus, in Palo Alto, at the

　　Allen and Co. retreat in Sun Valley. At first they came up with a plan for a new

　　distribution deal: Pixar would get back all the rights to the movies and

　　characters it had already produced in return for Disney’s getting an equity

　　stake in Pixar, and it would pay Disney a simple fee to distribute its future

　　movies. But Iger worried that such a deal would simply set Pixar up as a

　　competitor to Disney, which would be bad even if Disney had an equity stake in

　　it. So he began to hint that maybe they should actually do something bigger. “I

　　want you to know that I am really thinking out of the box on this,” he said.

　　Jobs seemed to encourage the advances. “It wasn’t too long before it was clear

　　to both of us that this discussion might lead to an acquisition discussion,”

　　Jobs recalled.

　　But first Jobs needed the blessing of John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, so he asked

　　them to come over to his house. He got right to the point. “We need to get to

　　know Bob Iger,” he told them. “We may want to throw in with him and to help him

　　remake Disney. He’s a great guy.” They were skeptical at first. “He could tell

　　we were pretty shocked,” Lasseter recalled.

　　“If you guys don’t want to do it, that’s fine, but I want you to get to know

　　Iger before you decide,” Jobs continued. “I was feeling the same as you, but

　　I’ve really grown to like the guy.” He explained how easy it had been to make

　　the deal to put ABC shows on the iPod, and added, “It’s night and day different

　　from Eisner’s Disney. He’s straightforward, and there’s no drama with him.”

　　Lasseter remembers that he and Catmull just sat there with their mouths slightly

　　open.

　　Iger went to work. He flew from Los Angeles to Lasseter’s house for dinner, and

　　stayed up well past midnight talking. He also took Catmull out to dinner, and

　　then he visited Pixar Studios, alone, with no entourage and without Jobs. “I

　　went out and met all the directors one on one, and they each pitched me their

　　movie,” he said. Lasseter was proud of how much his team impressed Iger, which

　　of course made him warm up to Iger. “I never had more pride in Pixar than that

　　day,” he said. “All the teams and pitches were amazing, and Bob was blown away.”

　　Indeed after seeing what was coming up over the next few years—Cars,

　　Ratatouille, WALL-E—Iger told his chief financial officer at Disney, “Oh my God,

　　they’ve got great stuff. We’ve got to get this deal done. It’s the future of the

　　company.” He admitted that he had no faith in the movies that Disney animation

　　had in the works.

　　The deal they proposed was that Disney would purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion in

　　stock. Jobs would thus become Disney’s largest shareholder, with approximately

　　7% of the company’s stock compared to 1.7% owned by Eisner and 1% by Roy Disney.

　　Disney Animation would be put under Pixar, with Lasseter and Catmull running the

　　combined unit. Pixar would retain its independent identity, its studio and

　　headquarters would remain in Emeryville, and it would even keep its own email

　　addresses.

　　Iger asked Jobs to bring Lasseter and Catmull to a secret meeting of the Disney

　　board in Century City, Los Angeles, on a Sunday morning. The goal was to make

　　them feel comfortable with what would be a radical and expensive deal. As they

　　prepared to take the elevator from the parking garage, Lasseter said to Jobs,

　　“If I start getting too excited or go on too long, just touch my leg.” Jobs

　　ended up having to do it once, but otherwise Lasseter made the perfect sales

　　pitch. “I talked about how we make films, what our philosophies are, the honesty

　　we have with each other, and how we nurture the creative talent,” he recalled.

　　The board asked a lot of questions, and Jobs let Lasseter answer most. But Jobs

　　did talk about how exciting it was to connect art with technology. “That’s what

　　our culture is all about, just like at Apple,” he said.

　　Before the Disney board got a chance to approve the merger, however, Michael

　　Eisner arose from the departed to try to derail it. He called Iger and said it

　　was far too expensive. “You can fix animation yourself,” Eisner told him. “How?”

　　asked Iger. “I know you can,” said Eisner. Iger got a bit annoyed. “Michael, how

　　come you say I can fix it, when you couldn’t fix it yourself?” he asked.

　　Eisner said he wanted to come to a board meeting, even though he was no longer a

　　member or an officer, and speak against the acquisition. Iger resisted, but

　　Eisner called Warren Buffett, a big shareholder, and George Mitchell, who was

　　the lead director. The former senator convinced Iger to let Eisner have his say.

　　“I told the board that they didn’t need to buy Pixar because they already owned

　　85% of the movies Pixar had already made,” Eisner recounted. He was referring to

　　the fact that for the movies already made, Disney was getting that percentage of

　　the gross, plus it had the rights to make all the sequels and exploit the

　　characters. “I made a presentation that said, here’s the 15% of Pixar that

　　Disney does not already own. So that’s what you’re getting. The rest is a bet on

　　future Pixar films.” Eisner admitted that Pixar had been enjoying a good run,

　　but he said it could not continue. “I showed the history of producers and

　　directors who had X number of hits in a row and then failed. It happened to

　　Spielberg, Walt Disney, all of them.” To make the deal worth it, he calculated,

　　each new Pixar movie would have to gross $1.3 billion. “It drove Steve crazy

　　that I knew that,” Eisner later said.

　　After he left the room, Iger refuted his argument point by point. “Let me tell

　　you what was wrong with that presentation,” he began. When the board had

　　finished hearing them both, it approved the deal Iger proposed.

　　Iger flew up to Emeryville to meet Jobs and jointly announce the deal to the

　　Pixar workers. But before they did, Jobs sat down alone with Lasseter and

　　Catmull. “If either of you have doubts,” he said, “I will just tell them no

　　thanks and blow off this deal.” He wasn’t totally sincere. It would have been

　　almost impossible to do so at that point. But it was a welcome gesture. “I’m

　　good,” said Lasseter. “Let’s do it.” Catmull agreed. They all hugged, and Jobs

　　wept.

　　Everyone then gathered in the atrium. “Disney is buying Pixar,” Jobs announced.

　　There were a few tears, but as he explained the deal, the staffers began to

　　realize that in some ways it was a reverse acquisition. Catmull would be the

　　head of Disney animation, Lasseter its chief creative officer. By the end they

　　were cheering. Iger had been standing on the side, and Jobs invited him to

　　center stage. As he talked about the special culture of Pixar and how badly

　　Disney needed to nurture it and learn from it, the crowd broke into applause.

　　“My goal has always been not only to make great products, but to build great

　　companies,” Jobs later said. “Walt Disney did that. And the way we did the

　　merger, we kept Pixar as a great company and helped Disney remain one as well.”UnknownTWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MACS

　　Setting Apple Apart

　　With the iBook, 1999

　　Clams, Ice Cubes, and Sunflowers

　　Ever since the introduction of the iMac in 1998, Jobs and Jony Ive had made

　　beguiling design a signature of Apple’s computers. There was a consumer laptop

　　that looked like a tangerine clam, and a professional desktop computer that

　　suggested a Zen ice cube. Like bell-bottoms that turn up in the back of a

　　closet, some of these models looked better at the time than they do in

　　retrospect, and they show a love of design that was, on occasion, a bit too

　　exuberant. But they set Apple apart and provided the publicity bursts it needed

　　to survive in a Windows world.

　　The Power Mac G4 Cube, released in 2000, was so alluring that one ended up on

　　display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. An eight-inch perfect cube the size

　　of a Kleenex box, it was the pure expression of Jobs’s aesthetic. The

　　sophistication came from minimalism. No buttons marred the surface. There was no

　　CD tray, just a subtle slot. And as with the original Macintosh, there was no

　　fan. Pure Zen. “When you see something that’s so thoughtful on the outside you

　　say, ‘Oh, wow, it must be really thoughtful on the inside,’” he told Newsweek.

　　“We make progress by eliminating things, by removing the superfluous.”

　　The G4 Cube was almost ostentatious in its lack of ostentation, and it was

　　powerful. But it was not a success. It had been designed as a high-end desktop,

　　but Jobs wanted to turn it, as he did almost every product, into something that

　　could be mass-marketed to consumers. The Cube ended up not serving either market

　　well. Workaday professionals weren’t seeking a jewel-like sculpture for their

　　desks, and mass-market consumers were not eager to spend twice what they’d pay

　　for a plain vanilla desktop. Jobs predicted that Apple would sell 200,000 Cubes

　　per quarter. In its first quarter it sold half that. The next quarter it sold

　　fewer than thirty thousand units. Jobs later admitted that he had overdesigned

　　and overpriced the Cube, just as he had the NeXT computer. But gradually he was

　　learning his lesson. In building devices like the iPod, he would control costs

　　and make the trade-offs necessary to get them launched on time and on budget.

　　Partly because of the poor sales of the Cube, Apple produced disappointing

　　revenue numbers in September 2000. That was just when the tech bubble was

　　deflating and Apple’s education market was declining. The company’s stock price,

　　which had been above $60, fell 50% in one day, and by early December it was

　　below $15.

　　None of this deterred Jobs from continuing to push for distinctive, even

　　distracting, new design. When flat-screen displays became commercially viable,

　　he decided it was time to replace the iMac, the translucent consumer desktop

　　computer that looked as if it were from a Jetsons cartoon. Ive came up with a

　　model that was somewhat conventional, with the guts of the computer attached to

　　the back of the flat screen. Jobs didn’t like it. As he often did, both at Pixar

　　and at Apple, he slammed on the brakes to rethink things. There was something

　　about the design that lacked purity, he felt. “Why have this flat display if

　　you’re going to glom all this stuff on its back?” he asked Ive. “We should let

　　each element be true to itself.”

　　Jobs went home early that day to mull over the problem, then called Ive to come

　　by. They wandered into the garden, which Jobs’s wife had planted with a

　　profusion of sunflowers. “Every year I do something wild with the garden, and

　　that time it involved masses of sunflowers, with a sunflower house for the

　　kids,” she recalled. “Jony and Steve were riffing on their design problem, then

　　Jony asked, ‘What if the screen was separated from the base like a sunflower?’

　　He got excited and started sketching.” Ive liked his designs to suggest a

　　narrative, and he realized that a sunflower shape would convey that the flat

　　screen was so fluid and responsive that it could reach for the sun.

　　In Ive’s new design, the Mac’s screen was attached to a movable chrome neck, so

　　that it looked not only like a sunflower but also like a cheeky Luxo lamp.

　　Indeed it evoked the playful personality of Luxo Jr. in the first short film

　　that John Lasseter had made at Pixar. Apple took out many patents for the

　　design, most crediting Ive, but on one of them, for “a computer system having a

　　movable assembly attached to a flat panel display,” Jobs listed himself as the

　　primary inventor.

　　In hindsight, some of Apple’s Macintosh designs may seem a bit too cute. But

　　other computer makers were at the other extreme. It was an industry that you’d

　　expect to be innovative, but instead it was dominated by cheaply designed

　　generic boxes. After a few ill-conceived stabs at painting on blue colors and

　　trying new shapes, companies such as Dell, Compaq, and HP commoditized computers

　　by outsourcing manufacturing and competing on price. With its spunky designs and

　　its pathbreaking applications like iTunes and iMovie, Apple was about the only

　　place innovating.

　　Intel Inside

　　Apple’s innovations were more than skin-deep. Since 1994 it had been using a

　　microprocessor, called the PowerPC, that was made by a partnership of IBM and

　　Motorola. For a few years it was faster than Intel’s chips, an advantage that

　　Apple touted in humorous commercials. By the time of Jobs’s return, however,

　　Motorola had fallen behind in producing new versions of the chip. This provoked

　　a fight between Jobs and Motorola’s CEO Chris Galvin. When Jobs decided to stop

　　licensing the Macintosh operating system to clone makers, right after his return

　　to Apple in 1997, he suggested to Galvin that he might consider making an

　　exception for Motorola’s clone, the StarMax Mac, but only if Motorola sped up

　　development of new PowerPC chips for laptops. The call got heated. Jobs offered

　　his opinion that Motorola chips sucked. Galvin, who also had a temper, pushed

　　back. Jobs hung up on him. The Motorola StarMax was canceled, and Jobs secretly

　　began planning to move Apple off the Motorola-IBM PowerPC chip and to adopt,

　　instead, Intel’s. This would not be a simple task. It was akin to writing a new

　　operating system.

　　Jobs did not cede any real power to his board, but he did use its meetings to

　　kick around ideas and think through strategies in confidence, while he stood at

　　a whiteboard and led freewheeling discussions. For eighteen months the directors

　　discussed whether to move to an Intel architecture. “We debated it, we asked a

　　lot of questions, and finally we all decided it needed to be done,” board member

　　Art Levinson recalled.

　　Paul Otellini, who was then president and later became CEO of Intel, began

　　huddling with Jobs. They had gotten to know each other when Jobs was struggling

　　to keep NeXT alive and, as Otellini later put it, “his arrogance had been

　　temporarily tempered.” Otellini has a calm and wry take on people, and he was

　　amused rather than put off when he discovered, upon dealing with Jobs at Apple

　　in the early 2000s, “that his juices were going again, and he wasn’t nearly as

　　humble anymore.” Intel had deals with other computer makers, and Jobs wanted a

　　better price than they had. “We had to find creative ways to bridge the

　　numbers,” said Otellini. Most of the negotiating was done, as Jobs preferred, on

　　long walks, sometimes on the trails up to the radio telescope known as the Dish

　　above the Stanford campus. Jobs would start the walk by telling a story and

　　explaining how he saw the history of computers evolving. By the end he would be

　　haggling over price.

　　“Intel had a reputation for being a tough partner, coming out of the days when

　　it was run by Andy Grove and Craig Barrett,” Otellini said. “I wanted to show

　　that Intel was a company you could work with.” So a crack team from Intel worked

　　with Apple, and they were able to beat the conversion deadline by six months.

　　Jobs invited Otellini to Apple’s Top 100 management retreat, where he donned one

　　of the famous Intel lab coats that looked like a bunny suit and gave Jobs a big

　　hug. At the public announcement in 2005, the usually reserved Otellini repeated

　　the act. “Apple and Intel, together at last,” flashed on the big screen.

　　Bill Gates was amazed. Designing crazy-colored cases did not impress him, but a

　　secret program to switch the CPU in a computer, completed seamlessly and on

　　time, was a feat he truly admired. “If you’d said, ‘Okay, we’re going to change

　　our microprocessor chip, and we’re not going to lose a beat,’ that sounds

　　impossible,” he told me years later, when I asked him about Jobs’s

　　accomplishments. “They basically did that.”

　　Options

　　Among Jobs’s quirks was his attitude toward money. When he returned to Apple in

　　1997, he portrayed himself as a person working for $1 a year, doing it for the

　　benefit of the company rather than himself. Nevertheless he embraced the idea of

　　option megagrants—granting huge bundles of options to buy Apple stock at a

　　preset price—that were not subject to the usual good compensation practices of

　　board committee reviews and performance criteria.

　　When he dropped the “interim” in his title and officially became CEO, he was

　　offered (in addition to the airplane) a megagrant by Ed Woolard and the board at

　　the beginning of 2000; defying the image he cultivated of not being interested

　　in money, he had stunned Woolard by asking for even more options than the board

　　had proposed. But soon after he got them, it turned out that it was for naught.

　　Apple stock cratered in September 2000—due to disappointing sales of the Cube

　　plus the bursting of the Internet bubble—which made the options worthless.

　　Making matters worse was a June 2001 cover story in Fortune about

　　overcompensated CEOs, “The Great CEO Pay Heist.” A mug of Jobs, smiling smugly,

　　filled the cover. Even though his options were underwater at the time, the

　　technical method of valuing them when granted (known as a Black-Scholes

　　valuation) set their worth at $872 million. Fortune proclaimed it “by far” the

　　largest compensation package ever granted a CEO. It was the worst of all worlds:

　　Jobs had almost no money that he could put in his pocket for his four years of

　　hard and successful turnaround work at Apple, yet he had become the poster child

　　of greedy CEOs, making him look hypocritical and undermining his self-image. He

　　wrote a scathing letter to the editor, declaring that his options actually “are

　　worth zero” and offering to sell them to Fortune for half of the supposed $872

　　million the magazine had reported.

　　In the meantime Jobs wanted the board to give him another big grant of options,

　　since his old ones seemed worthless. He insisted, both to the board and probably

　　to himself, that it was more about getting proper recognition than getting rich.

　　“It wasn’t so much about the money,” he later said in a deposition in an SEC

　　lawsuit over the options. “Everybody likes to be recognized by his peers. . . .

　　I felt that the board wasn’t really doing the same with me.” He felt that the

　　board should have come to him offering a new grant, without his having to

　　suggest it. “I thought I was doing a pretty good job. It would have made me feel

　　better at the time.”

　　His handpicked board in fact doted on him. So they decided to give him another

　　huge grant in August 2001, when the stock price was just under $18. The problem

　　was that he worried about his image, especially after the Fortune article. He

　　did not want to accept the new grant unless the board canceled his old options

　　at the same time. But to do so would have adverse accounting implications,

　　because it would be effectively repricing the old options. That would require

　　taking a charge against current earnings. The only way to avoid this “variable

　　accounting” problem was to cancel his old options at least six months after his

　　new options were granted. In addition, Jobs started haggling with the board over

　　how quickly the new options would vest.

　　It was not until mid-December 2001 that Jobs finally agreed to take the new

　　options and, braving the optics, wait six months before his old ones were

　　canceled. But by then the stock price (adjusting for a split) had gone up $3, to

　　about $21. If the strike price of the new options was set at that new level,

　　each would have thus been $3 less valuable. So Apple’s legal counsel, Nancy

　　Heinen, looked over the recent stock prices and helped to choose an October

　　date, when the stock was $18.30. She also approved a set of minutes that

　　purported to show that the board had approved the grant on that date. The

　　backdating was potentially worth $20 million to Jobs.

　　Once again Jobs would end up suffering bad publicity without making a penny.

　　Apple’s stock price kept dropping, and by March 2003 even the new options were

　　so low that Jobs traded in all of them for an outright grant of $75 million

　　worth of shares, which amounted to about $8.3 million for each year he had

　　worked since coming back in 1997 through the end of the vesting in 2006.

　　None of this would have mattered much if the Wall Street Journal had not run a

　　powerful series in 2006 about backdated stock options. Apple wasn’t mentioned,

　　but its board appointed a committee of three members—Al Gore, Eric Schmidt of

　　Google, and Jerry York, formerly of IBM and Chrysler—to investigate its own

　　practices. “We decided at the outset that if Steve was at fault we would let the

　　chips fall where they may,” Gore recalled. The committee uncovered some

　　irregularities with Jobs’s grants and those of other top officers, and it

　　immediately turned the findings over to the SEC. Jobs was aware of the

　　backdating, the report said, but he ended up not benefiting financially. (A

　　board committee at Disney also found that similar backdating had occurred at

　　Pixar when Jobs was in charge.)

　　The laws governing such backdating practices were murky, especially since no one

　　at Apple ended up benefiting from the dubiously dated grants. The SEC took eight

　　months to do its own investigation, and in April 2007 it announced that it would

　　not bring action against Apple “based in part on its swift, extensive, and

　　extraordinary cooperation in the Commission’s investigation [and its] prompt

　　self-reporting.” Although the SEC found that Jobs had been aware of the

　　backdating, it cleared him of any misconduct because he “was unaware of the

　　accounting implications.”

　　The SEC did file complaints against Apple’s former chief financial officer Fred

　　Anderson, who was on the board, and general counsel Nancy Heinen. Anderson, a

　　retired Air Force captain with a square jaw and deep integrity, had been a wise

　　and calming influence at Apple, where he was known for his ability to control

　　Jobs’s tantrums. He was cited by the SEC only for “negligence” regarding the

　　paperwork for one set of the grants (not the ones that went to Jobs), and the

　　SEC allowed him to continue to serve on corporate boards. Nevertheless he ended

　　up resigning from the Apple board.

　　Anderson thought he had been made a scapegoat. When he settled with the SEC, his

　　lawyer issued a statement that cast some of the blame on Jobs. It said that

　　Anderson had “cautioned Mr. Jobs that the executive team grant would have to be

　　priced on the date of the actual board agreement or there could be an accounting

　　charge,” and that Jobs replied “that the board had given its prior approval.”

　　Heinen, who initially fought the charges against her, ended up settling and

　　paying a $2.2 million fine, without admitting or denying any wrongdoing.

　　Likewise the company itself settled a shareholders’ lawsuit by agreeing to pay

　　$14 million in damages.

　　“Rarely have so many avoidable problems been created by one man’s obsession with

　　his own image,” Joe Nocera wrote in the New York Times. “Then again, this is

　　Steve Jobs we’re talking about.” Contemptuous of rules and regulations, he

　　created a climate that made it hard for someone like Heinen to buck his wishes.

　　At times, great creativity occurred. But people around him could pay a price. On

　　compensation issues in particular, the difficulty of defying his whims drove

　　some good people to make some bad mistakes.

　　The compensation issue in some ways echoed Jobs’s parking quirk. He refused such

　　trappings as having a “Reserved for CEO” spot, but he assumed for himself the

　　right to park in the handicapped spaces. He wanted to be seen (both by himself

　　and by others) as someone willing to work for $1 a year, but he also wanted to

　　have huge stock grants bestowed upon him. Jangling inside him were the

　　contradictions of a counterculture rebel turned business entrepreneur, someone

　　who wanted to believe that he had turned on and tuned in without having sold out

　　and cashed in.UnknownROUND ONE

　　Memento Mori

　　At fifty (in center), with Eve and Laurene (behind cake), Eddy Cue (by window),

　　John Lasseter (with camera), and Lee Clow (with beard)

　　Cancer

　　Jobs would later speculate that his cancer was caused by the grueling year that

　　he spent, starting in 1997, running both Apple and Pixar. As he drove back and

　　forth, he had developed kidney stones and other ailments, and he would come home

　　so exhausted that he could barely speak. “That’s probably when this cancer

　　started growing, because my immune system was pretty weak at that time,” he

　　said.

　　There is no evidence that exhaustion or a weak immune system causes cancer.

　　However, his kidney problems did indirectly lead to the detection of his cancer.

　　In October 2003 he happened to run into the urologist who had treated him, and

　　she asked him to get a CAT scan of his kidneys and ureter. It had been five

　　years since his last scan. The new scan revealed nothing wrong with his kidneys,

　　but it did show a shadow on his pancreas, so she asked him to schedule a

　　pancreatic study. He didn’t. As usual, he was good at willfully ignoring inputs

　　that he did not want to process. But she persisted. “Steve, this is really

　　important,” she said a few days later. “You need to do this.”

　　Her tone of voice was urgent enough that he complied. He went in early one

　　morning, and after studying the scan, the doctors met with him to deliver the

　　bad news that it was a tumor. One of them even suggested that he should make

　　sure his affairs were in order, a polite way of saying that he might have only

　　months to live. That evening they performed a biopsy by sticking an endoscope

　　down his throat and into his intestines so they could put a needle into his

　　pancreas and get a few cells from the tumor. Powell remembers her husband’s

　　doctors tearing up with joy. It turned out to be an islet cell or pancreatic

　　neuroendocrine tumor, which is rare but slower growing and thus more likely to

　　be treated successfully. He was lucky that it was detected so early—as the

　　by-product of a routine kidney screening—and thus could be surgically removed

　　before it had definitely spread.

　　One of his first calls was to Larry Brilliant, whom he first met at the ashram

　　in India. “Do you still believe in God?” Jobs asked him. Brilliant said that he

　　did, and they discussed the many paths to God that had been taught by the Hindu

　　guru Neem Karoli Baba. Then Brilliant asked Jobs what was wrong. “I have

　　cancer,” Jobs replied.

　　Art Levinson, who was on Apple’s board, was chairing the board meeting of his

　　own company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs’s name appeared on the

　　screen. As soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the

　　news of the tumor. He had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made

　　cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who

　　had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called him that Sunday, and he drove

　　right over to Jobs’s house and stayed for two hours.

　　To the horror of his friends and wife, Jobs decided not to have surgery to

　　remove the tumor, which was the only accepted medical approach. “I really didn’t

　　want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would

　　work,” he told me years later with a hint of regret. Specifically, he kept to a

　　strict vegan diet, with large quantities of fresh carrot and fruit juices. To

　　that regimen he added acupuncture, a variety of herbal remedies, and

　　occasionally a few other treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting

　　people around the country, including a psychic. For a while he was under the

　　sway of a doctor who operated a natural healing clinic in southern California

　　that stressed the use of organic herbs, juice fasts, frequent bowel cleansings,

　　hydrotherapy, and the expression of all negative feelings.

　　“The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” Powell

　　recalled. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however. “The

　　body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued. His friends repeatedly urged him

　　to have surgery and chemotherapy. “Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure

　　himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy,”

　　Grove recalled. Levinson said that he “pleaded every day” with Jobs and found it

　　“enormously frustrating that I just couldn’t connect with him.” The fights

　　almost ruined their friendship. “That’s not how cancer works,” Levinson insisted

　　when Jobs discussed his diet treatments. “You cannot solve this without surgery

　　and blasting it with toxic chemicals.” Even the diet doctor Dean Ornish, a

　　pioneer in alternative and nutritional methods of treating diseases, took a long

　　walk with Jobs and insisted that sometimes traditional methods were the right

　　option. “You really need surgery,” Ornish told him.

　　Jobs’s obstinacy lasted for nine months after his October 2003 diagnosis. Part

　　of it was the product of the dark side of his reality distortion field. “I think

　　Steve has such a strong desire for the world to be a certain way that he wills

　　it to be that way,” Levinson speculated. “Sometimes it doesn’t work. Reality is

　　unforgiving.” The flip side of his wondrous ability to focus was his fearsome

　　willingness to filter out things he did not wish to deal with. This led to many

　　of his great breakthroughs, but it could also backfire. “He has that ability to

　　ignore stuff he doesn’t want to confront,” Powell explained. “It’s just the way

　　he’s wired.” Whether it involved personal topics relating to his family and

　　marriage, or professional issues relating to engineering or business challenges,

　　or health and cancer issues, Jobs sometimes simply didn’t engage.

　　In the past he had been rewarded for what his wife called his “magical

　　thinking”—his assumption that he could will things to be as he wanted. But

　　cancer does not work that way. Powell enlisted everyone close to him, including

　　his sister Mona Simpson, to try to bring him around. In July 2004 a CAT scan

　　showed that the tumor had grown and possibly spread. It forced him to face

　　reality.

　　Jobs underwent surgery on Saturday, July 31, 2004, at Stanford University

　　Medical Center. He did not have a full “Whipple procedure,” which removes a

　　large part of the stomach and intestine as well as the pancreas. The doctors

　　considered it, but decided instead on a less radical approach, a modified

　　Whipple that removed only part of the pancreas.

　　Jobs sent employees an email the next day, using his PowerBook hooked up to an

　　AirPort Express in his hospital room, announcing his surgery. He assured them

　　that the type of pancreatic cancer he had “represents about 1% of the total

　　cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical

　　removal if diagnosed in time (mine was).” He said he would not require

　　chemotherapy or radiation treatment, and he planned to return to work in

　　September. “While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day

　　to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of

　　you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.”

　　One side effect of the operation would become a problem for Jobs because of his

　　obsessive diets and the weird routines of purging and fasting that he had

　　practiced since he was a teenager. Because the pancreas provides the enzymes

　　that allow the stomach to digest food and absorb nutrients, removing part of the

　　organ makes it hard to get enough protein. Patients are advised to make sure

　　that they eat frequent meals and maintain a nutritious diet, with a wide variety

　　of meat and fish proteins as well as full-fat milk products. Jobs had never done

　　this, and he never would.

　　He stayed in the hospital for two weeks and then struggled to regain his

　　strength. “I remember coming back and sitting in that rocking chair,” he told

　　me, pointing to one in his living room. “I didn’t have the energy to walk. It

　　took me a week before I could walk around the block. I pushed myself to walk to

　　the gardens a few blocks away, then further, and within six months I had my

　　energy almost back.”

　　Unfortunately the cancer had spread. During the operation the doctors found

　　three liver metastases. Had they operated nine months earlier, they might have

　　caught it before it spread, though they would never know for sure. Jobs began

　　chemotherapy treatments, which further complicated his eating challenges.

　　The Stanford Commencement

　　Jobs kept his continuing battle with the cancer secret—he told everyone that he

　　had been “cured”—just as he had kept quiet about his diagnosis in October 2003.

　　Such secrecy was not surprising; it was part of his nature. What was more

　　surprising was his decision to speak very personally and publicly about his

　　cancer diagnosis. Although he rarely gave speeches other than his staged product

　　demonstrations, he accepted Stanford’s invitation to give its June 2005

　　commencement address. He was in a reflective mood after his health scare and

　　turning fifty.

　　For help with the speech, he called the brilliant scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin (A

　　Few Good Men, The West Wing). Jobs sent him some thoughts. “That was in

　　February, and I heard nothing, so I ping him again in April, and he says, ‘Oh,

　　yeah,’ and I send him a few more thoughts,” Jobs recounted. “I finally get him

　　on the phone, and he keeps saying ‘Yeah,’ but finally it’s the beginning of

　　June, and he never sent me anything.”

　　Jobs got panicky. He had always written his own presentations, but he had never

　　done a commencement address. One night he sat down and wrote the speech himself,

　　with no help other than bouncing ideas off his wife. As a result, it turned out

　　to be a very intimate and simple talk, with the unadorned and personal feel of a

　　perfect Steve Jobs product.

　　Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a

　　story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story. And that was

　　the approach Jobs chose. “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,”

　　he began. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”

　　The first was about dropping out of Reed College. “I could stop taking the

　　required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that

　　looked far more interesting.” The second was about how getting fired from Apple

　　turned out to be good for him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced

　　by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” The

　　students were unusually attentive, despite a plane circling overhead with a

　　banner that exhorted “recycle all e-waste,” and it was his third tale that

　　enthralled them. It was about being diagnosed with cancer and the awareness it

　　brought:

　　Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever

　　encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost

　　everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or

　　failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is

　　truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know

　　to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already

　　naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

　　The artful minimalism of the speech gave it simplicity, purity, and charm.

　　Search where you will, from anthologies to YouTube, and you won’t find a better

　　commencement address. Others may have been more important, such as George

　　Marshall’s at Harvard in 1947 announcing a plan to rebuild Europe, but none has

　　had more grace.

　　A Lion at Fifty

　　For his thirtieth and fortieth birthdays, Jobs had celebrated with the stars of

　　Silicon Valley and other assorted celebrities. But when he turned fifty in 2005,

　　after coming back from his cancer surgery, the surprise party that his wife

　　arranged featured mainly his closest friends and professional colleagues. It was

　　at the comfortable San Francisco home of some friends, and the great chef Alice

　　Waters prepared salmon from Scotland along with couscous and a variety of

　　garden-raised vegetables. “It was beautifully warm and intimate, with everyone

　　and the kids all able to sit in one room,” Waters recalled. The entertainment

　　was comedy improvisation done by the cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway? Jobs’s

　　close friend Mike Slade was there, along with colleagues from Apple and Pixar,

　　including Lasseter, Cook, Schiller, Clow, Rubinstein, and Tevanian.

　　Cook had done a good job running the company during Jobs’s absence. He kept

　　Apple’s temperamental actors performing well, and he avoided stepping into the

　　limelight. Jobs liked strong personalities, up to a point, but he had never

　　truly empowered a deputy or shared the stage. It was hard to be his understudy.

　　You were damned if you shone, and damned if you didn’t. Cook had managed to

　　navigate those shoals. He was calm and decisive when in command, but he didn’t

　　seek any notice or acclaim for himself. “Some people resent the fact that Steve

　　gets credit for everything, but I’ve never given a rat’s ass about that,” said

　　Cook. “Frankly speaking, I’d prefer my name never be in the paper.”

　　When Jobs returned from his medical leave, Cook resumed his role as the person

　　who kept the moving parts at Apple tightly meshed and remained unfazed by Jobs’s

　　tantrums. “What I learned about Steve was that people mistook some of his

　　comments as ranting or negativism, but it was really just the way he showed

　　passion. So that’s how I processed it, and I never took issues personally.” In

　　many ways he was Jobs’s mirror image: unflappable, steady in his moods, and (as

　　the thesaurus in the NeXT would have noted) saturnine rather than mercurial.

　　“I’m a good negotiator, but he’s probably better than me because he’s a cool

　　customer,” Jobs later said. After adding a bit more praise, he quietly added a

　　reservation, one that was serious but rarely spoken: “But Tim’s not a product

　　person, per se.”

　　In the fall of 2005, after returning from his medical leave, Jobs tapped Cook to

　　become Apple’s chief operating officer. They were flying together to Japan. Jobs

　　didn’t really ask Cook; he simply turned to him and said, “I’ve decided to make

　　you COO.”

　　Around that time, Jobs’s old friends Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian, the

　　hardware and software lieutenants who had been recruited during the 1997

　　restoration, decided to leave. In Tevanian’s case, he had made a lot of money

　　and was ready to quit working. “Avie is a brilliant guy and a nice guy, much

　　more grounded than Ruby and doesn’t carry the big ego,” said Jobs. “It was a

　　huge loss for us when Avie left. He’s a one-of-a-kind person—a genius.”

　　Rubinstein’s case was a little more contentious. He was upset by Cook’s

　　ascendency and frazzled after working for nine years under Jobs. Their shouting

　　matches became more frequent. There was also a substantive issue: Rubinstein was

　　repeatedly clashing with Jony Ive, who used to work for him and now reported

　　directly to Jobs. Ive was always pushing the envelope with designs that dazzled

　　but were difficult to engineer. It was Rubinstein’s job to get the hardware

　　built in a practical way, so he often balked. He was by nature cautious. “In the

　　end, Ruby’s from HP,” said Jobs. “And he never delved deep, he wasn’t

　　aggressive.”

　　There was, for example, the case of the screws that held the handles on the

　　Power Mac G4. Ive decided that they should have a certain polish and shape. But

　　Rubinstein thought that would be “astronomically” costly and delay the project

　　for weeks, so he vetoed the idea. His job was to deliver products, which meant

　　making trade-offs. Ive viewed that approach as inimical to innovation, so he

　　would go both above him to Jobs and also around him to the midlevel engineers.

　　“Ruby would say, ‘You can’t do this, it will delay,’ and I would say, ‘I think

　　we can,’” Ive recalled. “And I would know, because I had worked behind his back

　　with the product teams.” In this and other cases, Jobs came down on Ive’s side.

　　At times Ive and Rubinstein got into arguments that almost led to blows. Finally

　　Ive told Jobs, “It’s him or me.” Jobs chose Ive. By that point Rubinstein was

　　ready to leave. He and his wife had bought property in Mexico, and he wanted

　　time off to build a home there. He eventually went to work for Palm, which was

　　trying to match Apple’s iPhone. Jobs was so furious that Palm was hiring some of

　　his former employees that he complained to Bono, who was a cofounder of a

　　private equity group, led by the former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, that had bought

　　a controlling stake in Palm. Bono sent Jobs a note back saying, “You should

　　chill out about this. This is like the Beatles ringing up because Herman and the

　　Hermits have taken one of their road crew.” Jobs later admitted that he had

　　overreacted. “The fact that they completely failed salves that wound,” he said.

　　Jobs was able to build a new management team that was less contentious and a bit

　　more subdued. Its main players, in addition to Cook and Ive, were Scott Forstall

　　running iPhone software, Phil Schiller in charge of marketing, Bob Mansfield

　　doing Mac hardware, Eddy Cue handling Internet services, and Peter Oppenheimer

　　as the chief financial officer. Even though there was a surface sameness to his

　　top team—all were middle-aged white males—there was a range of styles. Ive was

　　emotional and expressive; Cook was as cool as steel. They all knew they were

　　expected to be deferential to Jobs while also pushing back on his ideas and

　　being willing to argue—a tricky balance to maintain, but each did it well. “I

　　realized very early that if you didn’t voice your opinion, he would mow you

　　down,” said Cook. “He takes contrary positions to create more discussion,

　　because it may lead to a better result. So if you don’t feel comfortable

　　disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”

　　The key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team

　　gathering, which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was

　　always on the future: What should each product do next? What new things should

　　be developed? Jobs used the meeting to enforce a sense of shared mission at

　　Apple. This served to centralize control, which made the company seem as tightly

　　integrated as a good Apple product, and prevented the struggles between

　　divisions that plagued decentralized companies.

　　Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland’s farm, his

　　job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that

　　became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to

　　let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a

　　thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three

　　priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is

　　going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and

　　say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”

　　In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning,

　　Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny,

　　who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case

　　studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch

　　to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top

　　executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple

　　style of decision making would be embedded in the culture.

　　In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend

　　has it that he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to

　　him, “Memento mori”: Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help

　　the hero keep things in perspective, instill some humility. Jobs’s memento mori

　　had been delivered by his doctors, but it did not instill humility. Instead he

　　roared back after his recovery with even more passion. The illness reminded him

　　that he had nothing to lose, so he should forge ahead full speed. “He came back

　　on a mission,” said Cook. “Even though he was now running a large company, he

　　kept making bold moves that I don’t think anybody else would have done.”

　　For a while there was some evidence, or at least hope, that he had tempered his

　　personal style, that facing cancer and turning fifty had caused him to be a bit

　　less brutish when he was upset. “Right after he came back from his operation, he

　　didn’t do the humiliation bit as much,” Tevanian recalled. “If he was

　　displeased, he might scream and get hopping mad and use expletives, but he

　　wouldn’t do it in a way that would totally destroy the person he was talking to.

　　It was just his way to get the person to do a better job.” Tevanian reflected

　　for a moment as he said this, then added a caveat: “Unless he thought someone

　　was really bad and had to go, which happened every once in a while.”

　　Eventually, however, the rough edges returned. Because most of his colleagues

　　were used to it by then and had learned to cope, what upset them most was when

　　his ire turned on strangers. “Once we went to a Whole Foods market to get a

　　smoothie,” Ive recalled. “And this older woman was making it, and he really got

　　on her about how she was doing it. Then later, he sympathized. ‘She’s an older

　　woman and doesn’t want to be doing this job.’ He didn’t connect the two. He was

　　being a purist in both cases.”

　　On a trip to London with Jobs, Ive had the thankless task of choosing the hotel.

　　He picked the Hempel, a tranquil five-star boutique hotel with a sophisticated

　　minimalism that he thought Jobs would love. But as soon as they checked in, he

　　braced himself, and sure enough his phone rang a minute later. “I hate my room,”

　　Jobs declared. “It’s a piece of shit, let’s go.” So Ive gathered his luggage and

　　went to the front desk, where Jobs bluntly told the shocked clerk what he

　　thought. Ive realized that most people, himself among them, tend not to be

　　direct when they feel something is shoddy because they want to be liked, “which

　　is actually a vain trait.” That was an overly kind explanation. In any case, it

　　was not a trait Jobs had.

　　Because Ive was so instinctively nice, he puzzled over why Jobs, whom he deeply

　　liked, behaved as he did. One evening, in a San Francisco bar, he leaned forward

　　with an earnest intensity and tried to analyze it:

　　He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that makes his

　　antisocial behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable. I can understand why

　　people who are thick-skinned and unfeeling can be rude, but not sensitive

　　people. I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, “But I don’t

　　stay mad.” He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about

　　something, and it doesn’t stay with him at all. But there are other times, I

　　think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is

　　to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do

　　that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him.

　　Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and

　　effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.

　　Every now and then a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to

　　settle down. Lee Clow was a master. “Steve, can I talk to you?” he would quietly

　　say when Jobs had belittled someone publicly. He would go into Jobs’s office and

　　explain how hard everyone was working. “When you humiliate them, it’s more

　　debilitating than stimulating,” he said in one such session. Jobs would

　　apologize and say he understood. But then he would lapse again. “It’s simply who

　　I am,” he would say.

　　One thing that did mellow was his attitude toward Bill Gates. Microsoft had kept

　　its end of the bargain it made in 1997, when it agreed to continue developing

　　great software for the Macintosh. Also, it was becoming less relevant as a

　　competitor, having failed thus far to replicate Apple’s digital hub strategy.

　　Gates and Jobs had very different approaches to products and innovation, but

　　their rivalry had produced in each a surprising self-awareness.

　　For their All Things Digital conference in May 2007, the Wall Street Journal

　　columnists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher worked to get them together for a

　　joint interview. Mossberg first invited Jobs, who didn’t go to many such

　　conferences, and was surprised when he said he would do it if Gates would. On

　　hearing that, Gates accepted as well.

　　Mossberg wanted the evening joint appearance to be a cordial discussion, not a

　　debate, but that seemed less likely when Jobs unleashed a swipe at Microsoft

　　during a solo interview earlier that day. Asked about the fact that Apple’s

　　iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, “It’s

　　like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”

　　So when it was time for Gates and Jobs to meet in the green room before their

　　joint session that evening, Mossberg was worried. Gates got there first, with

　　his aide Larry Cohen, who had briefed him about Jobs’s remark earlier that day.

　　When Jobs ambled in a few minutes later, he grabbed a bottle of water from the

　　ice bucket and sat down. After a moment or two of silence, Gates said, “So I

　　guess I’m the representative from hell.” He wasn’t smiling. Jobs paused, gave

　　him one of his impish grins, and handed him the ice water. Gates relaxed, and

　　the tension dissipated.

　　The result was a fascinating duet, in which each wunderkind of the digital age

　　spoke warily, and then warmly, about the other. Most memorably they gave candid

　　answers when the technology strategist Lise Buyer, who was in the audience,

　　asked what each had learned from observing the other. “Well, I’d give a lot to

　　have Steve’s taste,” Gates answered. There was a bit of nervous laughter; Jobs

　　had famously said, ten years earlier, that his problem with Microsoft was that

　　it had absolutely no taste. But Gates insisted he was serious. Jobs was a

　　“natural in terms of intuitive taste.” He recalled how he and Jobs used to sit

　　together reviewing the software that Microsoft was making for the Macintosh.

　　“I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that,

　　you know, is hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different

　　and I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow.”

　　Jobs stared at the floor. Later he told me that he was blown away by how honest

　　and gracious Gates had just been. Jobs was equally honest, though not quite as

　　gracious, when his turn came. He described the great divide between the Apple

　　theology of building end-to-end integrated products and Microsoft’s openness to

　　licensing its software to competing hardware makers. In the music market, the

　　integrated approach, as manifested in his iTunes-iPod package, was proving to be

　　the better, he noted, but Microsoft’s decoupled approach was faring better in

　　the personal computer market. One question he raised in an offhand way was:

　　Which approach might work better for mobile phones?

　　Then he went on to make an insightful point: This difference in design

　　philosophy, he said, led him and Apple to be less good at collaborating with

　　other companies. “Because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole

　　banana, we weren’t so good at partnering with people,” he said. “And I think if

　　Apple could have had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it

　　extremely well.”UnknownTHE iPHONE

　　Three Revolutionary Products in One

　　An iPod That Makes Calls

　　By 2005 iPod sales were skyrocketing. An astonishing twenty million were sold

　　that year, quadruple the number of the year before. The product was becoming

　　more important to the company’s bottom line, accounting for 45% of the revenue

　　that year, and it was also burnishing the hipness of the company’s image in a

　　way that drove sales of Macs.

　　That is why Jobs was worried. “He was always obsessing about what could mess us

　　up,” board member Art Levinson recalled. The conclusion he had come to: “The

　　device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.” As he explained to the board,

　　the digital camera market was being decimated now that phones were equipped with

　　cameras. The same could happen to the iPod, if phone manufacturers started to

　　build music players into them. “Everyone carries a phone, so that could render

　　the iPod unnecessary.”

　　His first strategy was to do something that he had admitted in front of Bill

　　Gates was not in his DNA: to partner with another company. He began talking to

　　Ed Zander, the new CEO of Motorola, about making a companion to Motorola’s

　　popular RAZR, which was a cell phone and digital camera, that would have an iPod

　　built in. Thus was born the ROKR. It ended up having neither the enticing

　　minimalism of an iPod nor the convenient slimness of a RAZR. Ugly, difficult to

　　load, and with an arbitrary hundred-song limit, it had all the hallmarks of a

　　product that had been negotiated by a committee, which was counter to the way

　　Jobs liked to work. Instead of hardware, software, and content all being

　　controlled by one company, they were cobbled together by Motorola, Apple, and

　　the wireless carrier Cingular. “You call this the phone of the future?” Wired

　　scoffed on its November 2005 cover.

　　Jobs was furious. “I’m sick of dealing with these stupid companies like

　　Motorola,” he told Tony Fadell and others at one of the iPod product review

　　meetings. “Let’s do it ourselves.” He had noticed something odd about the cell

　　phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.

　　“We would sit around talking about how much we hated our phones,” he recalled.

　　“They were way too complicated. They had features nobody could figure out,

　　including the address book. It was just Byzantine.” George Riley, an outside

　　lawyer for Apple, remembers sitting at meetings to go over legal issues, and

　　Jobs would get bored, grab Riley’s mobile phone, and start pointing out all the

　　ways it was “brain-dead.” So Jobs and his team became excited about the prospect

　　of building a phone that they would want to use. “That’s the best motivator of

　　all,” Jobs later said.

　　Another motivator was the potential market. More than 825 million mobile phones

　　were sold in 2005, to everyone from grammar schoolers to grandmothers. Since

　　most were junky, there was room for a premium and hip product, just as there had

　　been in the portable music-player market. At first he gave the project to the

　　Apple group that was making the AirPort wireless base station, on the theory

　　that it was a wireless product. But he soon realized that it was basically a

　　consumer device, like the iPod, so he reassigned it to Fadell and his teammates.

　　Their initial approach was to modify the iPod. They tried to use the trackwheel

　　as a way for a user to scroll through phone options and, without a keyboard, try

　　to enter numbers. It was not a natural fit. “We were having a lot of problems

　　using the wheel, especially in getting it to dial phone numbers,” Fadell

　　recalled. “It was cumbersome.” It was fine for scrolling through an address

　　book, but horrible at inputting anything. The team kept trying to convince

　　themselves that users would mainly be calling people who were already in their

　　address book, but they knew that it wouldn’t really work.

　　At that time there was a second project under way at Apple: a secret effort to

　　build a tablet computer. In 2005 these narratives intersected, and the ideas for

　　the tablet flowed into the planning for the phone. In other words, the idea for

　　the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone.

　　Multi-touch

　　One of the engineers developing a tablet PC at Microsoft was married to a friend

　　of Laurene and Steve Jobs, and for his fiftieth birthday he wanted to have a

　　dinner party that included them along with Bill and Melinda Gates. Jobs went, a

　　bit reluctantly. “Steve was actually quite friendly to me at the dinner,” Gates

　　recalled, but he “wasn’t particularly friendly” to the birthday guy.

　　Gates was annoyed that the guy kept revealing information about the tablet PC he

　　had developed for Microsoft. “He’s our employee and he’s revealing our

　　intellectual property,” Gates recounted. Jobs was also annoyed, and it had just

　　the consequence that Gates feared. As Jobs recalled:

　　This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the

　　world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and

　　Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all

　　wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner

　　was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that

　　I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

　　Jobs went into the office the next day, gathered his team, and said, “I want to

　　make a tablet, and it can’t have a keyboard or a stylus.” Users would be able to

　　type by touching the screen with their fingers. That meant the screen needed to

　　have a feature that became known as multi-touch, the ability to process multiple

　　inputs at the same time. “So could you guys come up with a multi-touch,

　　touch-sensitive display for me?” he asked. It took them about six months, but

　　they came up with a crude but workable prototype.

　　Jony Ive had a different memory of how multi-touch was developed. He said his

　　design team had already been working on a multi-touch input that was developed

　　for the trackpads of Apple’s MacBook Pro, and they were experimenting with ways

　　to transfer that capability to a computer screen. They used a projector to show

　　on a wall what it would look like. “This is going to change everything,” Ive

　　told his team. But he was careful not to show it to Jobs right away, especially

　　since his people were working on it in their spare time and he didn’t want to

　　quash their enthusiasm. “Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I don’t

　　show him stuff in front of other people,” Ive recalled. “He might say, ‘This is

　　shit,’ and snuff the idea. I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be

　　tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it

　　would be so sad, because I knew it was so important.”

　　Ive set up the demonstration in his conference room and showed it to Jobs

　　privately, knowing that he was less likely to make a snap judgment if there was

　　no audience. Fortunately he loved it. “This is the future,” he exulted.

　　It was in fact such a good idea that Jobs realized that it could solve the

　　problem they were having creating an interface for the proposed cell phone. That

　　project was far more important, so he put the tablet development on hold while

　　the multi-touch interface was adopted for a phone-size screen. “If it worked on

　　a phone,” he recalled, “I knew we could go back and use it on a tablet.”

　　Jobs called Fadell, Rubinstein, and Schiller to a secret meeting in the design

　　studio conference room, where Ive gave a demonstration of multi-touch. “Wow!”

　　said Fadell. Everyone liked it, but they were not sure that they would be able

　　to make it work on a mobile phone. They decided to proceed on two paths: P1 was

　　the code name for the phone being developed using an iPod trackwheel, and P2 was

　　the new alternative using a multi-touch screen.

　　A small company in Delaware called FingerWorks was already making a line of

　　multi-touch trackpads. Founded by two academics at the University of Delaware,

　　John Elias and Wayne Westerman, FingerWorks had developed some tablets with

　　multi-touch sensing capabilities and taken out patents on ways to translate

　　various finger gestures, such as pinches and swipes, into useful functions. In

　　early 2005 Apple quietly acquired the company, all of its patents, and the

　　services of its two founders. FingerWorks quit selling its products to others,

　　and it began filing its new patents in Apple’s name.

　　After six months of work on the trackwheel P1 and the multi-touch P2 phone

　　options, Jobs called his inner circle into his conference room to make a

　　decision. Fadell had been trying hard to develop the trackwheel model, but he

　　admitted they had not cracked the problem of figuring out a simple way to dial

　　calls. The multi-touch approach was riskier, because they were unsure whether

　　they could execute the engineering, but it was also more exciting and promising.

　　“We all know this is the one we want to do,” said Jobs, pointing to the

　　touchscreen. “So let’s make it work.” It was what he liked to call a

　　bet-the-company moment, high risk and high reward if it succeeded.

　　A couple of members of the team argued for having a keyboard as well, given the

　　popularity of the BlackBerry, but Jobs vetoed the idea. A physical keyboard

　　would take away space from the screen, and it would not be as flexible and

　　adaptable as a touchscreen keyboard. “A hardware keyboard seems like an easy

　　solution, but it’s constraining,” he said. “Think of all the innovations we’d be

　　able to adapt if we did the keyboard onscreen with software. Let’s bet on it,

　　and then we’ll find a way to make it work.” The result was a device that

　　displays a numerical pad when you want to dial a phone number, a typewriter

　　keyboard when you want to write, and whatever buttons you might need for each

　　particular activity. And then they all disappear when you’re watching a video.

　　By having software replace hardware, the interface became fluid and flexible.

　　Jobs spent part of every day for six months helping to refine the display. “It

　　was the most complex fun I’ve ever had,” he recalled. “It was like being the one

　　evolving the variations on ‘Sgt. Pepper.’” A lot of features that seem simple

　　now were the result of creative brainstorms. For example, the team worried about

　　how to prevent the device from playing music or making a call accidentally when

　　it was jangling in your pocket. Jobs was congenitally averse to having on-off

　　switches, which he deemed “inelegant.” The solution was “Swipe to Open,” the

　　simple and fun on-screen slider that activated the device when it had gone

　　dormant. Another breakthrough was the sensor that figured out when you put the

　　phone to your ear, so that your lobes didn’t accidentally activate some

　　function. And of course the icons came in his favorite shape, the primitive he

　　made Bill Atkinson design into the software of the first Macintosh: rounded

　　rectangles. In session after session, with Jobs immersed in every detail, the

　　team members figured out ways to simplify what other phones made complicated.

　　They added a big bar to guide you in putting calls on hold or making conference

　　calls, found easy ways to navigate through email, and created icons you could

　　scroll through horizontally to get to different apps—all of which were easier

　　because they could be used visually on the screen rather than by using a

　　keyboard built into the hardware.

　　Gorilla Glass

　　Jobs became infatuated with different materials the way he did with certain

　　foods. When he went back to Apple in 1997 and started work on the iMac, he had

　　embraced what could be done with translucent and colored plastic. The next phase

　　was metal. He and Ive replaced the curvy plastic PowerBook G3 with the sleek

　　titanium PowerBook G4, which they redesigned two years later in aluminum, as if

　　just to demonstrate how much they liked different metals. Then they did an iMac

　　and an iPod Nano in anodized aluminum, which meant that the metal had been put

　　in an acid bath and electrified so that its surface oxidized. Jobs was told it

　　could not be done in the quantities they needed, so he had a factory built in

　　China to handle it. Ive went there, during the SARS epidemic, to oversee the

　　process. “I stayed for three months in a dormitory to work on the process,” he

　　recalled. “Ruby and others said it would be impossible, but I wanted to do it

　　because Steve and I felt that the anodized aluminum had a real integrity to it.”

　　Next was glass. “After we did metal, I looked at Jony and said that we had to

　　master glass,” said Jobs. For the Apple stores, they had created huge

　　windowpanes and glass stairs. For the iPhone, the original plan was for it to

　　have a plastic screen, like the iPod. But Jobs decided it would feel much more

　　elegant and substantive if the screens were glass. So he set about finding a

　　glass that would be strong and resistant to scratches.

　　The natural place to look was Asia, where the glass for the stores was being

　　made. But Jobs’s friend John Seeley Brown, who was on the board of Corning Glass

　　in Upstate New York, told him that he should talk to that company’s young and

　　dynamic CEO, Wendell Weeks. So he dialed the main Corning switchboard number and

　　asked to be put through to Weeks. He got an assistant, who offered to pass along

　　the message. “No, I’m Steve Jobs,” he replied. “Put me through.” The assistant

　　refused. Jobs called Brown and complained that he had been subjected to “typical

　　East Coast bullshit.” When Weeks heard that, he called the main Apple

　　switchboard and asked to speak to Jobs. He was told to put his request in

　　writing and send it in by fax. When Jobs was told what happened, he took a

　　liking to Weeks and invited him to Cupertino.

　　Jobs described the type of glass Apple wanted for the iPhone, and Weeks told him

　　that Corning had developed a chemical exchange process in the 1960s that led to

　　what they dubbed “gorilla glass.” It was incredibly strong, but it had never

　　found a market, so Corning quit making it. Jobs said he doubted it was good

　　enough, and he started explaining to Weeks how glass was made. This amused

　　Weeks, who of course knew more than Jobs about that topic. “Can you shut up,”

　　Weeks interjected, “and let me teach you some science?” Jobs was taken aback and

　　fell silent. Weeks went to the whiteboard and gave a tutorial on the chemistry,

　　which involved an ion-exchange process that produced a compression layer on the

　　surface of the glass. This turned Jobs around, and he said he wanted as much

　　gorilla glass as Corning could make within six months. “We don’t have the

　　capacity,” Weeks replied. “None of our plants make the glass now.”

　　“Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was good-humored and

　　confident but not used to Jobs’s reality distortion field. He tried to explain

　　that a false sense of confidence would not overcome engineering challenges, but

　　that was a premise that Jobs had repeatedly shown he didn’t accept. He stared at

　　Weeks unblinking. “Yes, you can do it,” he said. “Get your mind around it. You

　　can do it.”

　　As Weeks retold this story, he shook his head in astonishment. “We did it in

　　under six months,” he said. “We produced a glass that had never been made.”

　　Corning’s facility in Harrisburg, Kentucky, which had been making LCD displays,

　　was converted almost overnight to make gorilla glass full-time. “We put our best

　　scientists and engineers on it, and we just made it work.” In his airy office,

　　Weeks has just one framed memento on display. It’s a message Jobs sent the day

　　the iPhone came out: “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

　　The Design

　　On many of his major projects, such as the first Toy Story and the Apple store,

　　Jobs pressed “pause” as they neared completion and decided to make major

　　revisions. That happened with the design of the iPhone as well. The initial

　　design had the glass screen set into an aluminum case. One Monday morning Jobs

　　went over to see Ive. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he said, “because I realized

　　that I just don’t love it.” It was the most important product he had made since

　　the first Macintosh, and it just didn’t look right to him. Ive, to his dismay,

　　instantly realized that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely

　　embarrassed that he had to make the observation.”

　　The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in

　　their current design the case competed with the display instead of getting out

　　of the way. The whole device felt too masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys,

　　you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re

　　going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work

　　nights and weekends, and if you want we can hand out some guns so you can kill

　　us now.” Instead of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments

　　at Apple,” Jobs recalled.

　　The new design ended up with just a thin stainless steel bezel that allowed the

　　gorilla glass display to go right to the edge. Every part of the device seemed

　　to defer to the screen. The new look was austere, yet also friendly. You could

　　fondle it. It meant they had to redo the circuit boards, antenna, and processor

　　placement inside, but Jobs ordered the change. “Other companies may have

　　shipped,” said Fadell, “but we pressed the reset button and started over.”

　　One aspect of the design, which reflected not only Jobs’s perfectionism but also

　　his desire to control, was that the device was tightly sealed. The case could

　　not be opened, even to change the battery. As with the original Macintosh in

　　1984, Jobs did not want people fiddling inside. In fact when Apple discovered in

　　2011 that third-party repair shops were opening up the iPhone 4, it replaced the

　　tiny screws with a tamper-resistant Pentalobe screw that was impossible to open

　　with a commercially available screwdriver. By not having a replaceable battery,

　　it was possible to make the iPhone much thinner. For Jobs, thinner was always

　　better. “He’s always believed that thin is beautiful,” said Tim Cook. “You can

　　see that in all of the work. We have the thinnest notebook, the thinnest

　　smartphone, and we made the iPad thin and then even thinner.”

　　The Launch

　　When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a

　　magazine a special sneak preview. He called John Huey, the editor in chief of

　　Time Inc., and began with his typical superlative: “This is the best thing we’ve

　　ever done.” He wanted to give Time the exclusive, “but there’s nobody smart

　　enough at Time to write it, so I’m going to give it to someone else.” Huey

　　introduced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer (and novelist) at

　　Time. In his piece Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really

　　invent many new features, it just made these features a lot more usable. “But

　　that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for

　　being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. . . . When

　　our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a

　　tiny bit more whole.”

　　For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited

　　back Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team,

　　as he had done when he launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling product

　　presentations, this may have been his best. “Every once in a while a

　　revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he began. He

　　referred to two earlier examples: the original Macintosh, which “changed the

　　whole computer industry,” and the first iPod, which “changed the entire music

　　industry.” Then he carefully built up to the product he was about to launch:

　　“Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first

　　one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary

　　mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.”

　　He repeated the list for emphasis, then asked, “Are you getting it? These are

　　not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”

　　When the iPhone went on sale five months later, at the end of June 2007, Jobs

　　and his wife walked to the Apple store in Palo Alto to take in the excitement.

　　Since he often did that on the day new products went on sale, there were some

　　fans hanging out in anticipation, and they greeted him as they would have Moses

　　if he had walked in to buy the Bible. Among the faithful were Hertzfeld and

　　Atkinson. “Bill stayed in line all night,” Hertzfeld said. Jobs waved his arms

　　and started laughing. “I sent him one,” he said. Hertzfeld replied, “He needs

　　six.”

　　The iPhone was immediately dubbed “the Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s

　　competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s

　　the most expensive phone in the world,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC

　　interview. “And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have

　　a keyboard.” Once again Microsoft had underestimated Jobs’s product. By the end

　　of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of

　　the total profits generated in the global cell phone market.

　　“Steve understands desire,” said Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC pioneer who had

　　envisioned a “Dynabook” tablet computer forty years earlier. Kay was good at

　　making prophetic assessments, so Jobs asked him what he thought of the iPhone.

　　“Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world,” Kay

　　said. He did not know that the design of the iPhone had started with, and would

　　someday lead to, ideas for a tablet computer that would fulfill—indeed

　　exceed—his vision for the Dynabook.UnknownROUND TWO

　　The Cancer Recurs

　　The Battles of 2008

　　By the beginning of 2008 it was clear to Jobs and his doctors that his cancer

　　was spreading. When they had taken out his pancreatic tumors in 2004, he had the

　　cancer genome partially sequenced. That helped his doctors determine which

　　pathways were broken, and they were treating him with targeted therapies that

　　they thought were most likely to work.

　　He was also being treated for pain, usually with morphine-based analgesics. One

　　day in February 2008 when Powell’s close friend Kathryn Smith was staying with

　　them in Palo Alto, she and Jobs took a walk. “He told me that when he feels

　　really bad, he just concentrates on the pain, goes into the pain, and that seems

　　to dissipate it,” she recalled. That wasn’t exactly true, however. When Jobs was

　　in pain, he let everyone around him know it.

　　There was another health issue that became increasingly problematic, one that

　　medical researchers didn’t focus on as rigorously as they did cancer or pain. He

　　was having eating problems and losing weight. Partly this was because he had

　　lost much of his pancreas, which produces the enzymes needed to digest protein

　　and other nutrients. It was also because both the cancer and the morphine

　　reduced his appetite. And then there was the psychological component, which the

　　doctors barely knew how to address: Since his early teens, he had indulged his

　　weird obsession with extremely restrictive diets and fasts.

　　Even after he married and had children, he retained his dubious eating habits.

　　He would spend weeks eating the same thing—carrot salad with lemon, or just

　　apples—and then suddenly spurn that food and declare that he had stopped eating

　　it. He would go on fasts, just as he did as a teenager, and he became

　　sanctimonious as he lectured others at the table on the virtues of whatever

　　eating regimen he was following. Powell had been a vegan when they were first

　　married, but after her husband’s operation she began to diversify their family

　　meals with fish and other proteins. Their son, Reed, who had been a vegetarian,

　　became a “hearty omnivore.” They knew it was important for his father to get

　　diverse sources of protein.

　　The family hired a gentle and versatile cook, Bryar Brown, who once worked for

　　Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. He came each afternoon and made a panoply of

　　healthy offerings for dinner, which used the herbs and vegetables that Powell

　　grew in their garden. When Jobs expressed any whim—carrot salad, pasta with

　　basil, lemongrass soup—Brown would quietly and patiently find a way to make it.

　　Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to

　　instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two

　　avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one

　　was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.

　　Beginning in early 2008 Jobs’s eating disorders got worse. On some nights he

　　would stare at the floor and ignore all of the dishes set out on the long

　　kitchen table. When others were halfway through their meal, he would abruptly

　　get up and leave, saying nothing. It was stressful for his family. They watched

　　him lose forty pounds during the spring of 2008.

　　His health problems became public again in March 2008, when Fortune published a

　　piece called “The Trouble with Steve Jobs.” It revealed that he had tried to

　　treat his cancer with diets for nine months and also investigated his

　　involvement in the backdating of Apple stock options. As the story was being

　　prepared, Jobs invited—summoned—Fortune’s managing editor Andy Serwer to

　　Cupertino to pressure him to spike it. He leaned into Serwer’s face and asked,

　　“So, you’ve uncovered the fact that I’m an asshole. Why is that news?” Jobs made

　　the same rather self-aware argument when he called Serwer’s boss at Time Inc.,

　　John Huey, from a satellite phone he brought to Hawaii’s Kona Village. He

　　offered to convene a panel of fellow CEOs and be part of a discussion about what

　　health issues are proper to disclose, but only if Fortune killed its piece. The

　　magazine didn’t.

　　When Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G in June 2008, he was so thin that it

　　overshadowed the product announcement. In Esquire Tom Junod described the

　　“withered” figure onstage as being “gaunt as a pirate, dressed in what had

　　heretofore been the vestments of his invulnerability.” Apple released a

　　statement saying, untruthfully, that his weight loss was the result of “a common

　　bug.” The following month, as questions persisted, the company released another

　　statement saying that Jobs’s health was “a private matter.”

　　Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote a column denouncing the handling of

　　Jobs’s health issues. “Apple simply can’t be trusted to tell the truth about its

　　chief executive,” he wrote in late July. “Under Mr. Jobs, Apple has created a

　　culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways—the speculation over

　　which products Apple will unveil at the annual Macworld conference has been one

　　of the company’s best marketing tools. But that same culture poisons its

　　corporate governance.” As he was writing the column and getting the standard “a

　　private matter” comment from all at Apple, he got an unexpected call from Jobs

　　himself. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant asshole who

　　thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of

　　his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, Jobs offered up some

　　information about his health, but only if Nocera would keep it off the record.

　　Nocera honored the request, but he was able to report that, while Jobs’s health

　　problems amounted to more than a common bug, “they weren’t life-threatening and

　　he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer.” Jobs had given Nocera more information

　　than he was willing to give his own board and shareholders, but it was not the

　　full truth.

　　Partly due to concern about Jobs’s weight loss, Apple’s stock price drifted from

　　$188 at the beginning of June 2008 down to $156 at the end of July. Matters were

　　not helped in late August when Bloomberg News mistakenly released its

　　prepackaged obituary of Jobs, which ended up on Gawker. Jobs was able to roll

　　out Mark Twain’s famous quip a few days later at his annual music event.

　　“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” he said, as he launched a line of

　　new iPods. But his gaunt appearance was not reassuring. By early October the

　　stock price had sunk to $97.

　　That month Doug Morris of Universal Music was scheduled to meet with Jobs at

　　Apple. Instead Jobs invited him to his house. Morris was surprised to see him so

　　ill and in pain. Morris was about to be honored at a gala in Los Angeles for

　　City of Hope, which raised money to fight cancer, and he wanted Jobs to be

　　there. Charitable events were something Jobs avoided, but he decided to do it,

　　both for Morris and for the cause. At the event, held in a big tent on Santa

　　Monica beach, Morris told the two thousand guests that Jobs was giving the music

　　industry a new lease on life. The performances—by Stevie Nicks, Lionel Richie,

　　Erykah Badu, and Akon—went on past midnight, and Jobs had severe chills. Jimmy

　　Iovine gave him a hooded sweatshirt to wear, and he kept the hood over his head

　　all evening. “He was so sick, so cold, so thin,” Morris recalled.

　　Fortune’s veteran technology writer Brent Schlender was leaving the magazine

　　that December, and his swan song was to be a joint interview with Jobs, Bill

　　Gates, Andy Grove, and Michael Dell. It had been hard to organize, and just a

　　few days before it was to happen, Jobs called to back out. “If they ask why,

　　just tell them I’m an asshole,” he said. Gates was annoyed, then discovered what

　　the health situation was. “Of course, he had a very, very good reason,” said

　　Gates. “He just didn’t want to say.” That became more apparent when Apple

　　announced on December 16 that Jobs was canceling his scheduled appearance at the

　　January Macworld, the forum he had used for big product launches for the past

　　eleven years.

　　The blogosphere erupted with speculation about his health, much of which had the

　　odious smell of truth. Jobs was furious and felt violated. He was also annoyed

　　that Apple wasn’t being more active in pushing back. So on January 5, 2009, he

　　wrote and released a misleading open letter. He claimed that he was skipping

　　Macworld because he wanted to spend more time with his family. “As many of you

　　know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008,” he added. “My doctors think

　　they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been robbing me of the

　　proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed

　　this diagnosis. The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple.”

　　There was a kernel of truth to this, albeit a small one. One of the hormones

　　created by the pancreas is glucagon, which is the flip side of insulin. Glucagon

　　causes your liver to release blood sugar. Jobs’s tumor had metastasized into his

　　liver and was wreaking havoc. In effect, his body was devouring itself, so his

　　doctors gave him drugs to try to lower the glucagon level. He did have a hormone

　　imbalance, but it was because his cancer had spread into his liver. He was in

　　personal denial about this, and he also wanted to be in public denial.

　　Unfortunately that was legally problematic, because he ran a publicly traded

　　company. But Jobs was furious about the way the blogosphere was treating him,

　　and he wanted to strike back.

　　He was very sick at this point, despite his upbeat statement, and also in

　　excruciating pain. He had undertaken another round of cancer drug therapy, and

　　it had grueling side effects. His skin started drying out and cracking. In his

　　quest for alternative approaches, he flew to Basel, Switzerland, to try an

　　experimental hormone-delivered radiotherapy. He also underwent an experimental

　　treatment developed in Rotterdam known as peptide receptor radionuclide therapy.

　　After a week filled with increasingly insistent legal advice, Jobs finally

　　agreed to go on medical leave. He made the announcement on January 14, 2009, in

　　another open letter to the Apple staff. At first he blamed the decision on the

　　prying of bloggers and the press. “Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal

　　health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone

　　else at Apple,” he said. But then he admitted that the remedy for his “hormone

　　imbalance” was not as simple as he had claimed. “During the past week I have

　　learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally

　　thought.” Tim Cook would again take over daily operations, but Jobs said that he

　　would remain CEO, continue to be involved in major decisions, and be back by

　　June.

　　Jobs had been consulting with Bill Campbell and Art Levinson, who were juggling

　　the dual roles of being his personal health advisors and also the co-lead

　　directors of the company. But the rest of the board had not been as fully

　　informed, and the shareholders had initially been misinformed. That raised some

　　legal issues, and the SEC opened an investigation into whether the company had

　　withheld “material information” from shareholders. It would constitute security

　　fraud, a felony, if the company had allowed the dissemination of false

　　information or withheld true information that was relevant to the company’s

　　financial prospects. Because Jobs and his magic were so closely identified with

　　Apple’s comeback, his health seemed to meet this standard. But it was a murky

　　area of the law; the privacy rights of the CEO had to be weighed. This balance

　　was particularly difficult in the case of Jobs, who both valued his privacy and

　　embodied his company more than most CEOs. He did not make the task easier. He

　　became very emotional, both ranting and crying at times, when railing against

　　anyone who suggested that he should be less secretive.

　　Campbell treasured his friendship with Jobs, and he didn’t want to have any

　　fiduciary duty to violate his privacy, so he offered to step down as a director.

　　“The privacy side is so important to me,” he later said. “He’s been my friend

　　for about a million years.” The lawyers eventually determined that Campbell

　　didn’t need to resign from the board but that he should step aside as co-lead

　　director. He was replaced in that role by Andrea Jung of Avon. The SEC

　　investigation ended up going nowhere, and the board circled the wagons to

　　protect Jobs from calls that he release more information. “The press wanted us

　　to blurt out more personal details,” recalled Al Gore. “It was really up to

　　Steve to go beyond what the law requires, but he was adamant that he didn’t want

　　his privacy invaded. His wishes should be respected.” When I asked Gore whether

　　the board should have been more forthcoming at the beginning of 2009, when

　　Jobs’s health issues were far worse than shareholders were led to believe, he

　　replied, “We hired outside counsel to do a review of what the law required and

　　what the best practices were, and we handled it all by the book. I sound

　　defensive, but the criticism really pissed me off.”

　　One board member disagreed. Jerry York, the former CFO at Chrysler and IBM, did

　　not say anything publicly, but he confided to a reporter at the Wall Street

　　Journal, off the record, that he was “disgusted” when he learned that the

　　company had concealed Jobs’s health problems in late 2008. “Frankly, I wish I

　　had resigned then.” When York died in 2010, the Journal put his comments on the

　　record. York had also provided off-the-record information to Fortune, which the

　　magazine used when Jobs went on his third health leave, in 2011.

　　Some at Apple didn’t believe the quotes attributed to York were accurate, since

　　he had not officially raised objections at the time. But Bill Campbell knew that

　　the reports rang true; York had complained to him in early 2009. “Jerry had a

　　little more white wine than he should have late at night, and he would call at

　　two or three in the morning and say, ‘What the fuck, I’m not buying that shit

　　about his health, we’ve got to make sure.’ And then I’d call him the next

　　morning and he’d say, ‘Oh fine, no problem.’ So on some of those evenings, I’m

　　sure he got raggy and talked to reporters.”

　　Memphis

　　The head of Jobs’s oncology team was Stanford University’s George Fisher, a

　　leading researcher on gastrointestinal and colorectal cancers. He had been

　　warning Jobs for months that he might have to consider a liver transplant, but

　　that was the type of information that Jobs resisted processing. Powell was glad

　　that Fisher kept raising the possibility, because she knew it would take

　　repeated proddings to get her husband to consider the idea.

　　He finally became convinced in January 2009, just after he claimed his “hormonal

　　imbalance” could be treated easily. But there was a problem. He was put on the

　　wait list for a liver transplant in California, but it became clear he would

　　never get one there in time. The number of available donors with his blood type

　　was small. Also, the metrics used by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which

　　establishes policies in the United States, favored those suffering from

　　cirrhosis and hepatitis over cancer patients.

　　There is no legal way for a patient, even one as wealthy as Jobs, to jump the

　　queue, and he didn’t. Recipients are chosen based on their MELD score (Model for

　　End-Stage Liver Disease), which uses lab tests of hormone levels to determine

　　how urgently a transplant is needed, and on the length of time they have been

　　waiting. Every donation is closely audited, data are available on public

　　websites (optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/), and you can monitor your status on the

　　wait list at any time.

　　Powell became the troller of the organ-donation websites, checking in every

　　night to see how many were on the wait lists, what their MELD scores were, and

　　how long they had been on. “You can do the math, which I did, and it would have

　　been way past June before he got a liver in California, and the doctors felt

　　that his liver would give out in about April,” she recalled. So she started

　　asking questions and discovered that it was permissible to be on the list in two

　　different states at the same time, which is something that about 3% of potential

　　recipients do. Such multiple listing is not discouraged by policy, even though

　　critics say it favors the rich, but it is difficult. There were two major

　　requirements: The potential recipient had to be able to get to the chosen

　　hospital within eight hours, which Jobs could do thanks to his plane, and the

　　doctors from that hospital had to evaluate the patient in person before adding

　　him or her to the list.

　　George Riley, the San Francisco lawyer who often served as Apple’s outside

　　counsel, was a caring Tennessee gentleman, and he had become close to Jobs. His

　　parents had both been doctors at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, he

　　was born there, and he was a friend of James Eason, who ran the transplant

　　institute there. Eason’s unit was one of the best and busiest in the nation; in

　　2008 he and his team did 121 liver transplants. He had no problem allowing

　　people from elsewhere to multiple-list in Memphis. “It’s not gaming the system,”

　　he said. “It’s people choosing where they want their health care. Some people

　　would leave Tennessee to go to California or somewhere else to seek treatment.

　　Now we have people coming from California to Tennessee.” Riley arranged for

　　Eason to fly to Palo Alto and conduct the required evaluation there.

　　By late February 2009 Jobs had secured a place on the Tennessee list (as well as

　　the one in California), and the nervous waiting began. He was declining rapidly

　　by the first week in March, and the waiting time was projected to be twenty-one

　　days. “It was dreadful,” Powell recalled. “It didn’t look like we would make it

　　in time.” Every day became more excruciating. He moved up to third on the list

　　by mid-March, then second, and finally first. But then days went by. The awful

　　reality was that upcoming events like St. Patrick’s Day and March Madness

　　(Memphis was in the 2009 tournament and was a regional site) offered a greater

　　likelihood of getting a donor because the drinking causes a spike in car

　　accidents.

　　Indeed, on the weekend of March 21, 2009, a young man in his midtwenties was

　　killed in a car crash, and his organs were made available. Jobs and his wife

　　flew to Memphis, where they landed just before 4 a.m. and were met by Eason. A

　　car was waiting on the tarmac, and everything was staged so that the admitting

　　paperwork was done as they rushed to the hospital.

　　The transplant was a success, but not reassuring. When the doctors took out his

　　liver, they found spots on the peritoneum, the thin membrane that surrounds

　　internal organs. In addition, there were tumors throughout the liver, which

　　meant it was likely that the cancer had migrated elsewhere as well. It had

　　apparently mutated and grown quickly. They took samples and did more genetic

　　mapping.

　　A few days later they needed to perform another procedure. Jobs insisted against

　　all advice they not pump out his stomach, and when they sedated him, he

　　aspirated some of the contents into his lungs and developed pneumonia. At that

　　point they thought he might die. As he described it later:

　　I almost died because in this routine procedure they blew it. Laurene was

　　there and they flew my children in, because they did not think I would make it

　　through the night. Reed was looking at colleges with one of Laurene’s

　　brothers. We had a private plane pick him up near Dartmouth and tell them what

　　was going on. A plane also picked up the girls. They thought it might be the

　　last chance they had to see me conscious. But I made it.

　　Powell took charge of overseeing the treatment, staying in the hospital room all

　　day and watching each of the monitors vigilantly. “Laurene was a beautiful tiger

　　protecting him,” recalled Jony Ive, who came as soon as Jobs could receive

　　visitors. Her mother and three brothers came down at various times to keep her

　　company. Jobs’s sister Mona Simpson also hovered protectively. She and George

　　Riley were the only people Jobs would allow to fill in for Powell at his

　　bedside. “Laurene’s family helped us take care of the kids—her mom and brothers

　　were great,” Jobs later said. “I was very fragile and not cooperative. But an

　　experience like that binds you together in a deep way.”

　　Powell came every day at 7 a.m. and gathered the relevant data, which she put on

　　a spreadsheet. “It was very complicated because there were a lot of different

　　things going on,” she recalled. When James Eason and his team of doctors arrived

　　at 9 a.m., she would have a meeting with them to coordinate all aspects of

　　Jobs’s treatment. At 9 p.m., before she left, she would prepare a report on how

　　each of the vital signs and other measurements were trending, along with a set

　　of questions she wanted answered the next day. “It allowed me to engage my brain

　　and stay focused,” she recalled.

　　Eason did what no one at Stanford had fully done: take charge of all aspects of

　　the medical care. Since he ran the facility, he could coordinate the transplant

　　recovery, cancer tests, pain treatments, nutrition, rehabilitation, and nursing.

　　He would even stop at the convenience store to get the energy drinks Jobs liked.

　　Two of the nurses were from tiny towns in Mississippi, and they became Jobs’s

　　favorites. They were solid family women and not intimidated by him. Eason

　　arranged for them to be assigned only to Jobs. “To manage Steve, you have to be

　　persistent,” recalled Tim Cook. “Eason managed Steve and forced him to do things

　　that no one else could, things that were good for him that may not have been

　　pleasant.”

　　Despite all the coddling, Jobs at times almost went crazy. He chafed at not

　　being in control, and he sometimes hallucinated or became angry. Even when he

　　was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the

　　pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs

　　ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it.

　　Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for

　　the mask and he would pick a design he liked. The doctors looked at Powell,

　　puzzled. She was finally able to distract him so they could put on the mask. He

　　also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly

　　and too complex. He suggested ways it could be designed more simply. “He was

　　very attuned to every nuance of the environment and objects around him, and that

　　drained him,” Powell recalled.

　　One day, when he was still floating in and out of consciousness, Powell’s close

　　friend Kathryn Smith came to visit. Her relationship with Jobs had not always

　　been the best, but Powell insisted that she come by the bedside. He motioned her

　　over, signaled for a pad and pen, and wrote, “I want my iPhone.” Smith took it

　　off the dresser and brought it to him. Taking her hand, he showed her the “swipe

　　to open” function and made her play with the menus.

　　Jobs’s relationship with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his daughter with Chrisann, had

　　frayed. She had graduated from Harvard, moved to New York City, and rarely

　　communicated with her father. But she flew down to Memphis twice, and he

　　appreciated it. “It meant a lot to me that she would do that,” he recalled.

　　Unfortunately he didn’t tell her at the time. Many of the people around Jobs

　　found Lisa could be as demanding as her father, but Powell welcomed her and

　　tried to get her involved. It was a relationship she wanted to restore.

　　As Jobs got better, much of his feisty personality returned. He still had his

　　bile ducts. “When he started to recover, he passed quickly through the phase of

　　gratitude, and went right back into the mode of being grumpy and in charge,” Kat

　　Smith recalled. “We were all wondering if he was going to come out of this with

　　a kinder perspective, but he didn’t.”

　　He also remained a finicky eater, which was more of a problem than ever. He

　　would eat only fruit smoothies, and he would demand that seven or eight of them

　　be lined up so he could find an option that might satisfy him. He would touch

　　the spoon to his mouth for a tiny taste and pronounce, “That’s no good. That

　　one’s no good either.” Finally Eason pushed back. “You know, this isn’t a matter

　　of taste,” he lectured. “Stop thinking of this as food. Start thinking of it as

　　medicine.”

　　Jobs’s mood buoyed when he was able to have visitors from Apple. Tim Cook came

　　down regularly and filled him in on the progress of new products. “You could see

　　him brighten every time the talk turned to Apple,” Cook said. “It was like the

　　light turned on.” He loved the company deeply, and he seemed to live for the

　　prospect of returning. Details would energize him. When Cook described a new

　　model of the iPhone, Jobs spent the next hour discussing not only what to call

　　it—they agreed on iPhone 3GS—but also the size and font of the “GS,” including

　　whether the letters should be capitalized (yes) and italicized (no).

　　One day Riley arranged a surprise after-hours visit to Sun Studio, the redbrick

　　shrine where Elvis, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, and many other rock-and-roll

　　pioneers recorded. They were given a private tour and a history lecture by one

　　of the young staffers, who sat with Jobs on the cigarette-scarred bench that

　　Jerry Lee Lewis used. Jobs was arguably the most influential person in the music

　　industry at the time, but the kid didn’t recognize him in his emaciated state.

　　As they were leaving, Jobs told Riley, “That kid was really smart. We should

　　hire him for iTunes.” So Riley called Eddy Cue, who flew the boy out to

　　California for an interview and ended up hiring him to help build the early R&B

　　and rock-and-roll sections of iTunes. When Riley went back to see his friends at

　　Sun Studio later, they said that it proved, as their slogan said, that your

　　dreams can still come true at Sun Studio.

　　Return

　　At the end of May 2009 Jobs flew back from Memphis on his jet with his wife and

　　sister. They were met at the San Jose airfield by Tim Cook and Jony Ive, who

　　came aboard as soon as the plane landed. “You could see in his eyes his

　　excitement at being back,” Cook recalled. “He had fight in him and was raring to

　　go.” Powell pulled out a bottle of sparkling apple cider and toasted her

　　husband, and everyone embraced.

　　Ive was emotionally drained. He drove to Jobs’s house from the airport and told

　　him how hard it had been to keep things going while he was away. He also

　　complained about the stories saying that Apple’s innovation depended on Jobs and

　　would disappear if he didn’t return. “I’m really hurt,” Ive told him. He felt

　　“devastated,” he said, and underappreciated.

　　Jobs was likewise in a dark mental state after his return to Palo Alto. He was

　　coming to grips with the thought that he might not be indispensable to the

　　company. Apple stock had fared well while he was away, going from $82 when he

　　announced his leave in January 2009 to $140 when he returned at the end of May.

　　On one conference call with analysts shortly after Jobs went on leave, Cook

　　departed from his unemotional style to give a rousing declaration of why Apple

　　would continue to soar even with Jobs absent:

　　We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and

　　that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in

　　the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the

　　primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in

　　markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no

　　to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are

　　truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and

　　cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that

　　others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence

　　in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when

　　we’re wrong and the courage to change. And I think, regardless of who is in

　　what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do

　　extremely well.

　　It sounded like something Jobs would say (and had said), but the press dubbed it

　　“the Cook doctrine.” Jobs was rankled and deeply depressed, especially about the

　　last line. He didn’t know whether to be proud or hurt that it might be true.

　　There was talk that he might step aside and become chairman rather than CEO.

　　That made him all the more motivated to get out of his bed, overcome the pain,

　　and start taking his restorative long walks again.

　　A board meeting was scheduled a few days after he returned, and Jobs surprised

　　everyone by making an appearance. He ambled in and was able to stay for most of

　　the meeting. By early June he was holding daily meetings at his house, and by

　　the end of the month he was back at work.

　　Would he now, after facing death, be more mellow? His colleagues quickly got an

　　answer. On his first day back, he startled his top team by throwing a series of

　　tantrums. He ripped apart people he had not seen for six months, tore up some

　　marketing plans, and chewed out a couple of people whose work he found shoddy.

　　But what was truly telling was the pronouncement he made to a couple of friends

　　late that afternoon. “I had the greatest time being back today,” he said. “I

　　can’t believe how creative I’m feeling, and how the whole team is.” Tim Cook

　　took it in stride. “I’ve never seen Steve hold back from expressing his view or

　　passion,” he later said. “But that was good.”

　　Friends noted that Jobs had retained his feistiness. During his recuperation he

　　signed up for Comcast’s high-definition cable service, and one day he called

　　Brian Roberts, who ran the company. “I thought he was calling to say something

　　nice about it,” Roberts recalled. “Instead, he told me ‘It sucks.’” But Andy

　　Hertzfeld noticed that, beneath the gruffness, Jobs had become more honest.

　　“Before, if you asked Steve for a favor, he might do the exact opposite,”

　　Hertzfeld said. “That was the perversity in his nature. Now he actually tries to

　　be helpful.”

　　His public return came on September 9, when he took the stage at the company’s

　　regular fall music event. He got a standing ovation that lasted almost a minute,

　　then he opened on an unusually personal note by mentioning that he was the

　　recipient of a liver donation. “I wouldn’t be here without such generosity,” he

　　said, “so I hope all of us can be as generous and elect to become organ donors.”

　　After a moment of exultation—“I’m vertical, I’m back at Apple, and I’m loving

　　every day of it”—he unveiled the new line of iPod Nanos, with video cameras, in

　　nine different colors of anodized aluminum.

　　By the beginning of 2010 he had recovered most of his strength, and he threw

　　himself back into work for what would be one of his, and Apple’s, most

　　productive years. He had hit two consecutive home runs since launching Apple’s

　　digital hub strategy: the iPod and the iPhone. Now he was going to swing for

　　another.UnknownTHE iPAD

　　Into the Post-PC Era

　　You Say You Want a Revolution

　　Back in 2002, Jobs had been annoyed by the Microsoft engineer who kept

　　proselytizing about the tablet computer software he had developed, which allowed

　　users to input information on the screen with a stylus or pen. A few

　　manufacturers released tablet PCs that year using the software, but none made a

　　dent in the universe. Jobs had been eager to show how it should be done right—no

　　stylus!—but when he saw the multi-touch technology that Apple was developing, he

　　had decided to use it first to make an iPhone.

　　In the meantime, the tablet idea was percolating within the Macintosh hardware

　　group. “We have no plans to make a tablet,” Jobs declared in an interview with

　　Walt Mossberg in May 2003. “It turns out people want keyboards. Tablets appeal

　　to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already.” Like his statement

　　about having a “hormone imbalance,” that was misleading; at most of his annual

　　Top 100 retreats, the tablet was among the future projects discussed. “We showed

　　the idea off at many of these retreats, because Steve never lost his desire to

　　do a tablet,” Phil Schiller recalled.

　　The tablet project got a boost in 2007 when Jobs was considering ideas for a

　　low-cost netbook computer. At an executive team brainstorming session one

　　Monday, Ive asked why it needed a keyboard hinged to the screen; that was

　　expensive and bulky. Put the keyboard on the screen using a multi-touch

　　interface, he suggested. Jobs agreed. So the resources were directed to revving

　　up the tablet project rather than designing a netbook.

　　The process began with Jobs and Ive figuring out the right screen size. They had

　　twenty models made—all rounded rectangles, of course—in slightly varying sizes

　　and aspect ratios. Ive laid them out on a table in the design studio, and in the

　　afternoon they would lift the velvet cloth hiding them and play with them.

　　“That’s how we nailed what the screen size was,” Ive said.

　　As usual Jobs pushed for the purest possible simplicity. That required

　　determining what was the core essence of the device. The answer: the display

　　screen. So the guiding principle was that everything they did had to defer to

　　the screen. “How do we get out of the way so there aren’t a ton of features and

　　buttons that distract from the display?” Ive asked. At every step, Jobs pushed

　　to remove and simplify.

　　At one point Jobs looked at the model and was slightly dissatisfied. It didn’t

　　feel casual and friendly enough, so that you would naturally scoop it up and

　　whisk it away. Ive put his finger, so to speak, on the problem: They needed to

　　signal that you could grab it with one hand, on impulse. The bottom of the edge

　　needed to be slightly rounded, so that you’d feel comfortable just scooping it

　　up rather than lifting it carefully. That meant engineering had to design the

　　necessary connection ports and buttons in a simple lip that was thin enough to

　　wash away gently underneath.

　　If you had been paying attention to patent filings, you would have noticed the

　　one numbered D504889 that Apple applied for in March 2004 and was issued

　　fourteen months later. Among the inventors listed were Jobs and Ive. The

　　application carried sketches of a rectangular electronic tablet with rounded

　　edges, which looked just the way the iPad turned out, including one of a man

　　holding it casually in his left hand while using his right index finger to touch

　　the screen.

　　Since the Macintosh computers were now using Intel chips, Jobs initially planned

　　to use in the iPad the low-voltage Atom chip that Intel was developing. Paul

　　Otellini, Intel’s CEO, was pushing hard to work together on a design, and Jobs’s

　　inclination was to trust him. His company was making the fastest processors in

　　the world. But Intel was used to making processors for machines that plugged

　　into a wall, not ones that had to preserve battery life. So Tony Fadell argued

　　strongly for something based on the ARM architecture, which was simpler and used

　　less power. Apple had been an early partner with ARM, and chips using its

　　architecture were in the original iPhone. Fadell gathered support from other

　　engineers and proved that it was possible to confront Jobs and turn him around.

　　“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” Fadell shouted at one meeting when Jobs insisted it was

　　best to trust Intel to make a good mobile chip. Fadell even put his Apple badge

　　on the table, threatening to resign.

　　Eventually Jobs relented. “I hear you,” he said. “I’m not going to go against my

　　best guys.” In fact he went to the other extreme. Apple licensed the ARM

　　architecture, but it also bought a 150-person microprocessor design firm in Palo

　　Alto, called P.A. Semi, and had it create a custom system-on-a-chip, called the

　　A4, which was based on the ARM architecture and manufactured in South Korea by

　　Samsung. As Jobs recalled:

　　At the high-performance end, Intel is the best. They build the fastest chip,

　　if you don’t care about power and cost. But they build just the processor on

　　one chip, so it takes a lot of other parts. Our A4 has the processor and the

　　graphics, mobile operating system, and memory control all in the chip. We

　　tried to help Intel, but they don’t listen much. We’ve been telling them for

　　years that their graphics suck. Every quarter we schedule a meeting with me

　　and our top three guys and Paul Otellini. At the beginning, we were doing

　　wonderful things together. They wanted this big joint project to do chips for

　　future iPhones. There were two reasons we didn’t go with them. One was that

　　they are just really slow. They’re like a steamship, not very flexible. We’re

　　used to going pretty fast. Second is that we just didn’t want to teach them

　　everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.

　　According to Otellini, it would have made sense for the iPad to use Intel chips.

　　The problem, he said, was that Apple and Intel couldn’t agree on price. Also,

　　they disagreed on who would control the design. It was another example of Jobs’s

　　desire, indeed compulsion, to control every aspect of a product, from the

　　silicon to the flesh.

　　The Launch, January 2010

　　The usual excitement that Jobs was able to gin up for a product launch paled in

　　comparison to the frenzy that built for the iPad unveiling on January 27, 2010,

　　in San Francisco. The Economist put him on its cover robed, haloed, and holding

　　what was dubbed “the Jesus Tablet.” The Wall Street Journal struck a similarly

　　exalted note: “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it

　　had some commandments written on it.”

　　As if to underscore the historic nature of the launch, Jobs invited back many of

　　the old-timers from his early Apple days. More poignantly, James Eason, who had

　　performed his liver transplant the year before, and Jeffrey Norton, who had

　　operated on his pancreas in 2004, were in the audience, sitting with his wife,

　　his son, and Mona Simpson.

　　Jobs did his usual masterly job of putting a new device into context, as he had

　　done for the iPhone three years earlier. This time he put up a screen that

　　showed an iPhone and a laptop with a question mark in between. “The question is,

　　is there room for something in the middle?” he asked. That “something” would

　　have to be good at web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and ebooks.

　　He drove a stake through the heart of the netbook concept. “Netbooks aren’t

　　better at anything!” he said. The invited guests and employees cheered. “But we

　　have something that is. We call it the iPad.”

　　To underscore the casual nature of the iPad, Jobs ambled over to a comfortable

　　leather chair and side table (actually, given his taste, it was a Le Corbusier

　　chair and an Eero Saarinen table) and scooped one up. “It’s so much more

　　intimate than a laptop,” he enthused. He proceeded to surf to the New York Times

　　website, send an email to Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller (“Wow, we really are

　　announcing the iPad”), flip through a photo album, use a calendar, zoom in on

　　the Eiffel Tower on Google Maps, watch some video clips (Star Trek and Pixar’s

　　Up), show off the iBook shelf, and play a song (Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling

　　Stone,” which he had played at the iPhone launch). “Isn’t that awesome?” he

　　asked.

　　With his final slide, Jobs emphasized one of the themes of his life, which was

　　embodied by the iPad: a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal

　　Arts Street. “The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve

　　always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he

　　concluded. The iPad was the digital reincarnation of the Whole Earth Catalog,

　　the place where creativity met tools for living.

　　For once, the initial reaction was not a Hallelujah Chorus. The iPad was not yet

　　available (it would go on sale in April), and some who watched Jobs’s demo were

　　not quite sure what it was. An iPhone on steroids? “I haven’t been this let down

　　since Snooki hooked up with The Situation,” wrote Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons (who

　　moonlighted as “The Fake Steve Jobs” in an online parody). Gizmodo ran a

　　contributor’s piece headlined “Eight Things That Suck about the iPad” (no

　　multitasking, no cameras, no Flash . . . ). Even the name came in for ridicule

　　in the blogosphere, with snarky comments about feminine hygiene products and

　　maxi pads. The hashtag “#iTampon” was the number-three trending topic on Twitter

　　that day.

　　There was also the requisite dismissal from Bill Gates. “I still think that some

　　mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard—in other words a netbook—will be

　　the mainstream,” he told Brent Schlender. “So, it’s not like I sit there and

　　feel the same way I did with the iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft

　　didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I

　　look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” He continued to insist

　　that the Microsoft approach of using a stylus for input would prevail. “I’ve

　　been predicting a tablet with a stylus for many years,” he told me. “I will

　　eventually turn out to be right or be dead.”

　　The night after his announcement, Jobs was annoyed and depressed. As we gathered

　　in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web

　　pages on his iPhone.

　　I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most

　　of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some

　　of them are like, “Fuck you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually write

　　people back, but I replied, “Your parents would be so proud of how you turned

　　out.” And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got

　　depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.

　　He did get one congratulatory call that day that he appreciated, from President

　　Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. But he noted at dinner that the president

　　had not called him since taking office.

　　The public carping subsided when the iPad went on sale in April and people got

　　their hands on it. Both Time and Newsweek put it on the cover. “The tough thing

　　about writing about Apple products is that they come with a lot of hype wrapped

　　around them,” Lev Grossman wrote in Time. “The other tough thing about writing

　　about Apple products is that sometimes the hype is true.” His main reservation,

　　a substantive one, was “that while it’s a lovely device for consuming content,

　　it doesn’t do much to facilitate its creation.” Computers, especially the

　　Macintosh, had become tools that allowed people to make music, videos, websites,

　　and blogs, which could be posted for the world to see. “The iPad shifts the

　　emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes

　　you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people’s masterpieces.” It

　　was a criticism Jobs took to heart. He set about making sure that the next

　　version of the iPad would emphasize ways to facilitate artistic creation by the

　　user.

　　Newsweek’s cover line was “What’s So Great about the iPad? Everything.” Daniel

　　Lyons, who had zapped it with his “Snooki” comment at the launch, revised his

　　opinion. “My first thought, as I watched Jobs run through his demo, was that it

　　seemed like no big deal,” he wrote. “It’s a bigger version of the iPod Touch,

　　right? Then I got a chance to use an iPad, and it hit me: I want one.” Lyons,

　　like others, realized that this was Jobs’s pet project, and it embodied all that

　　he stood for. “He has an uncanny ability to cook up gadgets that we didn’t know

　　we needed, but then suddenly can’t live without,” he wrote. “A closed system may

　　be the only way to deliver the kind of techno-Zen experience that Apple has

　　become known for.”

　　Most of the debate over the iPad centered on the issue of whether its closed

　　end-to-end integration was brilliant or doomed. Google was starting to play a

　　role similar to the one Microsoft had played in the 1980s, offering a mobile

　　platform, Android, that was open and could be used by all hardware makers.

　　Fortune staged a debate on this issue in its pages. “There’s no excuse to be

　　closed,” wrote Michael Copeland. But his colleague Jon Fortt rebutted, “Closed

　　systems get a bad rap, but they work beautifully and users benefit. Probably no

　　one in tech has proved this more convincingly than Steve Jobs. By bundling

　　hardware, software, and services, and controlling them tightly, Apple is

　　consistently able to get the jump on its rivals and roll out polished products.”

　　They agreed that the iPad would be the clearest test of this question since the

　　original Macintosh. “Apple has taken its control-freak rep to a whole new level

　　with the A4 chip that powers the thing,” wrote Fortt. “Cupertino now has

　　absolute say over the silicon, device, operating system, App Store, and payment

　　system.”

　　Jobs went to the Apple store in Palo Alto shortly before noon on April 5, the

　　day the iPad went on sale. Daniel Kottke—his acid-dropping soul mate from Reed

　　and the early days at Apple, who no longer harbored a grudge for not getting

　　founders’ stock options—made a point of being there. “It had been fifteen years,

　　and I wanted to see him again,” Kottke recounted. “I grabbed him and told him I

　　was going to use the iPad for my song lyrics. He was in a great mood and we had

　　a nice chat after all these years.” Powell and their youngest child, Eve,

　　watched from a corner of the store.

　　Wozniak, who had once been a proponent of making hardware and software as open

　　as possible, continued to revise that opinion. As he often did, he stayed up all

　　night with the enthusiasts waiting in line for the store to open. This time he

　　was at San Jose’s Valley Fair Mall, riding a Segway. A reporter asked him about

　　the closed nature of Apple’s ecosystem. “Apple gets you into their playpen and

　　keeps you there, but there are some advantages to that,” he replied. “I like

　　open systems, but I’m a hacker. But most people want things that are easy to

　　use. Steve’s genius is that he knows how to make things simple, and that

　　sometimes requires controlling everything.”

　　The question “What’s on your iPad?” replaced “What’s on your iPod?” Even

　　President Obama’s staffers, who embraced the iPad as a mark of their tech

　　hipness, played the game. Economic Advisor Larry Summers had the Bloomberg

　　financial information app, Scrabble, and The Federalist Papers. Chief of Staff

　　Rahm Emanuel had a slew of newspapers, Communications Advisor Bill Burton had

　　Vanity Fair and one entire season of the television series Lost, and Political

　　Director David Axelrod had Major League Baseball and NPR.

　　Jobs was stirred by a story, which he forwarded to me, by Michael Noer on

　　Forbes.com. Noer was reading a science fiction novel on his iPad while staying

　　at a dairy farm in a rural area north of Bogotá, Colombia, when a poor

　　six-year-old boy who cleaned the stables came up to him. Curious, Noer handed

　　him the device. With no instruction, and never having seen a computer before,

　　the boy started using it intuitively. He began swiping the screen, launching

　　apps, playing a pinball game. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that

　　an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that

　　isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.”

　　In less than a month Apple sold one million iPads. That was twice as fast as it

　　took the iPhone to reach that mark. By March 2011, nine months after its

　　release, fifteen million had been sold. By some measures it became the most

　　successful consumer product launch in history.

　　Advertising

　　Jobs was not happy with the original ads for the iPad. As usual, he threw

　　himself into the marketing, working with James Vincent and Duncan Milner at the

　　ad agency (now called TBWA/Media Arts Lab), with Lee Clow advising from a

　　semiretired perch. The commercial they first produced was a gentle scene of a

　　guy in faded jeans and sweatshirt reclining in a chair, looking at email, a

　　photo album, the New York Times, books, and video on an iPad propped on his lap.

　　There were no words, just the background beat of “There Goes My Love” by the

　　Blue Van. “After he approved it, Steve decided he hated it,” Vincent recalled.

　　“He thought it looked like a Pottery Barn commercial.” Jobs later told me:

　　It had been easy to explain what the iPod was—a thousand songs in your

　　pocket—which allowed us to move quickly to the iconic silhouette ads. But it

　　was hard to explain what an iPad was. We didn’t want to show it as a computer,

　　and yet we didn’t want to make it so soft that it looked like a cute TV. The

　　first set of ads showed we didn’t know what we were doing. They had a cashmere

　　and Hush Puppies feel to them.

　　James Vincent had not taken a break in months. So when the iPad finally went on

　　sale and the ads started airing, he drove with his family to the Coachella Music

　　Festival in Palm Springs, which featured some of his favorite bands, including

　　Muse, Faith No More, and Devo. Soon after he arrived, Jobs called. “Your

　　commercials suck,” he said. “The iPad is revolutionizing the world, and we need

　　something big. You’ve given me small shit.”

　　“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me

　　what you want.”

　　“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve

　　shown me is even close.”

　　Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming

　　at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys

　　escalated.

　　When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back,

　　“You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”

　　“Oh, great, let me write that on my brief for my creative people: I’ll know it

　　when I see it.”

　　Vincent got so frustrated that he slammed his fist into the wall of the house he

　　was renting and put a large dent in it. When he finally went outside to his

　　family, sitting by the pool, they looked at him nervously. “Are you okay?” his

　　wife finally asked.

　　It took Vincent and his team two weeks to come up with an array of new options,

　　and he asked to present them at Jobs’s house rather than the office, hoping that

　　it would be a more relaxed environment. Laying storyboards on the coffee table,

　　he and Milner offered twelve approaches. One was inspirational and stirring.

　　Another tried humor, with Michael Cera, the comic actor, wandering through a

　　fake house making funny comments about the way people could use iPads. Others

　　featured the iPad with celebrities, or set starkly on a white background, or

　　starring in a little sitcom, or in a straightforward product demonstration.

　　After mulling over the options, Jobs realized what he wanted. Not humor, nor a

　　celebrity, nor a demo. “It’s got to make a statement,” he said. “It needs to be

　　a manifesto. This is big.” He had announced that the iPad would change the

　　world, and he wanted a campaign that reinforced that declaration. Other

　　companies would come out with copycat tablets in a year or so, he said, and he

　　wanted people to remember that the iPad was the real thing. “We need ads that

　　stand up and declare what we have done.”

　　He abruptly got out of his chair, looking a bit weak but smiling. “I’ve got to

　　go have a massage now,” he said. “Get to work.”

　　So Vincent and Milner, along with the copywriter Eric Grunbaum, began crafting

　　what they dubbed “The Manifesto.” It would be fast-paced, with vibrant pictures

　　and a thumping beat, and it would proclaim that the iPad was revolutionary. The

　　music they chose was Karen O’s pounding refrain from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’” Gold

　　Lion.” As the iPad was shown doing magical things, a strong voice declared,

　　“iPad is thin. iPad is beautiful. . . . It’s crazy powerful. It’s magical. . . .

　　It’s video, photos. More books than you could read in a lifetime. It’s already a

　　revolution, and it’s only just begun.”

　　Once the Manifesto ads had run their course, the team again tried something

　　softer, shot as day-in-the-life documentaries by the young filmmaker Jessica

　　Sanders. Jobs liked them—for a little while. Then he turned against them for the

　　same reason he had reacted against the original Pottery Barn–style ads.

　　“Dammit,” he shouted, “they look like a Visa commercial, typical ad agency

　　stuff.”

　　He had been asking for ads that were different and new, but eventually he

　　realized he did not want to stray from what he considered the Apple voice. For

　　him, that voice had a distinctive set of qualities: simple, declarative, clean.

　　“We went down that lifestyle path, and it seemed to be growing on Steve, and

　　suddenly he said, ‘I hate that stuff, it’s not Apple,’” recalled Lee Clow. “He

　　told us to get back to the Apple voice. It’s a very simple, honest voice.” And

　　so they went back to a clean white background, with just a close-up showing off

　　all the things that “iPad is . . .” and could do.

　　Apps

　　The iPad commercials were not about the device, but about what you could do with

　　it. Indeed its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from

　　the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of

　　delightful activities. There were thousands—and soon hundreds of thousands—of

　　apps that you could download for free or for a few dollars. You could sling

　　angry birds with the swipe of your finger, track your stocks, watch movies, read

　　books and magazines, catch up on the news, play games, and waste glorious

　　amounts of time. Once again the integration of the hardware, software, and store

　　made it easy. But the apps also allowed the platform to be sort of open, in a

　　very controlled way, to outside developers who wanted to create software and

　　content for it—open, that is, like a carefully curated and gated community

　　garden.

　　The apps phenomenon began with the iPhone. When it first came out in early 2007,

　　there were no apps you could buy from outside developers, and Jobs initially

　　resisted allowing them. He didn’t want outsiders to create applications for the

　　iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity.

　　Board member Art Levinson was among those pushing to allow iPhone apps. “I

　　called him a half dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” he

　　recalled. If Apple didn’t allow them, indeed encourage them, another smartphone

　　maker would, giving itself a competitive advantage. Apple’s marketing chief Phil

　　Schiller agreed. “I couldn’t imagine that we would create something as powerful

　　as the iPhone and not empower developers to make lots of apps,” he recalled. “I

　　knew customers would love them.” From the outside, the venture capitalist John

　　Doerr argued that permitting apps would spawn a profusion of new entrepreneurs

　　who would create new services.

　　Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not

　　have the bandwidth to figure out all of the complexities that would be involved

　　in policing third-party app developers. He wanted focus. “So he didn’t want to

　　talk about it,” said Schiller. But as soon as the iPhone was launched, he was

　　willing to hear the debate. “Every time the conversation happened, Steve seemed

　　a little more open,” said Levinson. There were freewheeling discussions at four

　　board meetings.

　　Jobs soon figured out that there was a way to have the best of both worlds. He

　　would permit outsiders to write apps, but they would have to meet strict

　　standards, be tested and approved by Apple, and be sold only through the iTunes

　　Store. It was a way to reap the advantage of empowering thousands of software

　　developers while retaining enough control to protect the integrity of the iPhone

　　and the simplicity of the customer experience. “It was an absolutely magical

　　solution that hit the sweet spot,” said Levinson. “It gave us the benefits of

　　openness while retaining end-to-end control.”

　　The App Store for the iPhone opened on iTunes in July 2008; the billionth

　　download came nine months later. By the time the iPad went on sale in April

　　2010, there were 185,000 available iPhone apps. Most could also be used on the

　　iPad, although they didn’t take advantage of the bigger screen size. But in less

　　than five months, developers had written twenty-five thousand new apps that were

　　specifically configured for the iPad. By July 2011 there were 500,000 apps for

　　both devices, and there had been more than fifteen billion downloads of them.

　　The App Store created a new industry overnight. In dorm rooms and garages and at

　　major media companies, entrepreneurs invented new apps. John Doerr’s venture

　　capital firm created an iFund of $200 million to offer equity financing for the

　　best ideas. Magazines and newspapers that had been giving away their content for

　　free saw one last chance to put the genie of that dubious business model back

　　into the bottle. Innovative publishers created new magazines, books, and

　　learning materials just for the iPad. For example, the high-end publishing house

　　Callaway, which had produced books ranging from Madonna’s Sex to Miss Spider’s

　　Tea Party, decided to “burn the boats” and give up print altogether to focus on

　　publishing books as interactive apps. By June 2011 Apple had paid out $2.5

　　billion to app developers.

　　The iPad and other app-based digital devices heralded a fundamental shift in the

　　digital world. Back in the 1980s, going online usually meant dialing into a

　　service like AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy that charged fees for access to a

　　carefully curated walled garden filled with content plus some exit gates that

　　allowed braver users access to the Internet at large. The second phase,

　　beginning in the early 1990s, was the advent of browsers that allowed everyone

　　to freely surf the Internet using the hypertext transfer protocols of the World

　　Wide Web, which linked billions of sites. Search engines arose so that people

　　could easily find the websites they wanted. The release of the iPad portended a

　　new model. Apps resembled the walled gardens of old. The creators could charge

　　fees and offer more functions to the users who downloaded them. But the rise of

　　apps also meant that the openness and linked nature of the web were sacrificed.

　　Apps were not as easily linked or searchable. Because the iPad allowed the use

　　of both apps and web browsing, it was not at war with the web model. But it did

　　offer an alternative, for both the consumers and the creators of content.

　　Publishing and Journalism

　　With the iPod, Jobs had transformed the music business. With the iPad and its

　　App Store, he began to transform all media, from publishing to journalism to

　　television and movies.

　　Books were an obvious target, since Amazon’s Kindle had shown there was an

　　appetite for electronic books. So Apple created an iBooks Store, which sold

　　electronic books the way the iTunes Store sold songs. There was, however, a

　　slight difference in the business model. For the iTunes Store, Jobs had insisted

　　that all songs be sold at one inexpensive price, initially 99 cents. Amazon’s

　　Jeff Bezos had tried to take a similar approach with ebooks, insisting on

　　selling them for at most $9.99. Jobs came in and offered publishers what he had

　　refused to offer record companies: They could set any price they wanted for

　　their wares in the iBooks Store, and Apple would take 30%. Initially that meant

　　prices were higher than on Amazon. Why would people pay Apple more? “That won’t

　　be the case,” Jobs answered, when Walt Mossberg asked him that question at the

　　iPad launch event. “The price will be the same.” He was right.

　　The day after the iPad launch, Jobs described to me his thinking on books:

　　Amazon screwed it up. It paid the wholesale price for some books, but started

　　selling them below cost at $9.99. The publishers hated that—they thought it

　　would trash their ability to sell hardcover books at $28. So before Apple even

　　got on the scene, some booksellers were starting to withhold books from

　　Amazon. So we told the publishers, “We’ll go to the agency model, where you

　　set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more,

　　but that’s what you want anyway.” But we also asked for a guarantee that if

　　anybody else is selling the books cheaper than we are, then we can sell them

　　at the lower price too. So they went to Amazon and said, “You’re going to sign

　　an agency contract or we’re not going to give you the books.”

　　Jobs acknowledged that he was trying to have it both ways when it came to music

　　and books. He had refused to offer the music companies the agency model and

　　allow them to set their own prices. Why? Because he didn’t have to. But with

　　books he did. “We were not the first people in the books business,” he said.

　　“Given the situation that existed, what was best for us was to do this akido

　　move and end up with the agency model. And we pulled it off.”

　　Right after the iPad launch event, Jobs traveled to New York in February 2010 to

　　meet with executives in the journalism business. In two days he saw Rupert

　　Murdoch, his son James, and the management of their Wall Street Journal; Arthur

　　Sulzberger Jr. and the top executives at the New York Times; and executives at

　　Time, Fortune, and other Time Inc. magazines. “I would love to help quality

　　journalism,” he later said. “We can’t depend on bloggers for our news. We need

　　real reporting and editorial oversight more than ever. So I’d love to find a way

　　to help people create digital products where they actually can make money.”

　　Since he had gotten people to pay for music, he hoped he could do the same for

　　journalism.

　　Publishers, however, turned out to be leery of his lifeline. It meant that they

　　would have to give 30% of their revenue to Apple, but that wasn’t the biggest

　　problem. More important, the publishers feared that, under his system, they

　　would no longer have a direct relationship with their subscribers; they wouldn’t

　　have their email address and credit card number so they could bill them,

　　communicate with them, and market new products to them. Instead Apple would own

　　the customers, bill them, and have their information in its own database. And

　　because of its privacy policy, Apple would not share this information unless a

　　customer gave explicit permission to do so.

　　Jobs was particularly interested in striking a deal with the New York Times,

　　which he felt was a great newspaper in danger of declining because it had not

　　figured out how to charge for digital content. “One of my personal projects this

　　year, I’ve decided, is to try to help—whether they want it or not—the Times,” he

　　told me early in 2010. “I think it’s important to the country for them to figure

　　it out.”

　　During his New York trip, he went to dinner with fifty top Times executives in

　　the cellar private dining room at Pranna, an Asian restaurant. (He ordered a

　　mango smoothie and a plain vegan pasta, neither of which was on the menu.) There

　　he showed off the iPad and explained how important it was to find a modest price

　　point for digital content that consumers would accept. He drew a chart of

　　possible prices and volume. How many readers would they have if the Times were

　　free? They already knew the answer to that extreme on the chart, because they

　　were giving it away for free on the web already and had about twenty million

　　regular visitors. And if they made it really expensive? They had data on that

　　too; they charged print subscribers more than $300 a year and had about a

　　million of them. “You should go after the midpoint, which is about ten million

　　digital subscribers,” he told them. “And that means your digital subs should be

　　very cheap and simple, one click and $5 a month at most.”

　　When one of the Times circulation executives insisted that the paper needed the

　　email and credit card information for all of its subscribers, even if they

　　subscribed through the App Store, Jobs said that Apple would not give it out.

　　That angered the executive. It was unthinkable, he said, for the Times not to

　　have that information. “Well, you can ask them for it, but if they won’t

　　voluntarily give it to you, don’t blame me,” Jobs said. “If you don’t like it,

　　don’t use us. I’m not the one who got you in this jam. You’re the ones who’ve

　　spent the past five years giving away your paper online and not collecting

　　anyone’s credit card information.”

　　Jobs also met privately with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. “He’s a nice guy, and he’s

　　really proud of his new building, as he should be,” Jobs said later. “I talked

　　to him about what I thought he ought to do, but then nothing happened.” It took

　　a year, but in April 2011 the Times started charging for its digital edition and

　　selling some subscriptions through Apple, abiding by the policies that Jobs

　　established. It did, however, decide to charge approximately four times the $5

　　monthly charge that Jobs had suggested.

　　At the Time-Life Building, Time’s editor Rick Stengel played host. Jobs liked

　　Stengel, who had assigned a talented team led by Josh Quittner to make a robust

　　iPad version of the magazine each week. But he was upset to see Andy Serwer of

　　Fortune there. Tearing up, he told Serwer how angry he still was about Fortune’s

　　story two years earlier revealing details of his health and the stock options

　　problems. “You kicked me when I was down,” he said.

　　The bigger problem at Time Inc. was the same as the one at the Times: The

　　magazine company did not want Apple to own its subscribers and prevent it from

　　having a direct billing relationship. Time Inc. wanted to create apps that would

　　direct readers to its own website in order to buy a subscription. Apple refused.

　　When Time and other magazines submitted apps that did this, they were denied the

　　right to be in the App Store.

　　Jobs tried to negotiate personally with the CEO of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, a

　　savvy pragmatist with a no-bullshit charm to him. They had dealt with each other

　　a few years earlier over video rights for the iPod Touch; even though Jobs had

　　not been able to convince him to do a deal involving HBO’s exclusive rights to

　　show movies soon after their release, he admired Bewkes’s straight and decisive

　　style. For his part, Bewkes respected Jobs’s ability to be both a strategic

　　thinker and a master of the tiniest details. “Steve can go readily from the

　　overarching principals into the details,” he said.

　　When Jobs called Bewkes about making a deal for Time Inc. magazines on the iPad,

　　he started off by warning that the print business “sucks,” that “nobody really

　　wants your magazines,” and that Apple was offering a great opportunity to sell

　　digital subscriptions, but “your guys don’t get it.” Bewkes didn’t agree with

　　any of those premises. He said he was happy for Apple to sell digital

　　subscriptions for Time Inc. Apple’s 30% take was not the problem. “I’m telling

　　you right now, if you sell a sub for us, you can have 30%,” Bewkes told him.

　　“Well, that’s more progress than I’ve made with anybody,” Jobs replied.

　　“I have only one question,” Bewkes continued. “If you sell a subscription to my

　　magazine, and I give you the 30%, who has the subscription—you or me?”

　　“I can’t give away all the subscriber info because of Apple’s privacy policy,”

　　Jobs replied.

　　“Well, then, we have to figure something else out, because I don’t want my whole

　　subscription base to become subscribers of yours, for you to then aggregate at

　　the Apple store,” said Bewkes. “And the next thing you’ll do, once you have a

　　monopoly, is come back and tell me that my magazine shouldn’t be $4 a copy but

　　instead should be $1. If someone subscribes to our magazine, we need to know who

　　it is, we need to be able to create online communities of those people, and we

　　need the right to pitch them directly about renewing.”

　　Jobs had an easier time with Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owned the Wall

　　Street Journal, New York Post, newspapers around the world, Fox Studios, and the

　　Fox News Channel. When Jobs met with Murdoch and his team, they also pressed the

　　case that they should share ownership of the subscribers that came in through

　　the App Store. But when Jobs refused, something interesting happened. Murdoch is

　　not known as a pushover, but he knew that he did not have the leverage on this

　　issue, so he accepted Jobs’s terms. “We would prefer to own the subscribers, and

　　we pushed for that,” recalled Murdoch. “But Steve wouldn’t do a deal on those

　　terms, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s get on with it.’ We didn’t see any reason to mess

　　around. He wasn’t going to bend—and I wouldn’t have bent if I were in his

　　position—so I just said yes.”

　　Murdoch even launched a digital-only daily newspaper, The Daily, tailored

　　specifically for the iPad. It would be sold in the App Store, on the terms

　　dictated by Jobs, at 99 cents a week. Murdoch himself took a team to Cupertino

　　to show the proposed design. Not surprisingly, Jobs hated it. “Would you allow

　　our designers to help?” he asked. Murdoch accepted. “The Apple designers had a

　　crack at it,” Murdoch recalled, “and our folks went back and had another crack,

　　and ten days later we went back and showed them both, and he actually liked our

　　team’s version better. It stunned us.”

　　The Daily, which was neither tabloidy nor serious, but instead a rather

　　midmarket product like USA Today, was not very successful. But it did help

　　create an odd-couple bonding between Jobs and Murdoch. When Murdoch asked him to

　　speak at his June 2010 News Corp. annual management retreat, Jobs made an

　　exception to his rule of never doing such appearances. James Murdoch led him in

　　an after-dinner interview that lasted almost two hours. “He was very blunt and

　　critical of what newspapers were doing in technology,” Murdoch recalled. “He

　　told us we were going to find it hard to get things right, because you’re in New

　　York, and anyone who’s any good at tech works in Silicon Valley.” This did not

　　go down very well with the president of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network,

　　Gordon McLeod, who pushed back a bit. At the end, McLeod came up to Jobs and

　　said, “Thanks, it was a wonderful evening, but you probably just cost me my

　　job.” Murdoch chuckled a bit when he described the scene to me. “It ended up

　　being true,” he said. McLeod was out within three months.

　　In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox

　　News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on

　　Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told him over

　　dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is

　　constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people.

　　Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be

　　better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.” Jobs said he

　　thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder,

　　not a tearer-downer,” he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think

　　he agrees with me. I can just tell.”

　　Murdoch later said he was used to people like Jobs complaining about Fox. “He’s

　　got sort of a left-wing view on this,” he said. Jobs asked him to have his folks

　　make a reel of a week of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck shows—he thought that they

　　were more destructive than Bill O’Reilly—and Murdoch agreed to do so. Jobs later

　　told me that he was going to ask Jon Stewart’s team to put together a similar

　　reel for Murdoch to watch. “I’d be happy to see it,” Murdoch said, “but he

　　hasn’t sent it to me.”

　　Murdoch and Jobs hit it off well enough that Murdoch went to his Palo Alto house

　　for dinner twice more during the next year. Jobs joked that he had to hide the

　　dinner knives on such occasions, because he was afraid that his liberal wife was

　　going to eviscerate Murdoch when he walked in. For his part, Murdoch was

　　reported to have uttered a great line about the organic vegan dishes typically

　　served: “Eating dinner at Steve’s is a great experience, as long as you get out

　　before the local restaurants close.” Alas, when I asked Murdoch if he had ever

　　said that, he didn’t recall it.

　　One visit came early in 2011. Murdoch was due to pass through Palo Alto on

　　February 24, and he texted Jobs to tell him so. He didn’t know it was Jobs’s

　　fifty-sixth birthday, and Jobs didn’t mention it when he texted back inviting

　　him to dinner. “It was my way of making sure Laurene didn’t veto the plan,” Jobs

　　joked. “It was my birthday, so she had to let me have Rupert over.” Erin and Eve

　　were there, and Reed jogged over from Stanford near the end of the dinner. Jobs

　　showed off the designs for his planned boat, which Murdoch thought looked

　　beautiful on the inside but “a bit plain” on the outside. “It certainly shows

　　great optimism about his health that he was talking so much about building it,”

　　Murdoch later said.

　　At dinner they talked about the importance of infusing an entrepreneurial and

　　nimble culture into a company. Sony failed to do that, Murdoch said. Jobs

　　agreed. “I used to believe that a really big company couldn’t have a clear

　　corporate culture,” Jobs said. “But I now believe it can be done. Murdoch’s done

　　it. I think I’ve done it at Apple.”

　　Most of the dinner conversation was about education. Murdoch had just hired Joel

　　Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to

　　start a digital curriculum division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat

　　dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education. But Jobs

　　agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by

　　digital learning materials.

　　In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to

　　transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital

　　destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security

　　reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The

　　iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to

　　create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he

　　held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about

　　partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is

　　corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with

　　the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state

　　level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent

　　that whole process and save money.”UnknownNEW BATTLES

　　And Echoes of Old Ones

　　Google: Open versus Closed

　　A few days after he unveiled the iPad in January 2010, Jobs held a “town hall”

　　meeting with employees at Apple’s campus. Instead of exulting about their

　　transformative new product, however, he went into a rant against Google for

　　producing the rival Android operating system. Jobs was furious that Google had

　　decided to compete with Apple in the phone business. “We did not enter the

　　search business,” he said. “They entered the phone business. Make no mistake.

　　They want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” A few minutes later, after the

　　meeting moved on to another topic, Jobs returned to his tirade to attack

　　Google’s famous values slogan. “I want to go back to that other question first

　　and say one more thing. This ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, it’s bullshit.”

　　Jobs felt personally betrayed. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had been on the Apple

　　board during the development of the iPhone and iPad, and Google’s founders,

　　Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had treated him as a mentor. He felt ripped off.

　　Android’s touchscreen interface was adopting more and more of the

　　features—multi-touch, swiping, a grid of app icons—that Apple had created.

　　Jobs had tried to dissuade Google from developing Android. He had gone to

　　Google’s headquarters near Palo Alto in 2008 and gotten into a shouting match

　　with Page, Brin, and the head of the Android development team, Andy Rubin.

　　(Because Schmidt was then on the Apple board, he recused himself from

　　discussions involving the iPhone.) “I said we would, if we had good relations,

　　guarantee Google access to the iPhone and guarantee it one or two icons on the

　　home screen,” he recalled. But he also threatened that if Google continued to

　　develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue.

　　At first Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC

　　introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of

　　the iPhone’s look and feel. That was the context for Jobs’s pronouncement that

　　Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan was “bullshit.”

　　So Apple filed suit against HTC (and, by extension, Android), alleging

　　infringement of twenty of its patents. Among them were patents covering various

　　multi-touch gestures, swipe to open, double-tap to zoom, pinch and expand, and

　　the sensors that determined how a device was being held. As he sat in his house

　　in Palo Alto the week the lawsuit was filed, he became angrier than I had ever

　　seen him:

　　Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale

　　ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to,

　　and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this

　　wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m

　　willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because

　　they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android,

　　Google Docs—are shit.

　　A few days after this rant, Jobs got a call from Schmidt, who had resigned from

　　the Apple board the previous summer. He suggested they get together for coffee,

　　and they met at a café in a Palo Alto shopping center. “We spent half the time

　　talking about personal matters, then half the time on his perception that Google

　　had stolen Apple’s user interface designs,” recalled Schmidt. When it came to

　　the latter subject, Jobs did most of the talking. Google had ripped him off, he

　　said in colorful language. “We’ve got you red-handed,” he told Schmidt. “I’m not

　　interested in settling. I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I

　　won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in

　　Android, that’s all I want.” They resolved nothing.

　　Underlying the dispute was an even more fundamental issue, one that had

　　unnerving historical resonance. Google presented Android as an “open” platform;

　　its open-source code was freely available for multiple hardware makers to use on

　　whatever phones or tablets they built. Jobs, of course, had a dogmatic belief

　　that Apple should closely integrate its operating systems with its hardware. In

　　the 1980s Apple had not licensed out its Macintosh operating system, and

　　Microsoft eventually gained dominant market share by licensing its system to

　　multiple hardware makers and, in Jobs’s mind, ripping off Apple’s interface.

　　The comparison between what Microsoft wrought in the 1980s and what Google was

　　trying to do in 2010 was not exact, but it was close enough to be unsettling—and

　　infuriating. It exemplified the great debate of the digital age: closed versus

　　open, or as Jobs framed it, integrated versus fragmented. Was it better, as

　　Apple believed and as Jobs’s own controlling perfectionism almost compelled, to

　　tie the hardware and software and content handling into one tidy system that

　　assured a simple user experience? Or was it better to give users and

　　manufacturers more choice and free up avenues for more innovation, by creating

　　software systems that could be modified and used on different devices? “Steve

　　has a particular way that he wants to run Apple, and it’s the same as it was

　　twenty years ago, which is that Apple is a brilliant innovator of closed

　　systems,” Schmidt later told me. “They don’t want people to be on their platform

　　without permission. The benefits of a closed platform is control. But Google has

　　a specific belief that open is the better approach, because it leads to more

　　options and competition and consumer choice.”

　　So what did Bill Gates think as he watched Jobs, with his closed strategy, go

　　into battle against Google, as he had done against Microsoft twenty-five years

　　earlier? “There are some benefits to being more closed, in terms of how much you

　　control the experience, and certainly at times he’s had the benefit of that,”

　　Gates told me. But refusing to license the Apple iOS, he added, gave competitors

　　like Android the chance to gain greater volume. In addition, he argued,

　　competition among a variety of devices and manufacturers leads to greater

　　consumer choice and more innovation. “These companies are not all building

　　pyramids next to Central Park,” he said, poking fun at Apple’s Fifth Avenue

　　store, “but they are coming up with innovations based on competing for

　　consumers.” Most of the improvements in PCs, Gates pointed out, came because

　　consumers had a lot of choices, and that would someday be the case in the world

　　of mobile devices. “Eventually, I think, open will succeed, but that’s where I

　　come from. In the long run, the coherence thing, you can’t stay with that.”

　　Jobs believed in “the coherence thing.” His faith in a controlled and closed

　　environment remained unwavering, even as Android gained market share. “Google

　　says we exert more control than they do, that we are closed and they are open,”

　　he railed when I told him what Schmidt had said. “Well, look at the

　　results—Android’s a mess. It has different screen sizes and versions, over a

　　hundred permutations.” Even if Google’s approach might eventually win in the

　　marketplace, Jobs found it repellent. “I like being responsible for the whole

　　user experience. We do it not to make money. We do it because we want to make

　　great products, not crap like Android.”

　　Flash, the App Store, and Control

　　Jobs’s insistence on end-to-end control was manifested in other battles as well.

　　At the town hall meeting where he attacked Google, he also assailed Adobe’s

　　multimedia platform for websites, Flash, as a “buggy” battery hog made by “lazy”

　　people. The iPod and iPhone, he said, would never run Flash. “Flash is a

　　spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy performance and really bad

　　security problems,” he said to me later that week.

　　He even banned apps that made use of a compiler created by Adobe that translated

　　Flash code so that it would be compatible with Apple’s iOS. Jobs disdained the

　　use of compilers that allowed developers to write their products once and have

　　them ported to multiple operating systems. “Allowing Flash to be ported across

　　platforms means things get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator,” he

　　said. “We spend lots of effort to make our platform better, and the developer

　　doesn’t get any benefit if Adobe only works with functions that every platform

　　has. So we said that we want developers to take advantage of our better

　　features, so that their apps work better on our platform than they work on

　　anybody else’s.” On that he was right. Losing the ability to differentiate

　　Apple’s platforms—allowing them to become commoditized like HP and Dell

　　machines—would have meant death for the company.

　　There was, in addition, a more personal reason. Apple had invested in Adobe in

　　1985, and together the two companies had launched the desktop publishing

　　revolution. “I helped put Adobe on the map,” Jobs claimed. In 1999, after he

　　returned to Apple, he had asked Adobe to start making its video editing software

　　and other products for the iMac and its new operating system, but Adobe refused.

　　It focused on making its products for Windows. Soon after, its founder, John

　　Warnock, retired. “The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left,” Jobs said.

　　“He was the inventor, the person I related to. It’s been a bunch of suits since

　　then, and the company has turned out crap.”

　　When Adobe evangelists and various Flash supporters in the blogosphere attacked

　　Jobs for being too controlling, he decided to write and post an open letter.

　　Bill Campbell, his friend and board member, came by his house to go over it.

　　“Does it sound like I’m just trying to stick it to Adobe?” he asked Campbell.

　　“No, it’s facts, just put it out there,” the coach said. Most of the letter

　　focused on the technical drawbacks of Flash. But despite Campbell’s coaching,

　　Jobs couldn’t resist venting at the end about the problematic history between

　　the two companies. “Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully

　　adopt Mac OS X,” he noted.

　　Apple ended up lifting some of its restrictions on cross-platform compilers

　　later in the year, and Adobe was able to come out with a Flash authoring tool

　　that took advantage of the key features of Apple’s iOS. It was a bitter war, but

　　one in which Jobs had the better argument. In the end it pushed Adobe and other

　　developers of compilers to make better use of the iPhone and iPad interface and

　　its special features.

　　Jobs had a tougher time navigating the controversies over Apple’s desire to keep

　　tight control over which apps could be downloaded onto the iPhone and iPad.

　　Guarding against apps that contained viruses or violated the user’s privacy made

　　sense; preventing apps that took users to other websites to buy subscriptions,

　　rather than doing it through the iTunes Store, at least had a business

　　rationale. But Jobs and his team went further: They decided to ban any app that

　　defamed people, might be politically explosive, or was deemed by Apple’s censors

　　to be pornographic.

　　The problem of playing nanny became apparent when Apple rejected an app

　　featuring the animated political cartoons of Mark Fiore, on the rationale that

　　his attacks on the Bush administration’s policy on torture violated the

　　restriction against defamation. Its decision became public, and was subjected to

　　ridicule, when Fiore won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in

　　April. Apple had to reverse itself, and Jobs made a public apology. “We’re

　　guilty of making mistakes,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can, we’re

　　learning as fast as we can—but we thought this rule made sense.”

　　It was more than a mistake. It raised the specter of Apple’s controlling what

　　apps we got to see and read, at least if we wanted to use an iPad or iPhone.

　　Jobs seemed in danger of becoming the Orwellian Big Brother he had gleefully

　　destroyed in Apple’s “1984” Macintosh ad. He took the issue seriously. One day

　　he called the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to discuss how to draw lines

　　without looking like a censor. He asked Friedman to head an advisory group to

　　help come up with guidelines, but the columnist’s publisher said it would be a

　　conflict of interest, and no such committee was formed.

　　The pornography ban also caused problems. “We believe we have a moral

　　responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone,” Jobs declared in an email to a

　　customer. “Folks who want porn can buy an Android.”

　　This prompted an email exchange with Ryan Tate, the editor of the tech gossip

　　site Valleywag. Sipping a stinger cocktail one evening, Tate shot off an email

　　to Jobs decrying Apple’s heavy-handed control over which apps passed muster. “If

　　Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company?” Tate asked. “Would he

　　think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution’? Revolutions are

　　about freedom.”

　　To Tate’s surprise, Jobs responded a few hours later, after midnight. “Yep,” he

　　said, “freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs

　　that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a

　　changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away.

　　It is.”

　　In his reply, Tate offered some thoughts on Flash and other topics, then

　　returned to the censorship issue. “And you know what? I don’t want ‘freedom from

　　porn.’ Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree.”

　　“You might care more about porn when you have kids,” replied Jobs. “It’s not

　　about freedom, it’s about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users.” At

　　the end he added a zinger: “By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do

　　you create anything, or just criticize others’ work and belittle their

　　motivations?”

　　Tate admitted to being impressed. “Rare is the CEO who will spar one-on-one with

　　customers and bloggers like this,” he wrote. “Jobs deserves big credit for

　　breaking the mold of the typical American executive, and not just because his

　　company makes such hugely superior products: Jobs not only built and then

　　rebuilt his company around some very strong opinions about digital life, but

　　he’s willing to defend them in public. Vigorously. Bluntly. At two in the

　　morning on a weekend.” Many in the blogosphere agreed, and they sent Jobs emails

　　praising his feistiness. Jobs was proud as well; he forwarded his exchange with

　　Tate and some of the kudos to me.

　　Still, there was something unnerving about Apple’s decreeing that those who

　　bought their products shouldn’t look at controversial political cartoons or, for

　　that matter, porn. The humor site eSarcasm.com launched a “Yes, Steve, I want

　　porn” web campaign. “We are dirty, sex-obsessed miscreants who need access to

　　smut 24 hours a day,” the site declared. “Either that, or we just enjoy the idea

　　of an uncensored, open society where a techno-dictator doesn’t decide what we

　　can and cannot see.”

　　At the time Jobs and Apple were engaged in a battle with Valleywag’s affiliated

　　website, Gizmodo, which had gotten hold of a test version of the unreleased

　　iPhone 4 that a hapless Apple engineer had left in a bar. When the police,

　　responding to Apple’s complaint, raided the house of the reporter, it raised the

　　question of whether control freakiness had combined with arrogance.

　　Jon Stewart was a friend of Jobs and an Apple fan. Jobs had visited him

　　privately in February when he took his trip to New York to meet with media

　　executives. But that didn’t stop Stewart from going after him on The Daily Show.

　　“It wasn’t supposed to be this way! Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one!”

　　Stewart said, only half-jokingly. Behind him, the word “appholes” appeared on

　　the screen. “You guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. But now, are you

　　becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about

　　overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”

　　By late spring the issue was being discussed among board members. “There is an

　　arrogance,” Art Levinson told me over lunch just after he had raised it at a

　　meeting. “It ties into Steve’s personality. He can react viscerally and lay out

　　his convictions in a forceful manner.” Such arrogance was fine when Apple was

　　the feisty underdog. But now Apple was dominant in the mobile market. “We need

　　to make the transition to being a big company and dealing with the hubris

　　issue,” said Levinson. Al Gore also talked about the problem at board meetings.

　　“The context for Apple is changing dramatically,” he recounted. “It’s not

　　hammer-thrower against Big Brother. Now Apple’s big, and people see it as

　　arrogant.” Jobs became defensive when the topic was raised. “He’s still

　　adjusting to it,” said Gore. “He’s better at being the underdog than being a

　　humble giant.”

　　Jobs had little patience for such talk. The reason Apple was being criticized,

　　he told me then, was that “companies like Google and Adobe are lying about us

　　and trying to tear us down.” What did he think of the suggestion that Apple

　　sometimes acted arrogantly? “I’m not worried about that,” he said, “because

　　we’re not arrogant.”

　　Antennagate: Design versus Engineering

　　In many consumer product companies, there’s tension between the designers, who

　　want to make a product look beautiful, and the engineers, who need to make sure

　　it fulfills its functional requirements. At Apple, where Jobs pushed both design

　　and engineering to the edge, that tension was even greater.

　　When he and design director Jony Ive became creative coconspirators back in

　　1997, they tended to view the qualms expressed by engineers as evidence of a

　　can’t-do attitude that needed to be overcome. Their faith that awesome design

　　could force superhuman feats of engineering was reinforced by the success of the

　　iMac and iPod. When engineers said something couldn’t be done, Ive and Jobs

　　pushed them to try, and usually they succeeded. There were occasional small

　　problems. The iPod Nano, for example, was prone to getting scratched because Ive

　　believed that a clear coating would lessen the purity of his design. But that

　　was not a crisis.

　　When it came to designing the iPhone, Ive’s design desires bumped into a

　　fundamental law of physics that could not be changed even by a reality

　　distortion field. Metal is not a great material to put near an antenna. As

　　Michael Faraday showed, electromagnetic waves flow around the surface of metal,

　　not through it. So a metal enclosure around a phone can create what is known as

　　a Faraday cage, diminishing the signals that get in or out. The original iPhone

　　started with a plastic band at the bottom, but Ive thought that would wreck the

　　design integrity and asked that there be an aluminum rim all around. After that

　　ended up working out, Ive designed the iPhone 4 with a steel rim. The steel

　　would be the structural support, look really sleek, and serve as part of the

　　phone’s antenna.

　　There were significant challenges. In order to serve as an antenna, the steel

　　rim had to have a tiny gap. But if a person covered that gap with a finger or

　　sweaty palm, there could be some signal loss. The engineers suggested a clear

　　coating over the metal to help prevent this, but again Ive felt that this would

　　detract from the brushed-metal look. The issue was presented to Jobs at various

　　meetings, but he thought the engineers were crying wolf. You can make this work,

　　he said. And so they did.

　　And it worked, almost perfectly. But not totally perfectly. When the iPhone 4

　　was released in June 2010, it looked awesome, but a problem soon became evident:

　　If you held the phone a certain way, especially using your left hand so your

　　palm covered the tiny gap, you could lose your connection. It occurred with

　　perhaps one in a hundred calls. Because Jobs insisted on keeping his unreleased

　　products secret (even the phone that Gizmodo scored in a bar had a fake case

　　around it), the iPhone 4 did not go through the live testing that most

　　electronic devices get. So the flaw was not caught before the massive rush to

　　buy it began. “The question is whether the twin policies of putting design in

　　front of engineering and having a policy of supersecrecy surrounding unreleased

　　products helped Apple,” Tony Fadell said later. “On the whole, yes, but

　　unchecked power is a bad thing, and that’s what happened.”

　　Had it not been the Apple iPhone 4, a product that had everyone transfixed, the

　　issue of a few extra dropped calls would not have made news. But it became known

　　as “Antennagate,” and it boiled to a head in early July, when Consumer Reports

　　did some rigorous tests and said that it could not recommend the iPhone 4

　　because of the antenna problem.

　　Jobs was in Kona Village, Hawaii, with his family when the issue arose. At first

　　he was defensive. Art Levinson was in constant contact by phone, and Jobs

　　insisted that the problem stemmed from Google and Motorola making mischief.

　　“They want to shoot Apple down,” he said.

　　Levinson urged a little humility. “Let’s try to figure out if there’s something

　　wrong,” he said. When he again mentioned the perception that Apple was arrogant,

　　Jobs didn’t like it. It went against his black-white, right-wrong way of viewing

　　the world. Apple was a company of principle, he felt. If others failed to see

　　that, it was their fault, not a reason for Apple to play humble.

　　Jobs’s second reaction was to be hurt. He took the criticism personally and

　　became emotionally anguished. “At his core, he doesn’t do things that he thinks

　　are blatantly wrong, like some pure pragmatists in our business,” Levinson said.

　　“So if he feels he’s right, he will just charge ahead rather than question

　　himself.” Levinson urged him not to get depressed. But Jobs did. “Fuck this,

　　it’s not worth it,” he told Levinson. Finally Tim Cook was able to shake him out

　　of his lethargy. He quoted someone as saying that Apple was becoming the new

　　Microsoft, complacent and arrogant. The next day Jobs changed his attitude.

　　“Let’s get to the bottom of this,” he said.

　　When the data about dropped calls were assembled from AT&T, Jobs realized there

　　was a problem, even if it was more minor than people were making it seem. So he

　　flew back from Hawaii. But before he left, he made some phone calls. It was time

　　to gather a couple of trusted old hands, wise men who had been with him during

　　the original Macintosh days thirty years earlier.

　　His first call was to Regis McKenna, the public relations guru. “I’m coming back

　　from Hawaii to deal with this antenna thing, and I need to bounce some stuff off

　　of you,” Jobs told him. They agreed to meet at the Cupertino boardroom at 1:30

　　the next afternoon. The second call was to the adman Lee Clow. He had tried to

　　retire from the Apple account, but Jobs liked having him around. His colleague

　　James Vincent was summoned as well.

　　Jobs also decided to bring his son Reed, then a high school senior, back with

　　him from Hawaii. “I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I

　　want you to be in every single one because you’ll learn more in those two days

　　than you would in two years at business school,” he told him. “You’re going to

　　be in the room with the best people in the world making really tough decisions

　　and get to see how the sausage is made.” Jobs got a little misty-eyed when he

　　recalled the experience. “I would go through that all again just for that

　　opportunity to have him see me at work,” he said. “He got to see what his dad

　　does.”

　　They were joined by Katie Cotton, the steady public relations chief at Apple,

　　and seven other top executives. The meeting lasted all afternoon. “It was one of

　　the greatest meetings of my life,” Jobs later said. He began by laying out all

　　the data they had gathered. “Here are the facts. So what should we do about it?”

　　McKenna was the most calm and straightforward. “Just lay out the truth, the

　　data,” he said. “Don’t appear arrogant, but appear firm and confident.” Others,

　　including Vincent, pushed Jobs to be more apologetic, but McKenna said no.

　　“Don’t go into the press conference with your tail between your legs,” he

　　advised. “You should just say: ‘Phones aren’t perfect, and we’re not perfect.

　　We’re human and doing the best we can, and here’s the data.’” That became the

　　strategy. When the topic turned to the perception of arrogance, McKenna urged

　　him not to worry too much. “I don’t think it would work to try to make Steve

　　look humble,” McKenna explained later. “As Steve says about himself, ‘What you

　　see is what you get.’”

　　At the press event that Friday, held in Apple’s auditorium, Jobs followed

　　McKenna’s advice. He did not grovel or apologize, yet he was able to defuse the

　　problem by showing that Apple understood it and would try to make it right. Then

　　he changed the framework of the discussion, saying that all cell phones had some

　　problems. Later he told me that he had sounded a bit “too annoyed” at the event,

　　but in fact he was able to strike a tone that was unemotional and

　　straightforward. He captured it in four short, declarative sentences: “We’re not

　　perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users

　　happy.”

　　If anyone was unhappy, he said, they could return the phone (the return rate

　　turned out to be 1.7%, less than a third of the return rate for the iPhone 3GS

　　or most other phones) or get a free bumper case from Apple. He went on to report

　　data showing that other mobile phones had similar problems. That was not totally

　　true. Apple’s antenna design made it slightly worse than most other phones,

　　including earlier versions of the iPhone. But it was true that the media frenzy

　　over the iPhone 4’s dropped calls was overblown. “This is blown so out of

　　proportion that it’s incredible,” he said. Instead of being appalled that he

　　didn’t grovel or order a recall, most customers realized that he was right.

　　The wait list for the phone, which was already sold out, went from two weeks to

　　three. It remained the company’s fastest-selling product ever. The media debate

　　shifted to the issue of whether Jobs was right to assert that other smartphones

　　had the same antenna problems. Even if the answer was no, that was a better

　　story to face than one about whether the iPhone 4 was a defective dud.

　　Some media observers were incredulous. “In a bravura demonstration of

　　stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to

　　the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread

　　the blame among other smartphone makers,” Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote.

　　“This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management

　　about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get

　　away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?” Wolff

　　attributed it to Jobs’s mesmerizing effect as “the last charismatic individual.”

　　Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive recalls,

　　but Jobs didn’t have to. “The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the

　　ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really

　　works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding

　　what is meaningful and what is trivial.”

　　Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert, was also incredulous, but

　　far more admiring. He wrote a blog entry a few days later (which Jobs proudly

　　emailed around) that marveled at how Jobs’s “high ground maneuver” was destined

　　to be studied as a new public relations standard. “Apple’s response to the

　　iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations playbook, because Jobs

　　decided to rewrite the playbook,” Adams wrote. “If you want to know what genius

　　looks like, study Jobs’ words.” By proclaiming up front that phones are not

　　perfect, Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable

　　assertion. “If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 to all

　　smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product

　　so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But

　　as soon as the context is changed to ‘all smartphones have problems,’ the humor

　　opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.”

　　Here Comes the Sun

　　There were a few things that needed to be resolved for the career of Steve Jobs

　　to be complete. Among them was an end to the Thirty Years’ War with the band he

　　loved, the Beatles. In 2007 Apple had settled its trademark battle with Apple

　　Corps, the holding company of the Beatles, which had first sued the fledgling

　　computer company over use of the name in 1978. But that still did not get the

　　Beatles into the iTunes Store. The band was the last major holdout, primarily

　　because it had not resolved with EMI music, which owned most of its songs, how

　　to handle the digital rights.

　　By the summer of 2010 the Beatles and EMI had sorted things out, and a

　　four-person summit was held in the boardroom in Cupertino. Jobs and his vice

　　president for the iTunes Store, Eddy Cue, played host to Jeff Jones, who managed

　　the Beatles’ interests, and Roger Faxon, the chief of EMI music. Now that the

　　Beatles were ready to go digital, what could Apple offer to make that milestone

　　special? Jobs had been anticipating this day for a long time. In fact he and his

　　advertising team, Lee Clow and James Vincent, had mocked up some ads and

　　commercials three years earlier when strategizing on how to lure the Beatles on

　　board.

　　“Steve and I thought about all the things that we could possibly do,” Cue

　　recalled. That included taking over the front page of the iTunes Store, buying

　　billboards featuring the best photographs of the band, and running a series of

　　television ads in classic Apple style. The topper was offering a $149 box set

　　that included all thirteen Beatles studio albums, the two-volume “Past Masters”

　　collection, and a nostalgia-inducing video of the 1964 Washington Coliseum

　　concert.

　　Once they reached an agreement in principle, Jobs personally helped choose the

　　photographs for the ads. Each commercial ended with a still black-and-white shot

　　of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, young and smiling, in a recording studio

　　looking down at a piece of music. It evoked the old photographs of Jobs and

　　Wozniak looking at an Apple circuit board. “Getting the Beatles on iTunes was

　　the culmination of why we got into the music business,” said Cue.UnknownTO INFINITY

　　The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond

　　The iPad 2

　　Even before the iPad went on sale, Jobs was thinking about what should be in the

　　iPad 2. It needed front and back cameras—everyone knew that was coming—and he

　　definitely wanted it to be thinner. But there was a peripheral issue that he

　　focused on that most people hadn’t thought about: The cases that people used

　　covered the beautiful lines of the iPad and detracted from the screen. They made

　　fatter what should be thinner. They put a pedestrian cloak on a device that

　　should be magical in all of its aspects.

　　Around that time he read an article about magnets, cut it out, and handed it to

　　Jony Ive. The magnets had a cone of attraction that could be precisely focused.

　　Perhaps they could be used to align a detachable cover. That way, it could snap

　　onto the front of an iPad but not have to engulf the entire device. One of the

　　guys in Ive’s group worked out how to make a detachable cover that could connect

　　with a magnetic hinge. When you began to open it, the screen would pop to life

　　like the face of a tickled baby, and then the cover could fold into a stand.

　　It was not high-tech; it was purely mechanical. But it was enchanting. It also

　　was another example of Jobs’s desire for end-to-end integration: The cover and

　　the iPad had been designed together so that the magnets and hinge all connected

　　seamlessly. The iPad 2 would have many improvements, but this cheeky little

　　cover, which most other CEOs would never have bothered with, was the one that

　　would elicit the most smiles.

　　Because Jobs was on another medical leave, he was not expected to be at the

　　launch of the iPad 2, scheduled for March 2, 2011, in San Francisco. But when

　　the invitations were sent out, he told me that I should try to be there. It was

　　the usual scene: top Apple executives in the front row, Tim Cook eating energy

　　bars, and the sound system blaring the appropriate Beatles songs, building up to

　　“You Say You Want a Revolution” and “Here Comes the Sun.” Reed Jobs arrived at

　　the last minute with two rather wide-eyed freshman dorm mates.

　　“We’ve been working on this product for a while, and I just didn’t want to miss

　　today,” Jobs said as he ambled onstage looking scarily gaunt but with a jaunty

　　smile. The crowd erupted in whoops, hollers, and a standing ovation.

　　He began his demo of the iPad 2 by showing off the new cover. “This time, the

　　case and the product were designed together,” he explained. Then he moved on to

　　address a criticism that had been rankling him because it had some merit: The

　　original iPad had been better at consuming content than at creating it. So Apple

　　had adapted its two best creative applications for the Macintosh, GarageBand and

　　iMovie, and made powerful versions available for the iPad. Jobs showed how easy

　　it was to compose and orchestrate a song, or put music and special effects into

　　your home videos, and post or share such creations using the new iPad.

　　Once again he ended his presentation with the slide showing the intersection of

　　Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. And this time he gave one of the

　　clearest expressions of his credo, that true creativity and simplicity come from

　　integrating the whole widget—hardware and software, and for that matter content

　　and covers and salesclerks—rather than allowing things to be open and

　　fragmented, as happened in the world of Windows PCs and was now happening with

　　Android devices:

　　It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s

　　technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes

　　our heart sing. Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. Folks

　　are rushing into this tablet market, and they’re looking at it as the next PC,

　　in which the hardware and the software are done by different companies. Our

　　experience, and every bone in our body, says that is not the right approach.

　　These are post-PC devices that need to be even more intuitive and easier to

　　use than a PC, and where the software and the hardware and the applications

　　need to be intertwined in an even more seamless way than they are on a PC. We

　　think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in our

　　organization, to build these kinds of products.

　　It was an architecture that was bred not just into the organization he had

　　built, but into his own soul.

　　After the launch event, Jobs was energized. He came to the Four Seasons hotel to

　　join me, his wife, and Reed, plus Reed’s two Stanford pals, for lunch. For a

　　change he was eating, though still with some pickiness. He ordered

　　fresh-squeezed juice, which he sent back three times, declaring that each new

　　offering was from a bottle, and a pasta primavera, which he shoved away as

　　inedible after one taste. But then he ate half of my crab Louie salad and

　　ordered a full one for himself, followed by a bowl of ice cream. The indulgent

　　hotel was even able to produce a glass of juice that finally met his standards.

　　At his house the following day he was still on a high. He was planning to fly to

　　Kona Village the next day, alone, and I asked to see what he had put on his iPad

　　2 for the trip. There were three movies: Chinatown, The Bourne Ultimatum, and

　　Toy Story 3. More revealingly, there was just one book that he had downloaded:

　　The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he

　　had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year

　　ever since.

　　Midway through the morning he decided he wanted to eat something. He was still

　　too weak to drive, so I drove him to a café in a shopping mall. It was closed,

　　but the owner was used to Jobs knocking on the door at off-hours, and he happily

　　let us in. “He’s taken on a mission to try to fatten me up,” Jobs joked. His

　　doctors had pushed him to eat eggs as a source of high-quality protein, and he

　　ordered an omelet. “Living with a disease like this, and all the pain,

　　constantly reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to

　　your brain if you’re not careful,” he said. “You don’t make plans more than a

　　year out, and that’s bad. You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live

　　for many years.”

　　An example of this magical thinking was his plan to build a luxurious yacht.

　　Before his liver transplant, he and his family used to rent a boat for

　　vacations, traveling to Mexico, the South Pacific, or the Mediterranean. On many

　　of these cruises, Jobs got bored or began to hate the design of the boat, so

　　they would cut the trip short and fly to Kona Village. But sometimes the cruise

　　worked well. “The best vacation I’ve ever been on was when we went down the

　　coast of Italy, then to Athens—which is a pit, but the Parthenon is

　　mind-blowing—and then to Ephesus in Turkey, where they have these ancient public

　　lavatories in marble with a place in the middle for musicians to serenade.” When

　　they got to Istanbul, he hired a history professor to give his family a tour. At

　　the end they went to a Turkish bath, where the professor’s lecture gave Jobs an

　　insight about the globalization of youth:

　　I had a real revelation. We were all in robes, and they made some Turkish

　　coffee for us. The professor explained how the coffee was made very different

　　from anywhere else, and I realized, “So fucking what?” Which kids even in

　　Turkey give a shit about Turkish coffee? All day I had looked at young people

　　in Istanbul. They were all drinking what every other kid in the world drinks,

　　and they were wearing clothes that look like they were bought at the Gap, and

　　they are all using cell phones. They were like kids everywhere else. It hit me

　　that, for young people, this whole world is the same now. When we’re making

　　products, there is no such thing as a Turkish phone, or a music player that

　　young people in Turkey would want that’s different from one young people

　　elsewhere would want. We’re just one world now.

　　After the joy of that cruise, Jobs had amused himself by beginning to design,

　　and then repeatedly redesigning, a boat he said he wanted to build someday. When

　　he got sick again in 2009, he almost canceled the project. “I didn’t think I

　　would be alive when it got done,” he recalled. “But that made me so sad, and I

　　decided that working on the design was fun to do, and maybe I have a shot at

　　being alive when it’s done. If I stop work on the boat and then I make it alive

　　for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I’ve kept going.”

　　After our omelets at the café, we went back to his house and he showed me all of

　　the models and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek

　　and minimalist. The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any

　　accoutrements. As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost

　　floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass

　　that were forty feet long and ten feet high. He had gotten the chief engineer of

　　the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural

　　support.

　　By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders

　　Feadship, but Jobs was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s

　　possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat,” he said. “But I

　　have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”

　　He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few

　　days later, and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her

　　as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re

　　getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling

　　about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and

　　beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared

　　up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he

　　ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he

　　could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said.

　　“I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.”

　　Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or

　　birthdays. But in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten

　　married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back

　　there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So

　　he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite where he and

　　Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for

　　another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty

　　years, please take it, it’s yours.’”

　　He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints

　　made on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his

　　iPhone, he found the note that he had composed to be included in the box and

　　read it aloud:

　　We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our

　　intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the

　　Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad

　　times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much

　　together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older,

　　wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys,

　　sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have

　　never returned to the ground.

　　By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed

　　himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his

　　kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.”

　　iCloud

　　In 2001 Jobs had a vision: Your personal computer would serve as a “digital hub”

　　for a variety of lifestyle devices, such as music players, video recorders,

　　phones, and tablets. This played to Apple’s strength of creating end-to-end

　　products that were simple to use. The company was thus transformed from a

　　high-end niche computer company to the most valuable technology company in the

　　world.

　　By 2008 Jobs had developed a vision for the next wave of the digital era. In the

　　future, he believed, your desktop computer would no longer serve as the hub for

　　your content. Instead the hub would move to “the cloud.” In other words, your

　　content would be stored on remote servers managed by a company you trusted, and

　　it would be available for you to use on any device, anywhere. It would take him

　　three years to get it right.

　　He began with a false step. In the summer of 2008 he launched a product called

　　MobileMe, an expensive ($99 per year) subscription service that allowed you to

　　store your address book, documents, pictures, videos, email, and calendar

　　remotely in the cloud and to sync them with any device. In theory, you could go

　　to your iPhone or any computer and access all aspects of your digital life.

　　There was, however, a big problem: The service, to use Jobs’s terminology,

　　sucked. It was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and other data got

　　lost randomly in the ether. “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be Reliable,”

　　was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s review in the Wall Street Journal.

　　Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple

　　campus, stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed

　　to do?” After the team members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why

　　the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Over the next half hour he continued to berate

　　them. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. “You should hate each

　　other for having let each other down. Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing

　　good things about us.” In front of the whole audience, he got rid of the leader

　　of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, who oversaw all Internet

　　content at Apple. As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky reported in a dissection of the

　　Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly enforced.”

　　By 2010 it was clear that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others were aiming to

　　be the company that could best store all of your content and data in the cloud

　　and sync it on your various devices. So Jobs redoubled his efforts. As he

　　explained it to me that fall:

　　We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the

　　cloud—streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and

　　information, and maybe even your medical data. Apple was the first to have the

　　insight about your computer becoming a digital hub. So we wrote all of these

　　apps—iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes—and tied in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone

　　and iPad, and it’s worked brilliantly. But over the next few years, the hub is

　　going to move from your computer into the cloud. So it’s the same digital hub

　　strategy, but the hub’s in a different place. It means you will always have

　　access to your content and you won’t have to sync.

　　It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton

　　Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something

　　are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be

　　left behind. I’m going to take MobileMe and make it free, and we’re going to

　　make syncing content simple. We are building a server farm in North Carolina.

　　We can provide all the syncing you need, and that way we can lock in the

　　customer.

　　Jobs discussed this vision at his Monday morning meetings, and gradually it was

　　refined to a new strategy. “I sent emails to groups of people at 2 a.m. and

　　batted things around,” he recalled. “We think about this a lot because it’s not

　　a job, it’s our life.” Although some board members, including Al Gore,

　　questioned the idea of making MobileMe free, they supported it. It would be

　　their strategy for attracting customers into Apple’s orbit for the next decade.

　　The new service was named iCloud, and Jobs unveiled it in his keynote address to

　　Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2011. He was still on medical

　　leave and, for some days in May, had been hospitalized with infections and pain.

　　Some close friends urged him not to make the presentation, which would involve

　　lots of preparation and rehearsals. But the prospect of ushering in another

　　tectonic shift in the digital age seemed to energize him.

　　When he came onstage at the San Francisco Convention Center, he was wearing a

　　VONROSEN black cashmere sweater on top of his usual Issey Miyake black

　　turtleneck, and he had thermal underwear beneath his blue jeans. But he looked

　　more gaunt than ever. The crowd gave him a prolonged standing ovation—“That

　　always helps, and I appreciate it,” he said—but within minutes Apple’s stock

　　dropped more than $4, to $340. He was making a heroic effort, but he looked

　　weak.

　　He handed the stage over to Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall to demo the new

　　operating systems for Macs and mobile devices, then came back on to show off

　　iCloud himself. “About ten years ago, we had one of our most important

　　insights,” he said. “The PC was going to become the hub for your digital life.

　　Your videos, your photos, your music. But it has broken down in the last few

　　years. Why?” He riffed about how hard it was to get all of your content synced

　　to each of your devices. If you have a song you’ve downloaded on your iPad, a

　　picture you’ve taken on your iPhone, and a video you’ve stored on your computer,

　　you can end up feeling like an old-fashioned switchboard operator as you plug

　　USB cables into and out of things to get the content shared. “Keeping these

　　devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he said to great laughter. “We have a

　　solution. It’s our next big insight. We are going to demote the PC and the Mac

　　to be just a device, and we are going to move the digital hub into the cloud.”

　　Jobs was well aware that this “big insight” was in fact not really new. Indeed

　　he joked about Apple’s previous attempt: “You may think, Why should I believe

　　them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe.” The audience laughed nervously.

　　“Let me just say it wasn’t our finest hour.” But as he demonstrated iCloud, it

　　was clear that it would be better. Mail, contacts, and calendar entries synced

　　instantly. So did apps, photos, books, and documents. Most impressively, Jobs

　　and Eddy Cue had made deals with the music companies (unlike the folks at Google

　　and Amazon). Apple would have eighteen million songs on its cloud servers. If

　　you had any of these on any of your devices or computers—whether you had bought

　　it legally or pirated it—Apple would let you access a high-quality version of it

　　on all of your devices without having to go through the time and effort to

　　upload it to the cloud. “It all just works,” he said.

　　That simple concept—that everything would just work seamlessly—was, as always,

　　Apple’s competitive advantage. Microsoft had been advertising “Cloud Power” for

　　more than a year, and three years earlier its chief software architect, the

　　legendary Ray Ozzie, had issued a rallying cry to the company: “Our aspiration

　　is that individuals will only need to license their media once, and use any of

　　their . . . devices to access and enjoy their media.” But Ozzie had quit

　　Microsoft at the end of 2010, and the company’s cloud computing push was never

　　manifested in consumer devices. Amazon and Google both offered cloud services in

　　2011, but neither company had the ability to integrate the hardware and software

　　and content of a variety of devices. Apple controlled every link in the chain

　　and designed them all to work together: the devices, computers, operating

　　systems, and application software, along with the sale and storage of the

　　content.

　　Of course, it worked seamlessly only if you were using an Apple device and

　　stayed within Apple’s gated garden. That produced another benefit for Apple:

　　customer stickiness. Once you began using iCloud, it would be difficult to

　　switch to a Kindle or Android device. Your music and other content would not

　　sync to them; in fact they might not even work. It was the culmination of three

　　decades spent eschewing open systems. “We thought about whether we should do a

　　music client for Android,” Jobs told me over breakfast the next morning. “We put

　　iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of

　　putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I

　　don’t want to make Android users happy.”

　　A New Campus

　　When Jobs was thirteen, he had looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book, called

　　him to score a part he needed for a frequency counter he was trying to build,

　　and ended up getting a summer job at the instruments division of

　　Hewlett-Packard. That same year HP bought some land in Cupertino to expand its

　　calculator division. Wozniak went to work there, and it was on this site that he

　　designed the Apple I and Apple II during his moonlighting hours.

　　When HP decided in 2010 to abandon its Cupertino campus, which was just about a

　　mile east of Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters, Jobs quietly arranged to

　　buy it and the adjoining property. He admired the way that Hewlett and Packard

　　had built a lasting company, and he prided himself on having done the same at

　　Apple. Now he wanted a showcase headquarters, something that no West Coast

　　technology company had. He eventually accumulated 150 acres, much of which had

　　been apricot orchards when he was a boy, and threw himself into what would

　　become a legacy project that combined his passion for design with his passion

　　for creating an enduring company. “I want to leave a signature campus that

　　expresses the values of the company for generations,” he said.

　　He hired what he considered to be the best architectural firm in the world, that

　　of Sir Norman Foster, which had done smartly engineered buildings such as the

　　restored Reichstag in Berlin and 30 St. Mary Axe in London. Not surprisingly,

　　Jobs got so involved in the planning, both the vision and the details, that it

　　became almost impossible to settle on a final design. This was to be his lasting

　　edifice, and he wanted to get it right. Foster’s firm assigned fifty architects

　　to the team, and every three weeks throughout 2010 they showed Jobs revised

　　models and options. Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes

　　entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives.

　　When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building

　　was shaped like a huge winding racetrack made of three joined semicircles around

　　a large central courtyard. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the

　　interior had rows of office pods that allowed the sunlight to stream down the

　　aisles. “It permits serendipitous and fluid meeting spaces,” he said, “and

　　everybody gets to participate in the sunlight.”

　　The next time he showed me the plans, a month later, we were in Apple’s large

　　conference room across from his office, where a model of the proposed building

　　covered the table. He had made a major change. The pods would all be set back

　　from the windows so that long corridors would be bathed in sun. These would also

　　serve as the common spaces. There was a debate with some of the architects, who

　　wanted to allow the windows to be opened. Jobs had never liked the idea of

　　people being able to open things. “That would just allow people to screw things

　　up,” he declared. On that, as on other details, he prevailed.

　　When he got home that evening, Jobs showed off the drawings at dinner, and Reed

　　joked that the aerial view reminded him of male genitalia. His father dismissed

　　the comment as reflecting the mind-set of a teenager. But the next day he

　　mentioned the comment to the architects. “Unfortunately, once I’ve told you

　　that, you’re never going to be able to erase that image from your mind,” he

　　said. By the next time I visited, the shape had been changed to a simple circle.

　　The new design meant that there would not be a straight piece of glass in the

　　building. All would be curved and seamlessly joined. Jobs had long been

　　fascinated with glass, and his experience demanding huge custom panes for

　　Apple’s retail stores made him confident that it would be possible to make

　　massive curved pieces in quantity. The planned center courtyard was eight

　　hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length

　　of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how

　　it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome. One of his lingering memories was

　　of the orchards that had once dominated the area, so he hired a senior arborist

　　from Stanford and decreed that 80% of the property would be landscaped in a

　　natural manner, with six thousand trees. “I asked him to make sure to include a

　　new set of apricot orchards,” Jobs recalled. “You used to see them everywhere,

　　even on the corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley.”

　　By June 2011 the plans for the four-story, three-million-square-foot building,

　　which would hold more than twelve thousand employees, were ready to unveil. He

　　decided to do so in a quiet and unpublicized appearance before the Cupertino

　　City Council on the day after he had announced iCloud at the Worldwide

　　Developers Conference.

　　Even though he had little energy, he had a full schedule that day. Ron Johnson,

　　who had developed Apple’s stores and run them for more than a decade, had

　　decided to accept an offer to be the CEO of J.C. Penney, and he came by Jobs’s

　　house in the morning to discuss his departure. Then Jobs and I went into Palo

　　Alto to a small yogurt and oatmeal café called Fraiche, where he talked

　　animatedly about possible future Apple products. Later that day he was driven to

　　Santa Clara for the quarterly meeting that Apple had with top Intel executives,

　　where they discussed the possibility of using Intel chips in future mobile

　　devices. That night U2 was playing at the Oakland Coliseum, and Jobs had

　　considered going. Instead he decided to use that evening to show his plans to

　　the Cupertino Council.

　　Arriving without an entourage or any fanfare, and looking relaxed in the same

　　black sweater he had worn for his developers conference speech, he stood on a

　　podium with clicker in hand and spent twenty minutes showing slides of the

　　design to council members. When a rendering of the sleek, futuristic, perfectly

　　circular building appeared on the screen, he paused and smiled. “It’s like a

　　spaceship has landed,” he said. A few moments later he added, “I think we have a

　　shot at building the best office building in the world.”

　　The following Friday, Jobs sent an email to a colleague from the distant past,

　　Ann Bowers, the widow of Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce. She had been Apple’s human

　　resources director and den mother in the early 1980s, in charge of reprimanding

　　Jobs after his tantrums and tending to the wounds of his coworkers. Jobs asked

　　if she would come see him the next day. Bowers happened to be in New York, but

　　she came by his house that Sunday when she returned. By then he was sick again,

　　in pain and without much energy, but he was eager to show her the renderings of

　　the new headquarters. “You should be proud of Apple,” he said. “You should be

　　proud of what we built.”

　　Then he looked at her and asked, intently, a question that almost floored her:

　　“Tell me, what was I like when I was young?”

　　Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very

　　difficult,” she replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The

　　journey is the reward.’ That turned out to be true.”

　　“Yes,” Jobs answered. “I did learn some things along the way.” Then, a few

　　minutes later, he repeated it, as if to reassure Bowers and himself. “I did

　　learn some things. I really did.”UnknownROUND THREE

　　The Twilight Struggle

　　Family Ties

　　Jobs had an aching desire to make it to his son’s graduation from high school in

　　June 2010. “When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or

　　whatever, which was that I really wanted to see Reed graduate, and that got me

　　through 2009,” he said. As a senior, Reed looked eerily like his father at

　　eighteen, with a knowing and slightly rebellious smile, intense eyes, and a

　　shock of dark hair. But from his mother he had inherited a sweetness and

　　painfully sensitive empathy that his father lacked. He was demonstrably

　　affectionate and eager to please. Whenever his father was sitting sullenly at

　　the kitchen table and staring at the floor, which happened often when he was

　　ailing, the only thing sure to cause his eyes to brighten was Reed walking in.

　　Reed adored his father. Soon after I started working on this book, he dropped in

　　to where I was staying and, as his father often did, suggested we take a walk.

　　He told me, with an intensely earnest look, that his father was not a cold

　　profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a love of what he did and a

　　pride in the products he was making.

　　After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, Reed began spending his summers working in

　　a Stanford oncology lab doing DNA sequencing to find genetic markers for colon

　　cancer. In one experiment, he traced how mutations go through families. “One of

　　the very few silver linings about me getting sick is that Reed’s gotten to spend

　　a lot of time studying with some very good doctors,” Jobs said. “His enthusiasm

　　for it is exactly how I felt about computers when I was his age. I think the

　　biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of

　　biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was

　　when I was his age.”

　　Reed used his cancer study as the basis for the senior report he presented to

　　his class at Crystal Springs Uplands School. As he described how he used

　　centrifuges and dyes to sequence the DNA of tumors, his father sat in the

　　audience beaming, along with the rest of his family. “I fantasize about Reed

　　getting a house here in Palo Alto with his family and riding his bike to work as

　　a doctor at Stanford,” Jobs said afterward.

　　Reed had grown up fast in 2009, when it looked as if his father was going to

　　die. He took care of his younger sisters while his parents were in Memphis, and

　　he developed a protective paternalism. But when his father’s health stabilized

　　in the spring of 2010, he regained his playful, teasing personality. One day

　　during dinner he was discussing with his family where to take his girlfriend for

　　dinner. His father suggested Il Fornaio, an elegant standard in Palo Alto, but

　　Reed said he had been unable to get reservations. “Do you want me to try?” his

　　father asked. Reed resisted; he wanted to handle it himself. Erin, the somewhat

　　shy middle child, suggested that she could outfit a tepee in their garden and

　　she and Eve, the younger sister, would serve them a romantic meal there. Reed

　　stood up and hugged her. He would take her up on that some other time, he

　　promised.

　　One Saturday Reed was one of the four contestants on his school’s Quiz Kids team

　　competing on a local TV station. The family—minus Eve, who was in a horse

　　show—came to cheer him on. As the television crew bumbled around getting ready,

　　his father tried to keep his impatience in check and remain inconspicuous among

　　the parents sitting in the rows of folding chairs. But he was clearly

　　recognizable in his trademark jeans and black turtleneck, and one woman pulled

　　up a chair right next to him and started to take his picture. Without looking at

　　her, he stood up and moved to the other end of the row. When Reed came on the

　　set, his nameplate identified him as “Reed Powell.” The host asked the students

　　what they wanted to be when they grew up. “A cancer researcher,” Reed answered.

　　Jobs drove his two-seat Mercedes SL55, taking Reed, while his wife followed in

　　her own car with Erin. On the way home, she asked Erin why she thought her

　　father refused to have a license plate on his car. “To be a rebel,” she

　　answered. I later put the question to Jobs. “Because people follow me sometimes,

　　and if I have a license plate, they can track down where I live,” he replied.

　　“But that’s kind of getting obsolete now with Google Maps. So I guess, really,

　　it’s just because I don’t.”

　　During Reed’s graduation ceremony, his father sent me an email from his iPhone

　　that simply exulted, “Today is one of my happiest days. Reed is graduating from

　　High School. Right now. And, against all odds, I am here.” That night there was

　　a party at their house with close friends and family. Reed danced with every

　　member of his family, including his father. Later Jobs took his son out to the

　　barnlike storage shed to offer him one of his two bicycles, which he wouldn’t be

　　riding again. Reed joked that the Italian one looked a bit too gay, so Jobs told

　　him to take the solid eight-speed next to it. When Reed said he would be

　　indebted, Jobs answered, “You don’t need to be indebted, because you have my

　　DNA.” A few days later Toy Story 3 opened. Jobs had nurtured this Pixar trilogy

　　from the beginning, and the final installment was about the emotions surrounding

　　the departure of Andy for college. “I wish I could always be with you,” Andy’s

　　mother says. “You always will be,” he replies.

　　Jobs’s relationship with his two younger daughters was somewhat more distant. He

　　paid less attention to Erin, who was quiet, introspective, and seemed not to

　　know exactly how to handle him, especially when he was emitting wounding barbs.

　　She was a poised and attractive young woman, with a personal sensitivity more

　　mature than her father’s. She thought that she might want to be an architect,

　　perhaps because of her father’s interest in the field, and she had a good sense

　　of design. But when her father was showing Reed the drawings for the new Apple

　　campus, she sat on the other side of the kitchen, and it seemed not to occur to

　　him to call her over as well. Her big hope that spring of 2010 was that her

　　father would take her to the Oscars. She loved the movies. Even more, she wanted

　　to fly with her father on his private plane and walk up the red carpet with him.

　　Powell was quite willing to forgo the trip and tried to talk her husband into

　　taking Erin. But he dismissed the idea.

　　At one point as I was finishing this book, Powell told me that Erin wanted to

　　give me an interview. It’s not something that I would have requested, since she

　　was then just turning sixteen, but I agreed. The point Erin emphasized was that

　　she understood why her father was not always attentive, and she accepted that.

　　“He does his best to be both a father and the CEO of Apple, and he juggles those

　　pretty well,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I

　　know the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s really cool, so I’m

　　fine. I don’t really need more attention.”

　　Jobs had promised to take each of his children on a trip of their choice when

　　they became teenagers. Reed chose to go to Kyoto, knowing how much his father

　　was entranced by the Zen calm of that beautiful city. Not surprisingly, when

　　Erin turned thirteen, in 2008, she chose Kyoto as well. Her father’s illness

　　caused him to cancel the trip, so he promised to take her in 2010, when he was

　　better. But that June he decided he didn’t want to go. Erin was crestfallen but

　　didn’t protest. Instead her mother took her to France with family friends, and

　　they rescheduled the Kyoto trip for July.

　　Powell worried that her husband would again cancel, so she was thrilled when the

　　whole family took off in early July for Kona Village, Hawaii, which was the

　　first leg of the trip. But in Hawaii Jobs developed a bad toothache, which he

　　ignored, as if he could will the cavity away. The tooth collapsed and had to be

　　fixed. Then the iPhone 4 antenna crisis hit, and he decided to rush back to

　　Cupertino, taking Reed with him. Powell and Erin stayed in Hawaii, hoping that

　　Jobs would return and continue with the plans to take them to Kyoto.

　　To their relief, and mild surprise, Jobs actually did return to Hawaii after his

　　press conference to pick them up and take them to Japan. “It’s a miracle,”

　　Powell told a friend. While Reed took care of Eve back in Palo Alto, Erin and

　　her parents stayed at the Tawaraya Ryokan, an inn of sublime simplicity that

　　Jobs loved. “It was fantastic,” Erin recalled.

　　Twenty years earlier Jobs had taken Erin’s half-sister, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, to

　　Japan when she was about the same age. Among her strongest memories was sharing

　　with him delightful meals and watching him, usually such a picky eater, savor

　　unagi sushi and other delicacies. Seeing him take joy in eating made Lisa feel

　　relaxed with him for the first time. Erin recalled a similar experience: “Dad

　　knew where he wanted to go to lunch every day. He told me he knew an incredible

　　soba shop, and he took me there, and it was so good that it’s been hard to ever

　　eat soba again because nothing comes close.” They also found a tiny neighborhood

　　sushi restaurant, and Jobs tagged it on his iPhone as “best sushi I’ve ever

　　had.” Erin agreed.

　　They also visited Kyoto’s famous Zen Buddhist temples; the one Erin loved most

　　was Saihō-ji, known as the “moss temple” because of its Golden Pond surrounded

　　by gardens featuring more than a hundred varieties of moss. “Erin was really

　　really happy, which was deeply gratifying and helped improve her relationship

　　with her father,” Powell recalled. “She deserved that.”

　　Their younger daughter, Eve, was quite a different story. She was spunky,

　　self-assured, and in no way intimidated by her father. Her passion was horseback

　　riding, and she became determined to make it to the Olympics. When a coach told

　　her how much work it would require, she replied, “Tell me exactly what I need to

　　do. I will do it.” He did, and she began diligently following the program.

　　Eve was an expert at the difficult task of pinning her father down; she often

　　called his assistant at work directly to make sure something got put on his

　　calendar. She was also pretty good as a negotiator. One weekend in 2010, when

　　the family was planning a trip, Erin wanted to delay the departure by half a

　　day, but she was afraid to ask her father. Eve, then twelve, volunteered to take

　　on the task, and at dinner she laid out the case to her father as if she were a

　　lawyer before the Supreme Court. Jobs cut her off—“No, I don’t think I want

　　to”—but it was clear that he was more amused than annoyed. Later that evening

　　Eve sat down with her mother and deconstructed the various ways that she could

　　have made her case better.

　　Jobs came to appreciate her spirit—and see a lot of himself in her. “She’s a

　　pistol and has the strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s like

　　payback.” He had a deep understanding of her personality, perhaps because it

　　bore some resemblance to his. “Eve is more sensitive than a lot of people

　　think,” he explained. “She’s so smart that she can roll over people a bit, so

　　that means she can alienate people, and she finds herself alone. She’s in the

　　process of learning how to be who she is, but tempers it around the edges so

　　that she can have the friends that she needs.”

　　Jobs’s relationship with his wife was sometimes complicated but always loyal.

　　Savvy and compassionate, Laurene Powell was a stabilizing influence and an

　　example of his ability to compensate for some of his selfish impulses by

　　surrounding himself with strong-willed and sensible people. She weighed in

　　quietly on business issues, firmly on family concerns, and fiercely on medical

　　matters. Early in their marriage, she cofounded and launched College Track, a

　　national after-school program that helps disadvantaged kids graduate from high

　　school and get into college. Since then she had become a leading force in the

　　education reform movement. Jobs professed an admiration for his wife’s work:

　　“What she’s done with College Track really impresses me.” But he tended to be

　　generally dismissive of philanthropic endeavors and never visited her

　　after-school centers.

　　In February 2010 Jobs celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday with just his family.

　　The kitchen was decorated with streamers and balloons, and his kids gave him a

　　red-velvet toy crown, which he wore. Now that he had recovered from a grueling

　　year of health problems, Powell hoped that he would become more attentive to his

　　family. But for the most part he resumed his focus on his work. “I think it was

　　hard on the family, especially the girls,” she told me. “After two years of him

　　being ill, he finally gets a little better, and they expected he would focus a

　　bit on them, but he didn’t.” She wanted to make sure, she said, that both sides

　　of his personality were reflected in this book and put into context. “Like many

　　great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not extraordinary in every realm,”

　　she said. “He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting himself in other

　　people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind, the advancement

　　of humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands.”

　　President Obama

　　On a trip to Washington in the early fall of 2010, Powell had met with some of

　　her friends at the White House who told her that President Obama was going to

　　Silicon Valley that October. She suggested that he might want to meet with her

　　husband. Obama’s aides liked the idea; it fit into his new emphasis on

　　competitiveness. In addition, John Doerr, the venture capitalist who had become

　　one of Jobs’s close friends, had told a meeting of the President’s Economic

　　Recovery Advisory Board about Jobs’s views on why the United States was losing

　　its edge. He too suggested that Obama should meet with Jobs. So a half hour was

　　put on the president’s schedule for a session at the Westin San Francisco

　　Airport.

　　There was one problem: When Powell told her husband, he said he didn’t want to

　　do it. He was annoyed that she had arranged it behind his back. “I’m not going

　　to get slotted in for a token meeting so that he can check off that he met with

　　a CEO,” he told her. She insisted that Obama was “really psyched to meet with

　　you.” Jobs replied that if that were the case, then Obama should call and

　　personally ask for the meeting. The standoff went on for five days. She called

　　in Reed, who was at Stanford, to come home for dinner and try to persuade his

　　father. Jobs finally relented.

　　The meeting actually lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back.

　　“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To

　　prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more

　　business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and

　　said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely

　　because of regulations and unnecessary costs.

　　Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly

　　antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were

　　broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be

　　treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers.

　　Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were.

　　Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven

　　months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still

　　based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning

　　materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each

　　student and providing feedback in real time.

　　Jobs offered to put together a group of six or seven CEOs who could really

　　explain the innovation challenges facing America, and the president accepted. So

　　Jobs made a list of people for a Washington meeting to be held in December.

　　Unfortunately, after Valerie Jarrett and other presidential aides had added

　　names, the list had expanded to more than twenty, with GE’s Jeffrey Immelt in

　　the lead. Jobs sent Jarrett an email saying it was a bloated list and he had no

　　intention of coming. In fact his health problems had flared anew by then, so he

　　would not have been able to go in any case, as Doerr privately explained to the

　　president.

　　In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President

　　Obama in Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at

　　Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen

　　chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz,

　　Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John Chambers, Oracle’s Larry Ellison,

　　Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Jobs’s attention to the

　　details of the dinner extended to the food. Doerr sent him the proposed menu,

　　and he responded that some of the dishes proposed by the caterer—shrimp, cod,

　　lentil salad—were far too fancy “and not who you are, John.” He particularly

　　objected to the dessert that was planned, a cream pie tricked out with chocolate

　　truffles, but the White House advance staff overruled him by telling the caterer

　　that the president liked cream pie. Because Jobs had lost so much weight that he

　　was easily chilled, Doerr kept the house so warm that Zuckerberg found himself

　　sweating profusely.

　　Jobs, sitting next to the president, kicked off the dinner by saying,

　　“Regardless of our political persuasions, I want you to know that we’re here to

　　do whatever you ask to help our country.” Despite that, the dinner initially

　　became a litany of suggestions of what the president could do for the businesses

　　there. Chambers, for example, pushed a proposal for a repatriation tax holiday

　　that would allow major corporations to avoid tax payments on overseas profits if

　　they brought them back to the United States for investment during a certain

　　period. The president was annoyed, and so was Zuckerberg, who turned to Valerie

　　Jarrett, sitting to his right, and whispered, “We should be talking about what’s

　　important to the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for him?”

　　Doerr was able to refocus the discussion by calling on everyone to suggest a

　　list of action items. When Jobs’s turn came, he stressed the need for more

　　trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an

　　engineering degree in the United States should be given a visa to stay in the

　　country. Obama said that could be done only in the context of the “Dream Act,”

　　which would allow illegal aliens who arrived as minors and finished high school

　　to become legal residents—something that the Republicans had blocked. Jobs found

　　this an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis. “The president

　　is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done,”

　　he recalled. “It infuriates me.”

　　Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple

　　had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it

　　needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. “You can’t find that

　　many in America to hire,” he said. These factory engineers did not have to be

　　PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for

　　manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, or trade schools could train

　　them. “If you could educate these engineers,” he said, “we could move more

　　manufacturing plants here.” The argument made a strong impression on the

　　president. Two or three times over the next month he told his aides, “We’ve got

　　to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us

　　about.”

　　Jobs was pleased that Obama followed up, and they talked by telephone a few

　　times after the meeting. He offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the

　　2012 campaign. (He had made the same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when

　　Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential.) “I think political

　　advertising is terrible. I’d love to get Lee Clow out of retirement, and we can

　　come up with great commercials for him,” Jobs told me a few weeks after the

　　dinner. Jobs had been fighting pain all week, but the talk of politics energized

　　him. “Every once in a while, a real ad pro gets involved, the way Hal Riney did

　　with ‘It’s morning in America’ for Reagan’s reelection in 1984. So that’s what

　　I’d like to do for Obama.”

　　Third Medical Leave, 2011

　　The cancer always sent signals as it reappeared. Jobs had learned that. He would

　　lose his appetite and begin to feel pains throughout his body. His doctors would

　　do tests, detect nothing, and reassure him that he still seemed clear. But he

　　knew better. The cancer had its signaling pathways, and a few months after he

　　felt the signs the doctors would discover that it was indeed no longer in

　　remission.

　　Another such downturn began in early November 2010. He was in pain, stopped

　　eating, and had to be fed intravenously by a nurse who came to the house. The

　　doctors found no sign of more tumors, and they assumed that this was just

　　another of his periodic cycles of fighting infections and digestive maladies. He

　　had never been one to suffer pain stoically, so his doctors and family had

　　become somewhat inured to his complaints.

　　He and his family went to Kona Village for Thanksgiving, but his eating did not

　　improve. The dining there was in a communal room, and the other guests pretended

　　not to notice as Jobs, looking emaciated, rocked and moaned at meals, not

　　touching his food. It was a testament to the resort and its guests that his

　　condition never leaked out. When he returned to Palo Alto, Jobs became

　　increasingly emotional and morose. He thought he was going to die, he told his

　　kids, and he would get choked up about the possibility that he would never

　　celebrate any more of their birthdays.

　　By Christmas he was down to 115 pounds, which was more than fifty pounds below

　　his normal weight. Mona Simpson came to Palo Alto for the holiday, along with

　　her ex-husband, the television comedy writer Richard Appel, and their children.

　　The mood picked up a bit. The families played parlor games such as Novel, in

　　which participants try to fool each other by seeing who can write the most

　　convincing fake opening sentence to a book, and things seemed to be looking up

　　for a while. He was even able to go out to dinner at a restaurant with Powell a

　　few days after Christmas. The kids went off on a ski vacation for New Year’s,

　　with Powell and Mona Simpson taking turns staying at home with Jobs in Palo

　　Alto.

　　By the beginning of 2011, however, it was clear that this was not merely one of

　　his bad patches. His doctors detected evidence of new tumors, and the

　　cancer-related signaling further exacerbated his loss of appetite. They were

　　struggling to determine how much drug therapy his body, in its emaciated

　　condition, would be able to take. Every inch of his body felt like it had been

　　punched, he told friends, as he moaned and sometimes doubled over in pain.

　　It was a vicious cycle. The first signs of cancer caused pain. The morphine and

　　other painkillers he took suppressed his appetite. His pancreas had been partly

　　removed and his liver had been replaced, so his digestive system was faulty and

　　had trouble absorbing protein. Losing weight made it harder to embark on

　　aggressive drug therapies. His emaciated condition also made him more

　　susceptible to infections, as did the immunosuppressants he sometimes took to

　　keep his body from rejecting his liver transplant. The weight loss reduced the

　　lipid layers around his pain receptors, causing him to suffer more. And he was

　　prone to extreme mood swings, marked by prolonged bouts of anger and depression,

　　which further suppressed his appetite.

　　Jobs’s eating problems were exacerbated over the years by his psychological

　　attitude toward food. When he was young, he learned that he could induce

　　euphoria and ecstasy by fasting. So even though he knew that he should eat—his

　　doctors were begging him to consume high-quality protein—lingering in the back

　　of his subconscious, he admitted, was his instinct for fasting and for diets

　　like Arnold Ehret’s fruit regimen that he had embraced as a teenager. Powell

　　kept telling him that it was crazy, even pointing out that Ehret had died at

　　fifty-six when he stumbled and knocked his head, and she would get angry when he

　　came to the table and just stared silently at his lap. “I wanted him to force

　　himself to eat,” she said, “and it was incredibly tense at home.” Bryar Brown,

　　their part-time cook, would still come in the afternoon and make an array of

　　healthy dishes, but Jobs would touch his tongue to one or two dishes and then

　　dismiss them all as inedible. One evening he announced, “I could probably eat a

　　little pumpkin pie,” and the even-tempered Brown created a beautiful pie from

　　scratch in an hour. Jobs ate only one bite, but Brown was thrilled.

　　Powell talked to eating disorder specialists and psychiatrists, but her husband

　　tended to shun them. He refused to take any medications, or be treated in any

　　way, for his depression. “When you have feelings,” he said, “like sadness or

　　anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial

　　life.” In fact he swung to the other extreme. He became morose, tearful, and

　　dramatic as he lamented to all around him that he was about to die. The

　　depression became part of the vicious cycle by making him even less likely to

　　eat.

　　Pictures and videos of Jobs looking emaciated began to appear online, and soon

　　rumors were swirling about how sick he was. The problem, Powell realized, was

　　that the rumors were true, and they were not going to go away. Jobs had agreed

　　only reluctantly to go on medical leave two years earlier, when his liver was

　　failing, and this time he also resisted the idea. It would be like leaving his

　　homeland, unsure that he would ever return. When he finally bowed to the

　　inevitable, in January 2011, the board members were expecting it; the telephone

　　meeting in which he told them that he wanted another leave took only three

　　minutes. He had often discussed with the board, in executive session, his

　　thoughts about who could take over if anything happened to him, presenting both

　　short-term and longer-term combinations of options. But there was no doubt that,

　　in this current situation, Tim Cook would again take charge of day-to-day

　　operations.

　　The following Saturday afternoon, Jobs allowed his wife to convene a meeting of

　　his doctors. He realized that he was facing the type of problem that he never

　　permitted at Apple. His treatment was fragmented rather than integrated. Each of

　　his myriad maladies was being treated by different specialists—oncologists, pain

　　specialists, nutritionists, hepatologists, and hematologists—but they were not

　　being co-ordinated in a cohesive approach, the way James Eason had done in

　　Memphis. “One of the big issues in the health care industry is the lack of

　　caseworkers or advocates that are the quarterback of each team,” Powell said.

　　This was particularly true at Stanford, where nobody seemed in charge of

　　figuring out how nutrition was related to pain care and to oncology. So Powell

　　asked the various Stanford specialists to come to their house for a meeting that

　　also included some outside doctors with a more aggressive and integrated

　　approach, such as David Agus of USC. They agreed on a new regimen for dealing

　　with the pain and for coordinating the other treatments.

　　Thanks to some pioneering science, the team of doctors had been able to keep

　　Jobs one step ahead of the cancer. He had become one of the first twenty people

　　in the world to have all of the genes of his cancer tumor as well as of his

　　normal DNA sequenced. It was a process that, at the time, cost more than

　　$100,000.

　　The gene sequencing and analysis were done collaboratively by teams at Stanford,

　　Johns Hopkins, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. By knowing the unique

　　genetic and molecular signature of Jobs’s tumors, his doctors had been able to

　　pick specific drugs that directly targeted the defective molecular pathways that

　　caused his cancer cells to grow in an abnormal manner. This approach, known as

　　molecular targeted therapy, was more effective than traditional chemotherapy,

　　which attacks the process of division of all the body’s cells, cancerous or not.

　　This targeted therapy was not a silver bullet, but at times it seemed close to

　　one: It allowed his doctors to look at a large number of drugs—common and

　　uncommon, already available or only in development—to see which three or four

　　might work best. Whenever his cancer mutated and repaved around one of these

　　drugs, the doctors had another drug lined up to go next.

　　Although Powell was diligent in overseeing her husband’s care, he was the one

　　who made the final decision on each new treatment regimen. A typical example

　　occurred in May 2011, when he held a meeting with George Fisher and other

　　doctors from Stanford, the gene-sequencing analysts from the Broad Institute,

　　and his outside consultant David Agus. They all gathered around a table at a

　　suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Palo Alto. Powell did not come, but their

　　son, Reed, did. For three hours there were presentations from the Stanford and

　　Broad researchers on the new information they had learned about the genetic

　　signatures of his cancer. Jobs was his usual feisty self. At one point he

　　stopped a Broad Institute analyst who had made the mistake of using PowerPoint

　　slides. Jobs chided him and explained why Apple’s Keynote presentation software

　　was better; he even offered to teach him how to use it. By the end of the

　　meeting, Jobs and his team had gone through all of the molecular data, assessed

　　the rationales for each of the potential therapies, and come up with a list of

　　tests to help them better prioritize these.

　　One of his doctors told him that there was hope that his cancer, and others like

　　it, would soon be considered a manageable chronic disease, which could be kept

　　at bay until the patient died of something else. “I’m either going to be one of

　　the first to be able to outrun a cancer like this, or I’m going to be one of the

　　last to die from it,” Jobs told me right after one of the meetings with his

　　doctors. “Either among the first to make it to shore, or the last to get

　　dumped.”

　　Visitors

　　When his 2011 medical leave was announced, the situation seemed so dire that

　　Lisa Brennan-Jobs got back in touch after more than a year and arranged to fly

　　from New York the following week. Her relationship with her father had been

　　built on layers of resentment. She was understandably scarred by having been

　　pretty much abandoned by him for her first ten years. Making matters worse, she

　　had inherited some of his prickliness and, he felt, some of her mother’s sense

　　of grievance. “I told her many times that I wished I’d been a better dad when

　　she was five, but now she should let things go rather than be angry the rest of

　　her life,” he recalled just before Lisa arrived.

　　The visit went well. Jobs was beginning to feel a little better, and he was in a

　　mood to mend fences and express his affection for those around him. At age

　　thirty-two, Lisa was in a serious relationship for one of the first times in her

　　life. Her boyfriend was a struggling young filmmaker from California, and Jobs

　　went so far as to suggest she move back to Palo Alto if they got married. “Look,

　　I don’t know how long I am for this world,” he told her. “The doctors can’t

　　really tell me. If you want to see more of me, you’re going to have to move out

　　here. Why don’t you consider it?” Even though Lisa did not move west, Jobs was

　　pleased at how the reconciliation had worked out. “I hadn’t been sure I wanted

　　her to visit, because I was sick and didn’t want other complications. But I’m

　　very glad she came. It helped settle a lot of things in me.”

　　Jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to repair fences.

　　Google’s cofounder Larry Page, who lived less than three blocks away, had just

　　announced plans to retake the reins of the company from Eric Schmidt. He knew

　　how to flatter Jobs: He asked if he could come by and get tips on how to be a

　　good CEO. Jobs was still furious at Google. “My first thought was, ‘Fuck you,’”

　　he recounted. “But then I thought about it and realized that everybody helped me

　　when I was young, from Bill Hewlett to the guy down the block who worked for HP.

　　So I called him back and said sure.” Page came over, sat in Jobs’s living room,

　　and listened to his ideas on building great products and durable companies. Jobs

　　recalled:

　　We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust,

　　and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the

　　blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting

　　flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus.

　　Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the

　　map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest,

　　because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re

　　causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. I tried to

　　be as helpful as I could. I will continue to do that with people like Mark

　　Zuckerberg too. That’s how I’m going to spend part of the time I have left. I

　　can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and

　　how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I

　　should do my best to repay.

　　The announcement of Jobs’s 2011 medical leave prompted others to make a

　　pilgrimage to the house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton, for example, came by and

　　talked about everything from the Middle East to American politics. But the most

　　poignant visit was from the other tech prodigy born in 1955, the guy who, for

　　more than three decades, had been Jobs’s rival and partner in defining the age

　　of personal computers.

　　Bill Gates had never lost his fascination with Jobs. In the spring of 2011 I was

　　at a dinner with him in Washington, where he had come to discuss his

　　foundation’s global health endeavors. He expressed amazement at the success of

　　the iPad and how Jobs, even while sick, was focusing on ways to improve it.

　　“Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and

　　Steve is still coming up with amazing new products,” he said wistfully. “Maybe I

　　should have stayed in that game.” He smiled to make sure that I knew he was

　　joking, or at least half joking.

　　Through their mutual friend Mike Slade, Gates made arrangements to visit Jobs in

　　May. The day before it was supposed to happen, Jobs’s assistant called to say he

　　wasn’t feeling well enough. But it was rescheduled, and early one afternoon

　　Gates drove to Jobs’s house, walked through the back gate to the open kitchen

　　door, and saw Eve studying at the table. “Is Steve around?” he asked. Eve

　　pointed him to the living room.

　　They spent more than three hours together, just the two of them, reminiscing.

　　“We were like the old guys in the industry looking back,” Jobs recalled. “He was

　　happier than I’ve ever seen him, and I kept thinking how healthy he looked.”

　　Gates was similarly struck by how Jobs, though scarily gaunt, had more energy

　　than he expected. He was open about his health problems and, at least that day,

　　feeling optimistic. His sequential regimens of targeted drug treatments, he told

　　Gates, were like “jumping from one lily pad to another,” trying to stay a step

　　ahead of the cancer.

　　Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of

　　what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and

　　video lessons on their own while using the classroom time for discussions and

　　problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly

　　little impact on schools—far less than on other realms of society such as media

　　and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said, computers and mobile

　　devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and

　　providing motivational feedback.

　　They also talked a lot about the joys of family, including how lucky they were

　　to have good kids and be married to the right women. “We laughed about how

　　fortunate it was that he met Laurene, and she’s kept him semi-sane, and I met

　　Melinda, and she’s kept me semi-sane,” Gates recalled. “We also discussed how

　　it’s challenging to be one of our children, and how do we mitigate that. It was

　　pretty personal.” At one point Eve, who in the past had been in horse shows with

　　Gates’s daughter Jennifer, wandered in from the kitchen, and Gates asked her

　　what jumping routines she liked best.

　　As their hours together drew to a close, Gates complimented Jobs on “the

　　incredible stuff” he had created and for being able to save Apple in the late

　　1990s from the bozos who were about to destroy it. He even made an interesting

　　concession. Throughout their careers they had adhered to competing philosophies

　　on one of the most fundamental of all digital issues: whether hardware and

　　software should be tightly integrated or more open. “I used to believe that the

　　open, horizontal model would prevail,” Gates told him. “But you proved that the

　　integrated, vertical model could also be great.” Jobs responded with his own

　　admission. “Your model worked too,” he said.

　　They were both right. Each model had worked in the realm of personal computers,

　　where Macintosh coexisted with a variety of Windows machines, and that was

　　likely to be true in the realm of mobile devices as well. But after recounting

　　their discussion, Gates added a caveat: “The integrated approach works well when

　　Steve is at the helm. But it doesn’t mean it will win many rounds in the

　　future.” Jobs similarly felt compelled to add a caveat about Gates after

　　describing their meeting: “Of course, his fragmented model worked, but it didn’t

　　make really great products. It produced crappy products. That was the problem.

　　The big problem. At least over time.”

　　“That Day Has Come”

　　Jobs had many other ideas and projects that he hoped to develop. He wanted to

　　disrupt the textbook industry and save the spines of spavined students bearing

　　backpacks by creating electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad. He

　　was also working with Bill Atkinson, his friend from the original Macintosh

　　team, on devising new digital technologies that worked at the pixel level to

　　allow people to take great photographs using their iPhones even in situations

　　without much light. And he very much wanted to do for television sets what he

　　had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.

　　“I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to

　　use,” he told me. “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and

　　with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD

　　players and cable channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could

　　imagine. I finally cracked it.”

　　But by July 2011, his cancer had spread to his bones and other parts of his

　　body, and his doctors were having trouble finding targeted drugs that could beat

　　it back. He was in pain, sleeping erratically, had little energy, and stopped

　　going to work. He and Powell had reserved a sailboat for a family cruise

　　scheduled for the end of that month, but those plans were scuttled. He was

　　eating almost no solid food, and he spent most of his days in his bedroom

　　watching television.

　　In August, I got a message that he wanted me to come visit. When I arrived at

　　his house, at mid-morning on a Saturday, he was still asleep, so I sat with his

　　wife and kids in the garden, filled with a profusion of yellow roses and various

　　types of daisies, until he sent word that I should come in. I found him curled

　　up on the bed, wearing khaki shorts and a white turtleneck. His legs were

　　shockingly sticklike, but his smile was easy and his mind quick. “We better

　　hurry, because I have very little energy,” he said.

　　He wanted to show me some of his personal pictures and let me pick a few to use

　　in the book. Because he was too weak to get out of bed, he pointed to various

　　drawers in the room, and I carefully brought him the photographs in each. As I

　　sat on the side of the bed, I held them up, one at a time, so he could see them.

　　Some prompted stories; others merely elicited a grunt or a smile. I had never

　　seen a picture of his father, Paul Jobs, and I was startled when I came across a

　　snapshot of a handsome hardscrabble 1950s dad holding a toddler. “Yes, that’s

　　him,” he said. “You can use it.” He then pointed to a box near the window that

　　contained a picture of his father looking at him lovingly at his wedding. “He

　　was a great man,” Jobs said quietly. I murmured something along the lines of “He

　　would have been proud of you.” Jobs corrected me: “He was proud of me.”

　　For a while, the pictures seemed to energize him. We discussed what various

　　people from his past, ranging from Tina Redse to Mike Markkula to Bill Gates,

　　now thought of him. I recounted what Gates had said after he described his last

　　visit with Jobs, which was that Apple had shown that the integrated approach

　　could work, but only “when Steve is at the helm.” Jobs thought that was silly.

　　“Anyone could make better products that way, not just me,” he said. So I asked

　　him to name another company that made great products by insisting on end-to-end

　　integration. He thought for a while, trying to come up with an example. “The car

　　companies,” he finally said, but then he added, “Or at least they used to.”

　　When our discussion turned to the sorry state of the economy and politics, he

　　offered a few sharp opinions about the lack of strong leadership around the

　　world. “I’m disappointed in Obama,” he said. “He’s having trouble leading

　　because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss them off.” He caught what I was

　　thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s not a problem I ever

　　had.”

　　After two hours, he grew quiet, so I got off the bed and started to leave.

　　“Wait,” he said, as he waved to me to sit back down. It took a minute or two for

　　him to regain enough energy to talk. “I had a lot of trepidation about this

　　project,” he finally said, referring to his decision to cooperate with this

　　book. “I was really worried.”

　　“Why did you do it?” I asked.

　　“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I

　　wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I

　　realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know

　　anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I

　　had to say.”

　　He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book

　　or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there

　　will be a lot in your book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a

　　statement, and when he stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I

　　was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then it won’t seem like an

　　in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad.

　　Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.” By then, his eyes were

　　closed and his energy gone, so I quietly took my leave.

　　As his health deteriorated throughout the summer, Jobs slowly began to face the

　　inevitable: He would not be returning to Apple as CEO. So it was time for him to

　　resign. He wrestled with the decision for weeks, discussing it with his wife,

　　Bill Campbell, Jony Ive, and George Riley. “One of the things I wanted to do for

　　Apple was to set an example of how you do a transfer of power right,” he told

　　me. He joked about all the rough transitions that had occurred at the company

　　over the past thirty-five years. “It’s always been a drama, like a third-world

　　country. Part of my goal has been to make Apple the world’s best company, and

　　having an orderly transition is key to that.”

　　The best time and place to make the transition, he decided, was at the company’s

　　regularly scheduled August 24 board meeting. He was eager to do it in person,

　　rather than merely send in a letter or attend by phone, so he had been pushing

　　himself to eat and regain strength. The day before the meeting, he decided he

　　could make it, but he needed the help of a wheelchair. Arrangements were made to

　　have him driven to headquarters and wheeled to the boardroom as secretly as

　　possible.

　　He arrived just before 11 a.m., when the board members were finishing committee

　　reports and other routine business. Most knew what was about to happen. But

　　instead of going right to the topic on everyone’s mind, Tim Cook and Peter

　　Oppenheimer, the chief financial officer, went through the results for the

　　quarter and the projections for the year ahead. Then Jobs said quietly that he

　　had something personal to say. Cook asked if he and the other top managers

　　should leave, and Jobs paused for more than thirty seconds before he decided

　　they should. Once the room was cleared of all but the six outside directors, he

　　began to read aloud from a letter he had dictated and revised over the previous

　　weeks. “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet

　　my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you

　　know,” it began. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

　　The letter was simple, direct, and only eight sentences long. In it he suggested

　　that Cook replace him, and he offered to serve as chairman of the board. “I

　　believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look

　　forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.”

　　There was a long silence. Al Gore was the first to speak, and he listed Jobs’s

　　accomplishments during his tenure. Mickey Drexler added that watching Jobs

　　transform Apple was “the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in business,” and

　　Art Levinson praised Jobs’s diligence in ensuring that there was a smooth

　　transition. Campbell said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes as the

　　formal resolutions transferring power were passed.

　　Over lunch, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller came in to display mockups of some

　　products that Apple had in the pipeline. Jobs peppered them with questions and

　　thoughts, especially about what capacities the fourth-generation cellular

　　networks might have and what features needed to be in future phones. At one

　　point Forstall showed off a voice recognition app. As he feared, Jobs grabbed

　　the phone in the middle of the demo and proceeded to see if he could confuse it.

　　“What’s the weather in Palo Alto?” he asked. The app answered. After a few more

　　questions, Jobs challenged it: “Are you a man or a woman?” Amazingly, the app

　　answered in its robotic voice, “They did not assign me a gender.” For a moment

　　the mood lightened.

　　When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that

　　HP had suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs

　　turned somber and declared that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett and

　　Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands,”

　　he said. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It’s tragic. I hope I’ve

　　left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple.” As he prepared to

　　leave, the board members gathered around to give him a hug.

　　After meeting with his executive team to explain the news, Jobs rode home with

　　George Riley. When they arrived at the house, Powell was in the backyard

　　harvesting honey from her hives, with help from Eve. They took off their screen

　　helmets and brought the honey pot to the kitchen, where Reed and Erin had

　　gathered, so that they could all celebrate the graceful transition. Jobs took a

　　spoonful of the honey and pronounced it wonderfully sweet.

　　That evening, he stressed to me that his hope was to remain as active as his

　　health allowed. “I’m going to work on new products and marketing and the things

　　that I like,” he said. But when I asked how it really felt to be relinquishing

　　control of the company he had built, his tone turned wistful, and he shifted

　　into the past tense. “I’ve had a very lucky career, a very lucky life,” he

　　replied. “I’ve done all that I can do.”UnknownLEGACY

　　The Brightest Heaven of Invention

　　At the 2006 Macworld, in front of a slide of him and Wozniak from thirty years

　　earlier

　　FireWire

　　His personality was reflected in the products he created. Just as the core of

　　Apple’s philosophy, from the original Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad a generation

　　later, was the end-to-end integration of hardware and software, so too was it

　　the case with Steve Jobs: His passions, perfectionism, demons, desires,

　　artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his

　　approach to business and the products that resulted.

　　The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products

　　begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as

　　searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes

　　this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he was explaining the

　　profundity of Bob Dylan’s music or why whatever product he was unveiling at that

　　moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it

　　could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft

　　ripping off Apple.

　　This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world. Colleagues referred to the

　　hero/shithead dichotomy. You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same

　　day. The same was true of products, ideas, even food: Something was either “the

　　best thing ever,” or it was shitty, brain-dead, inedible. As a result, any

　　perceived flaw could set off a rant. The finish on a piece of metal, the curve

　　of the head of a screw, the shade of blue on a box, the intuitiveness of a

　　navigation screen—he would declare them to “completely suck” until that moment

　　when he suddenly pronounced them “absolutely perfect.” He thought of himself as

　　an artist, which he was, and he indulged in the temperament of one.

　　His quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end

　　control of every product that it made. He got hives, or worse, when

　　contemplating great Apple software running on another company’s crappy hardware,

　　and he likewise was allergic to the thought of unapproved apps or content

　　polluting the perfection of an Apple device. This ability to integrate hardware

　　and software and content into one unified system enabled him to impose

　　simplicity. The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves

　　simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.

　　This instinct for integrated systems put him squarely on one side of the most

　　fundamental divide in the digital world: open versus closed. The hacker ethos

　　handed down from the Homebrew Computer Club favored the open approach, in which

　　there was little centralized control and people were free to modify hardware and

　　software, share code, write to open standards, shun proprietary systems, and

　　have content and apps that were compatible with a variety of devices and

　　operating systems. The young Wozniak was in that camp: The Apple II he designed

　　was easily opened and sported plenty of slots and ports that people could jack

　　into as they pleased. With the Macintosh Jobs became a founding father of the

　　other camp. The Macintosh would be like an appliance, with the hardware and

　　software tightly woven together and closed to modifications. The hacker ethos

　　would be sacrificed in order to create a seamless and simple user experience.

　　This led Jobs to decree that the Macintosh operating system would not be

　　available for any other company’s hardware. Microsoft pursued the opposite

　　strategy, allowing its Windows operating system to be promiscuously licensed.

　　That did not produce the most elegant computers, but it did lead to Microsoft’s

　　dominating the world of operating systems. After Apple’s market share shrank to

　　less than 5%, Microsoft’s approach was declared the winner in the personal

　　computer realm.

　　In the longer run, however, there proved to be some advantages to Jobs’s model.

　　Even with a small market share, Apple was able to maintain a huge profit margin

　　while other computer makers were commoditized. In 2010, for example, Apple had

　　just 7% of the revenue in the personal computer market, but it grabbed 35% of

　　the operating profit.

　　More significantly, in the early 2000s Jobs’s insistence on end-to-end

　　integration gave Apple an advantage in developing a digital hub strategy, which

　　allowed your desktop computer to link seamlessly with a variety of portable

　　devices. The iPod, for example, was part of a closed and tightly integrated

　　system. To use it, you had to use Apple’s iTunes software and download content

　　from its iTunes Store. The result was that the iPod, like the iPhone and iPad

　　that followed, was an elegant delight in contrast to the kludgy rival products

　　that did not offer a seamless end-to-end experience.

　　The strategy worked. In May 2000 Apple’s market value was one-twentieth that of

　　Microsoft. In May 2010 Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s most valuable

　　technology company, and by September 2011 it was worth 70% more than Microsoft.

　　In the first quarter of 2011 the market for Windows PCs shrank by 1%, while the

　　market for Macs grew 28%.

　　By then the battle had begun anew in the world of mobile devices. Google took

　　the more open approach, and it made its Android operating system available for

　　use by any maker of tablets or cell phones. By 2011 its share of the mobile

　　market matched Apple’s. The drawback of Android’s openness was the fragmentation

　　that resulted. Various handset and tablet makers modified Android into dozens of

　　variants and flavors, making it hard for apps to remain consistent or make full

　　use if its features. There were merits to both approaches. Some people wanted

　　the freedom to use more open systems and have more choices of hardware; others

　　clearly preferred Apple’s tight integration and control, which led to products

　　that had simpler interfaces, longer battery life, greater user-friendliness, and

　　easier handling of content.

　　The downside of Jobs’s approach was that his desire to delight the user led him

　　to resist empowering the user. Among the most thoughtful proponents of an open

　　environment is Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard. He begins his book The Future of

　　the Internet—And How to Stop It with the scene of Jobs introducing the iPhone,

　　and he warns of the consequences of replacing personal computers with “sterile

　　appliances tethered to a network of control.” Even more fervent is Cory

　　Doctorow, who wrote a manifesto called “Why I Won’t Buy an iPad” for Boing

　　Boing. “There’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design.

　　But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner,” he wrote. “Buying an iPad

　　for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is

　　yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that

　　even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the

　　professionals.”

　　For Jobs, belief in an integrated approach was a matter of righteousness. “We do

　　these things not because we are control freaks,” he explained. “We do them

　　because we want to make great products, because we care about the user, and

　　because we like to take responsibility for the entire experience rather than

　　turn out the crap that other people make.” He also believed he was doing people

　　a service: “They’re busy doing whatever they do best, and they want us to do

　　what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other things to do than

　　think about how to integrate their computers and devices.”

　　This approach sometimes went against Apple’s short-term business interests. But

　　in a world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying

　　interfaces, it led to astonishing products marked by beguiling user experiences.

　　Using an Apple product could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens

　　of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and neither experience was created by worshipping at

　　the altar of openness or by letting a thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s

　　nice to be in the hands of a control freak.

　　Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set

　　priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If

　　something engaged him—the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design

　　of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store—he was

　　relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something—a legal annoyance, a

　　business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug—he would resolutely ignore

　　it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all

　　except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons,

　　software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating

　　options.

　　He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen

　　training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out

　　anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic

　　based on minimalism.

　　Unfortunately his Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm or

　　inner serenity, and that too is part of his legacy. He was often tightly coiled

　　and impatient, traits he made no effort to hide. Most people have a regulator

　　between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and

　　spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. “My job

　　is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it,” he said. This made him

　　charismatic and inspiring, yet also, to use the technical term, an asshole at

　　times.

　　Andy Hertzfeld once told me, “The one question I’d truly love Steve to answer

　　is, ‘Why are you sometimes so mean?’” Even his family members wondered whether

　　he simply lacked the filter that restrains people from venting their wounding

　　thoughts or willfully bypassed it. Jobs claimed it was the former. “This is who

　　I am, and you can’t expect me to be someone I’m not,” he replied when I asked

　　him the question. But I think he actually could have controlled himself, if he

　　had wanted. When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional

　　awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner

　　thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.

　　The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than

　　it helped him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety

　　leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective

　　at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their

　　litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never

　　dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players.

　　The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching

　　a startup in his parents’ garage and building it into the world’s most valuable

　　company. He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting

　　together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. He

　　designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way

　　that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of

　　having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the

　　assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by

　　being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both,

　　relentlessly. As a result he launched a series of products over three decades

　　that transformed whole industries:

　　• The Apple II, which took Wozniak’s circuit board and turned it into the first

　　personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.

　　• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized

　　graphical user interfaces.

　　• Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle of digital

　　imagination.

　　• Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.

　　• The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.

　　• The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.

　　• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email,

　　and web devices.

　　• The App Store, which spawned a new content-creation industry.

　　• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital

　　newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.

　　• iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our

　　content and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.

　　• And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where

　　imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it

　　became the most valuable company on earth.

　　Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative

　　leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an

　　example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone

　　whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental

　　processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the

　　winds, and sense what lay ahead.

　　Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most

　　certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the

　　pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he

　　made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and

　　processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it

　　was inspiring, he also built the world’s most creative company. And he was able

　　to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination

　　that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best

　　at the intersection of artistry and technology.

　　And One More Thing . . .

　　Biographers are supposed to have the last word. But this is a biography of Steve

　　Jobs. Even though he did not impose his legendary desire for control on this

　　project, I suspect that I would not be conveying the right feel for him—the way

　　he asserted himself in any situation—if I just shuffled him onto history’s stage

　　without letting him have some last words.

　　Over the course of our conversations, there were many times when he reflected on

　　what he hoped his legacy would be. Here are those thoughts, in his own words:

　　My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated

　　to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to

　　make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But

　　the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these

　　priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but

　　it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what

　　you discuss in meetings.

　　Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my

　　approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.

　　I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they

　　would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until

　　you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is

　　to read things that are not yet on the page.

　　Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and

　　science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place.

　　There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of

　　my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep

　　current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great

　　engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves.

　　In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and

　　musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to

　　express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and

　　Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to

　　quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.

　　People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time

　　to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing

　　great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and

　　your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you

　　have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other

　　hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.

　　At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon

　　Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor

　　era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and

　　then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google—and a little

　　more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for

　　a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on.

　　It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their

　　dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they

　　did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things.

　　They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes

　　to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a

　　businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great

　　products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal,

　　then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if

　　it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I

　　enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor.

　　But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when

　　they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.

　　I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or

　　Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or

　　close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less

　　important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the

　　ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and

　　designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM

　　was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t know anything

　　about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the

　　company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn

　　off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it

　　happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it

　　rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as

　　Ballmer is running it.

　　I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really

　　trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash

　　in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real

　　company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a

　　contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a

　　company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now.

　　That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built

　　Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I

　　want Apple to be.

　　I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell

　　people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about,

　　and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We

　　are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am

　　full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we’ve had some rip-roaring

　　arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it’s some of the best times

　　I’ve ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying “Ron, that store looks like

　　shit” in front of everyone else. Or I might say “God, we really fucked up the

　　engineering on this” in front of the person that’s responsible. That’s the

　　ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to be super honest. Maybe

　　there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in

　　this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way,

　　because I am middle class from California.

　　I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I

　　remember the time when Reed was six years old, coming home, and I had just

　　fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like for that person to

　　tell his family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard. But

　　somebody’s got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that

　　the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.

　　You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest

　　songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move

　　on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people.

　　His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come on and do a set of

　　acoustic guitar, and the audiences loved him. Then he brought out what became

　　The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience sometimes

　　booed. There was one point where he was about to sing “Like a Rolling Stone”

　　and someone from the audience yells “Judas!” And Dylan then says, “Play it

　　fucking loud!” And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept

　　evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep

　　moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy

　　dying.

　　What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for

　　being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us.

　　I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own

　　food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our

　　species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute

　　something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about

　　trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because

　　we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the

　　talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of

　　all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow.

　　That’s what has driven me.

　　Coda

　　One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind

　　his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India

　　almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on

　　reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing

　　in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our

　　existence than meets the eye.”

　　He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of

　　a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives

　　after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this

　　experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want

　　to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”

　　He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like

　　an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.”

　　Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put

　　on-off switches on Apple devices.”