乔布斯传txt.doc.pd中f英文版全集Steve.Jobs.Walter.Isaacson

科夫维奇斯基

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.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE













FAMILY 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

科夫维奇斯基

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.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO





TOY 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.

科夫维奇斯基

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


THE 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.

科夫维奇斯基

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR





THE 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.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

科夫维奇斯基

THINK 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.

科夫维奇斯基

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX





DESIGN 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.”








CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN





THE 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.

科夫维奇斯基

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT













CEO




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.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE





APPLE 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.”

科夫维奇斯基

CHAPTER THIRTY


THE 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.





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE





THE iTUNES STORE




I’m the Pied Piper






Warner Music

科夫维奇斯基

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.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO





MUSIC 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.

科夫维奇斯基

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.





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE





PIXAR’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.

科夫维奇斯基

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.

科夫维奇斯基

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.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR


TWENTY-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.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE





ROUND 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

科夫维奇斯基

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.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX





THE 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.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN





ROUND TWO




The Cancer Recurs

科夫维奇斯基

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.

科夫维奇斯基

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT





THE 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

科夫维奇斯基

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.”








CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE













NEW 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.





CHAPTER FORTY




TO 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.

科夫维奇斯基

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.”

科夫维奇斯基

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE













ROUND 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.

科夫维奇斯基

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.”








CHAPTER FORTY-TWO





LEGACY




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.

科夫维奇斯基

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.”




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS












I’m deeply grateful to John and Ann Doerr, Laurene Powell, Mona Simpson, and Ken
Auletta, all of whom helped get this project launched and provided invaluable support
along the way. Alice Mayhew, who has been my editor at Simon & Schuster for thirty
years, and Jonathan Karp, the publisher, both were extraordinarily diligent and attentive in
shepherding this book, as was Amanda Urban, my agent. Crary Pullen was dogged in
tracking down photos, and my assistant, Pat Zindulka, calmly facilitated things. I also want









to thank my father, Irwin, and my daughter, Betsy, for reading the book and offering
advice. And as always, I am most deeply indebted to my wife, Cathy, for her editing,
suggestions, wise counsel, and so very much more.

SOURCES








Interviews (conducted 2009–2011)


Al Alcorn, Roger Ames, Fred Anderson, Bill Atkinson, Joan Baez, Marjorie Powell Barden,
Jeff Bewkes, Bono, Ann Bowers, Stewart Brand, Chrisann Brennan, Larry Brilliant, John
Seeley Brown, Tim Brown, Nolan Bushnell, Greg Calhoun, Bill Campbell, Berry Cash, Ed
Catmull, Ray Cave, Lee Clow, Debi Coleman, Tim Cook, Katie Cotton, Eddy Cue, Andrea
Cunningham, John Doerr, Millard Drexler, Jennifer Egan, Al Eisenstat, Michael Eisner,
Larry Ellison, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Gerard Errera, Tony Fadell, Jean-Louis Gassée, Bill
Gates, Adele Goldberg, Craig Good, Austan Goolsbee, Al Gore, Andy Grove, Bill
Hambrecht, Michael Hawley, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Elizabeth Holmes, Bruce
Horn, John Huey, Jimmy Iovine, Jony Ive, Oren Jacob, Erin Jobs, Reed Jobs, Steve Jobs,
Ron Johnson, Mitch Kapor, Susan Kare (email), Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pam Kerwin, Kristina
Kiehl, Joel Klein, Daniel Kottke, Andy Lack, John Lasseter, Art Levinson, Steven Levy,
Dan’l Lewin, Maya Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Mike Markkula, John Markoff, Wynton Marsalis,
Regis McKenna, Mike Merin, Bob Metcalfe, Doug Morris, Walt Mossberg, Rupert
Murdoch, Mike Murray, Nicholas Negroponte, Dean Ornish, Paul Otellini, Norman
Pearlstine, Laurene Powell, Josh Quittner, Tina Redse, George Riley, Brian Roberts, Arthur
Rock, Jeff Rosen, Alain Rossmann, Jon Rubinstein, Phil Schiller, Eric Schmidt, Barry
Schuler, Mike Scott, John Sculley, Andy Serwer, Mona Simpson, Mike Slade, Alvy Ray
Smith, Gina Smith, Kathryn Smith, Rick Stengel, Larry Tesler, Avie Tevanian, Guy “Bud”
Tribble, Don Valentine, Paul Vidich, James Vincent, Alice Waters, Ron Wayne, Wendell
Weeks, Ed Woolard, Stephen Wozniak, Del Yocam, Jerry York.


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———. Insanely Great. Viking Penguin, 1994.
———. The Perfect Thing. Simon & Schuster, 2006.
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Sheff, David. “Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs.” Playboy, February 1985.
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———. A Regular Guy. Knopf, 1996.
Smith, Douglas, and Robert Alexander. Fumbling the Future. Morrow, 1988.
Stross, Randall. Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. Atheneum, 1993.
“Triumph of the Nerds,” PBS Television, hosted by Robert X. Cringely, June 1996.
Wozniak, Steve, with Gina Smith. iWoz. Norton, 2006.
Young, Jeffrey. Steve Jobs. Scott, Foresman, 1988.
———, and William Simon. iCon. John Wiley, 2005.







NOTES




















CHAPTER 1: CHILDHOOD
The Adoption: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, Mona Simpson, Del Yocam,
Greg Calhoun, Chrisann Brennan, Andy Hertzfeld. Moritz, 44–45; Young, 16–17; Jobs,
Smithsonian oral history; Jobs, Stanford commencement address; Andy Behrendt, “Apple
Computer Mogul’s Roots Tied to Green Bay,” (Green Bay) Press Gazette, Dec. 4, 2005;
Georgina Dickinson, “Dad Waits for Jobs to iPhone,” New York Post and The Sun
(London), Aug. 27, 2011; Mohannad Al-Haj Ali, “Steve Jobs Has Roots in Syria,” Al
Hayat, Jan. 16, 2011; Ulf Froitzheim, “Porträt Steve Jobs,” Unternehmen, Nov. 26, 2007.
Silicon Valley: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell. Jobs, Smithsonian oral
history; Moritz, 46; Berlin, 155–177; Malone, 21–22.
School: Interview with Steve Jobs. Jobs, Smithsonian oral history; Sculley, 166; Malone,
11, 28, 72; Young, 25, 34–35; Young and Simon, 18; Moritz, 48, 73–74. Jobs’s address was
originally 11161 Crist Drive, before the subdivsion was incorporated into the town from the
county. Some sources mention that Jobs worked at both Haltek and another store with a
similar name, Halted. When asked, Jobs says he can remember working only at Haltek.

CHAPTER 2: ODD COUPLE
Woz: Interviews with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs. Wozniak, 12–16, 22, 50–61, 86–91;
Levy, Hackers, 245; Moritz, 62–64; Young, 28; Jobs, Macworld address, Jan. 17, 2007.
The Blue Box: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. Ron Rosenbaum, “Secrets of
the Little Blue Box,” Esquire, Oct. 1971. Wozniak answer, woz.org/letters/general/03.html;
Wozniak, 98–115. For slightly varying accounts, see Markoff, 272; Moritz, 78–86; Young,
42–45; Malone, 30–35.

CHAPTER 3: THE DROPOUT
Chrisann Brennan: Interviews with Chrisann Brennan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tim
Brown. Moritz, 75–77; Young, 41; Malone, 39.
Reed College: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke, Elizabeth Holmes. Freiberger
and Swaine, 208; Moritz, 94–100; Young, 55; “The Updated Book of Jobs,” Time, Jan. 3,
1983.
Robert Friedland: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke, Elizabeth Holmes. In
September 2010 I met with Friedland in New York City to discuss his background and
relationship with Jobs, but he did not want to be quoted on the record. McNish, 11–17;
Jennifer Wells, “Canada’s Next Billionaire,” Maclean’s, June 3, 1996; Richard Read,
“Financier’s Saga of Risk,” Mines and Communities magazine, Oct. 16, 2005; Jennifer









Hunter, “But What Would His Guru Say?” (Toronto) Globe and Mail, Mar. 18, 1988;
Moritz, 96, 109; Young, 56.
. . . Drop Out: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak; Jobs, Stanford
commencement address; Moritz, 97.

CHAPTER 4: ATARI AND INDIA
Atari: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, Ron Wayne. Moritz, 103–
104.
India: Interviews with Daniel Kottke, Steve Jobs, Al Alcorn, Larry Brilliant.
The Search: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke, Elizabeth Holmes, Greg
Calhoun. Young, 72; Young and Simon, 31–32; Moritz, 107.
Breakout: Interviews with Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Wozniak, Ron Wayne, Andy
Hertzfeld. Wozniak, 144–149; Young, 88; Linzmayer, 4.

CHAPTER 5: THE APPLE I
Machines of Loving Grace: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bono, Stewart Brand. Markoff,
xii; Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, Mar. 1, 1995; Jobs, Stanford
commencement address; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago,
2006).
The Homebrew Computer Club: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak,
152–172; Freiberger and Swaine, 99; Linzmayer, 5; Moritz, 144; Steve Wozniak,
“Homebrew and How Apple Came to Be,” www.atariarchives.org; Bill Gates, “Open Letter
to Hobbyists,” Feb. 3, 1976.
Apple Is Born: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula, Ron Wayne.
Steve Jobs, address to the Aspen Design Conference, June 15, 1983, tape in Aspen Institute
archives; Apple Computer Partnership Agreement, County of Santa Clara, Apr. 1, 1976, and
Amendment to Agreement, Apr. 12, 1976; Bruce Newman, “Apple’s Lost Founder,” San
Jose Mercury News, June 2, 2010; Wozniak, 86, 176–177; Moritz, 149–151; Freiberger and
Swaine, 212–213; Ashlee Vance, “A Haven for Spare Parts Lives on in Silicon Valley,”
New York Times, Feb. 4, 2009; Paul Terrell interview, Aug. 1, 2008, mac-history.net.
Garage Band: Interviews with Steve Wozniak, Elizabeth Holmes, Daniel Kottke, Steve
Jobs. Wozniak, 179–189; Moritz, 152–163; Young, 95–111; R. S. Jones, “Comparing
Apples and Oranges,” Interface, July 1976.

CHAPTER 6: THE APPLE II
An Integrated Package: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Al Alcorn, Ron
Wayne. Wozniak, 165, 190–195; Young, 126; Moritz, 169–170, 194–197; Malone, v, 103.
Mike Markkula: Interviews with Regis McKenna, Don Valentine, Steve Jobs, Steve
Wozniak, Mike Markkula, Arthur Rock. Nolan Bushnell, keynote address at the
ScrewAttack Gaming Convention, Dallas, July 5, 2009; Steve Jobs, talk at the International
Design Conference at Aspen, June 15, 1983; Mike Markkula, “The Apple Marketing
Philosophy” (courtesy of Mike Markkula), Dec. 1979; Wozniak, 196–199. See also Moritz,
182–183; Malone, 110–111.









Regis McKenna: Interviews with Regis McKenna, John Doerr, Steve Jobs. Ivan Raszl,
“Interview with Rob Janoff,” Creativebits.org, Aug. 3, 2009.
The First Launch Event: Interviews with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs. Wozniak, 201–206;
Moritz, 199–201; Young, 139.
Mike Scott: Interviews with Mike Scott, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak,
Arthur Rock. Young, 135; Freiberger and Swaine, 219, 222; Moritz, 213; Elliot, 4.

CHAPTER 7: CHRISANN AND LISA
Interviews with Chrisann Brennan, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes, Greg Calhoun, Daniel
Kottke, Arthur Rock. Moritz, 285; “The Updated Book of Jobs,” Time, Jan. 3, 1983;
“Striking It Rich,” Time, Feb. 15, 1982.

CHAPTER 8: XEROX AND LISA
A New Baby: Interviews with Andrea Cunningham, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs, Bill
Atkinson. Wozniak, 226; Levy, Insanely Great, 124; Young, 168–170; Bill Atkinson, oral
history, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA; Jef Raskin, “Holes in the
Histories,” Interactions, July 1994; Jef Raskin, “Hubris of a Heavyweight,” IEEE
Spectrum, July 1994; Jef Raskin, oral history, April 13, 2000, Stanford Library Department
of Special Collections; Linzmayer, 74, 85–89.
Xerox PARC: Interviews with Steve Jobs, John Seeley Brown, Adele Goldberg, Larry
Tesler, Bill Atkinson. Freiberger and Swaine, 239; Levy, Insanely Great, 66–80; Hiltzik,
330–341; Linzmayer, 74–75; Young, 170–172; Rose, 45–47; Triumph of the Nerds, PBS,
part 3.
“Great Artists Steal”: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, Bill Atkinson. Levy,
Insanely Great, 77, 87–90; Triumph of the Nerds, PBS, part 3; Bruce Horn, “Where It All
Began” (1966), www.mackido.com; Hiltzik, 343, 367–370; Malcolm Gladwell, “Creation
Myth,” New Yorker, May 16, 2011; Young, 178–182.

CHAPTER 9: GOING PUBLIC
Options: Interviews with Daniel Kottke, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld,
Mike Markkula, Bill Hambrecht. “Sale of Apple Stock Barred,” Boston Globe, Dec. 11,
1980.
Baby You’re a Rich Man: Interviews with Larry Brilliant, Steve Jobs. Steve Ditlea, “An
Apple on Every Desk,” Inc., Oct. 1, 1981; “Striking It Rich,” Time, Feb. 15, 1982; “The
Seeds of Success,” Time, Feb. 15, 1982; Moritz, 292–295; Sheff.

CHAPTER 10: THE MAC IS BORN
Jef Raskin’s Baby: Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike
Markkula. Jef Raskin, “Recollections of the Macintosh Project,” “Holes in the Histories,”
“The Genesis and History of the Macintosh Project,” “Reply to Jobs, and Personal
Motivation,” “Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer,” and “Computers
by the Millions,” Raskin papers, Stanford University Library; Jef Raskin, “A
Conversation,” Ubiquity, June 23, 2003; Levy, Insanely Great, 107–121; Hertzfeld, 19;