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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 1

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING

BIOGRAPHIES OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND

ALBERT EINSTEIN, THIS IS THE EXCLUSIVE

BIOGRAPHY OF STEVE JOBS.

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs

conducted over two years—as well as interviews with

more than a hundred family members, friends,

adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter

Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster

life and searingly intense personality of a creative

entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and

ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal

computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet

computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain

its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of

inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that

the best way to create value in the twenty-ﬁrst century

was to connect creativity with technology. He built a

company where leaps of the imagination were

combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he

asked for no control over what was written nor even the

right to read it before it was published. He put nothing

ofﬂimits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak

honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally

so, about the people he worked with and competed

against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an

unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism,

obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control

that shaped his approach to business and the

innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around

him to fury and despair. But his personality and

products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 4

and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated

system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, ﬁlled with

lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and

values.

Walter Isaacson

, the CEO of the Aspen Institute,

has been the chairman of CNN and the managing

editor of

Time

magazine. He is the author of

Einstein:

His Life and Universe

Benjamin Franklin: An American

Life

, and

Kissinger: A Biography

, and is the coauthor,

with Evan Thomas, of

The Wise Men: Six Friends and

the World They Made

. He and his wife live in

Washington, D.C.

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND

MORE AT

SimonandSchuster.com

• THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS: FRONT BY ALBERT

WATSON;

BACK BY NORMAN SEEFF

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 5

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 6

ALSO BY WALTER ISAACSON

American Sketches

Einstein: His Life and Universe

A Benjamin Franklin Reader

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Kissinger: A Biography

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They

Made

(with Evan Thomas)

Pro and Con

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 7

Simon & Schuster

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New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

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or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary

Rights Department,

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition

November 2011

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are

registered trademarks

of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Illustration credits appear here.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4516-4853-9

ISBN 978-1-4516-4855-3 (ebook)

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 9

The people who are crazy enough

to think they can change

the world are the ones who do.

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 10

CONTENTS

Characters

Introduction:

How This Book Came to Be

CHAPTER ONE

Childhood:

Abandoned and Chosen

CHAPTER TWO

Odd Couple:

The Two Steves

CHAPTER THREE

The Dropout:

Turn On, Tune In . . .

CHAPTER FOUR

Atari and India:

Zen and the Art of Game Design

CHAPTER FIVE

The Apple I:

Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .

CHAPTER SIX

The Apple II:

Dawn of a New Age

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chrisann and Lisa:

He Who Is Abandoned . . .

CHAPTER EIGHT

Xerox and Lisa:

Graphical User Interfaces

CHAPTER NINE

Going Public:

A Man of Wealth and Fame

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 11

CHAPTER TEN

The Mac Is Born:

You Say You Want a Revolution

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Reality Distortion Field:

Playing by His Own Set of

Rules

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Design:

Real Artists Simplify

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Building the Mac:

The Journey Is the Reward

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Enter Sculley:

The Pepsi Challenge

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Launch:

A Dent in the Universe

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Gates and Jobs:

When Orbits Intersect

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Icarus:

What Goes Up . . .

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Prometheus Unbound

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Pixar:

Technology Meets Art

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Regular Guy:

Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Family Man:

At Home with the Jobs Clan

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 12

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Toy Story:

Buzz and Woody to the Rescue

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Second Coming:

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last . . .

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Restoration:

The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Think Different:

Jobs as iCEO

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Design Principles:

The Studio of Jobs and Ive

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The iMac:

Hello (Again)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CEO:

Still Crazy after All These Years

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Apple Stores:

Genius Bars and Siena Sandstone

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Digital Hub:

From iTunes to the iPod

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The iTunes Store:

I’m the Pied Piper

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Music Man:

The Sound Track of His Life

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 13

Pixar’s Friends:

. . . and Foes

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Twenty-ﬁrst-century Macs:

Setting Apple Apart

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Round One:

Memento Mori

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The iPhone:

Three Revolutionary Products in One

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Round Two:

The Cancer Recurs

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The iPad:

Into the Post-PC Era

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

New Battles:

And Echoes of Old Ones

CHAPTER FORTY

To Inﬁnity:

The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Round Three:

The Twilight Struggle

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Legacy:

The Brightest Heaven of Invention

Acknowledgments

Sources

Notes

Index

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 14

CHARACTERS

AL ALCORN

. Chief engineer at Atari, who

designed Pong and hired Jobs.

GIL AMELIO

. Became CEO of Apple in 1996,

bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back.

BILL ATKINSON

. Early Apple employee,

developed graphics for the Macintosh.

CHRISANN BRENNAN

. Jobs’s girlfriend at

Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa.

LISA BRENNAN-JOBS

. Daughter of Jobs and

Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer in

New York City.

NOLAN BUSHNELL

. Founder of Atari and

entrepreneurial role model for Jobs.

BILL CAMPBELL

. Apple marketing chief during

Jobs’s ﬁrst stint at Apple and board member and

conﬁdant after Jobs’s return in 1997.

EDWIN CATMULL

. A cofounder of Pixar and later

a Disney executive.

KOBUN CHINO

. A Soōtoō Zen master in

California who became Jobs’s spiritual teacher.

LEE CLOW

. Advertising wizard who created

Apple’s “1984” ad and worked with Jobs for three

decades.

DEBORAH “DEBI” COLEMAN

. Early Mac team

manager who took over Apple manufacturing.

TIM COOK

. Steady, calm, chief operating ofﬁcer

hired by Jobs in 1998; replaced Jobs as Apple CEO in

August 2011.

EDDY CUE

. Chief of Internet services at Apple,

Jobs’s wingman in dealing with content companies.

ANDREA “ANDY” CUNNINGHAM

. Publicist at

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 15

Regis McKenna’s ﬁrm who handled Apple in the early

Macintosh years.

MICHAEL EISNER

. Hard-driving Disney CEO who

made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs.

LARRY ELLISON

. CEO of Oracle and personal

friend of Jobs.

TONY FADELL

. Punky engineer brought to Apple

in 2001 to develop the iPod.

SCOTT FORSTALL

. Chief of Apple’s mobile

device software.

ROBERT FRIEDLAND

. Reed student, proprietor

of an apple farm commune, and spiritual seeker who

inﬂuenced Jobs, then went on to run a mining company.

JEAN-LOUIS GASSÉE

. Apple’s manager in

France, took over the Macintosh division when Jobs

was ousted in 1985.

BILL GATES

. The other computer wunderkind

born in 1955.

ANDY HERTZFELD

. Playful, friendly software

engineer and Jobs’s pal on the original Mac team.

JOANNA HOFFMAN

. Original Mac team member

with the spirit to stand up to Jobs.

ELIZABETH HOLMES

. Daniel Kottke’s girlfriend at

Reed and early Apple employee.

ROD HOLT

. Chain-smoking Marxist hired by Jobs

in 1976 to be the electrical engineer on the Apple II.

ROBERT IGER

. Succeeded Eisner as Disney

CEO in 2005.

JONATHAN “JONY” IVE

. Chief designer at

Apple, became Jobs’s partner and conﬁdant.

ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI

. Syrian-born

graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological

father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and

beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno.

CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS

. Daughter of Armenian

immigrants, married Paul Jobs in 1946; they adopted

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 16

Steve soon after his birth in 1955.

ERIN JOBS

. Middle child of Laurene Powell and

Steve Jobs.

EVE JOBS

. Youngest child of Laurene and Steve.

PATTY JOBS

. Adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs

two years after they adopted Steve.

PAUL REINHOLD JOBS

. Wisconsin-born Coast

Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve

in 1955.

REED JOBS

. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and

Laurene Powell.

RON JOHNSON

. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to

develop Apple’s stores.

JEFFREY KATZENBERG

. Head of Disney

Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to

cofound DreamWorks SKG.

DANIEL KOTTKE

. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed,

fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee.

JOHN LASSETER

. Cofounder and creative force

at Pixar.

DAN’L LEWIN

. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple

and then NeXT.

MIKE MARKKULA

. First big Apple investor and

chairman, a father ﬁgure to Jobs.

REGIS MCKENNA

. Publicity whiz who guided

Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor.

MIKE MURRAY

. Early Macintosh marketing

director.

PAUL OTELLINI

. CEO of Intel who helped switch

the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone

business.

LAURENE POWELL

. Savvy and good-humored

Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then

Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991.

GEORGE RILEY

. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and

lawyer.

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 17

ARTHUR ROCK

. Legendary tech investor, early

Apple board member, Jobs’s father ﬁgure.

JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN

. Worked with

Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at

Apple in 1997.

MIKE SCOTT

. Brought in by Markkula to be

Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.

JOHN SCULLEY

. Pepsi executive recruited by

Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and

ousted Jobs in 1985.

JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON

Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom

she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she

raised.

MONA SIMPSON

. Biological full sister of Jobs;

they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became

close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother

Joanne (

Anywhere but Here

), Jobs and his daughter

Lisa (

A Regular Guy

), and her father Abdulfattah

Jandali (

The Lost Father

ALVY RAY SMITH

. A cofounder of Pixar who

clashed with Jobs.

BURRELL SMITH

. Brilliant, troubled programmer

on the original Mac team, afﬂicted with schizophrenia in

the 1990s.

AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN

. Worked with Jobs

and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software

engineer at Apple in 1997.

JAMES VINCENT

. A music-loving Brit, the

younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at

the ad agency Apple hired.

RON WAYNE

. Met Jobs at Atari, became ﬁrst

partner with Jobs and Wozniak at ﬂedgling Apple, but

unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake.

STEPHEN WOZNIAK

. The star electronics geek at

Homestead High; Jobs ﬁgured out how to package and

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 18

market his amazing circuit boards and became his

partner in founding Apple.

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 19

INTRODUCTION

How This Book Came to Be

In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call

from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me

over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity,

especially when he was launching a new product that

he wanted on the cover of

Time

or featured on CNN,

places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer

at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much.

We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had

recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our

summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come,

he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to

take a walk so that we could talk.

That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that taking

a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious

conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a

biography of him. I had recently published one on

Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert

Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half

jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural

successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he

was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had

many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I

said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

I had known him since 1984, when he came to

Manhattan to have lunch with

Time

’s editors and extol

his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then,

attacking a

Time

correspondent for having wounded

him with a story that was too revealing. But talking to

him afterward, I found myself rather captivated, as so

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 20

many others have been over the years, by his engaging

intensity. We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted

from Apple. When he had something to pitch, such as a

NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm

would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me

to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tell me that

whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever

produced. I liked him.

When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we

put him on the cover of

Time

, and soon thereafter he

began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing

on the most inﬂuential people of the century. He had

launched his “Think Different” campaign, featuring

iconic photos of some of the same people we were

considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing

historic inﬂuence fascinating.

After I had deﬂected his suggestion that I write a

biography of him, I heard from him every now and then.

At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my

daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an

homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer

who broke the German wartime codes and then

committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple.

He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but

hadn’t. That started an exchange about the early history

of Apple, and I found myself gathering string on the

subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a book.

When my Einstein biography came out, he came to a

book event in Palo Alto and pulled me aside to suggest,

again, that he would make a good subject.

His persistence bafﬂed me. He was known to

guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he’d

ever read any of my books. Maybe someday, I

continued to say. But in 2009 his wife, Laurene Powell,

said bluntly, “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve,

you’d better do it now.” He had just taken a second

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 21

medical leave. I confessed to her that when he had ﬁrst

raised the idea, I hadn’t known he was sick. Almost

nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before

he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was

still keeping it a secret, she explained.

I decided then to write this book. Jobs surprised

me by readily acknowledging that he would have no

control over it or even the right to see it in advance. “It’s

your book,” he said. “I won’t even read it.” But later that

fall he seemed to have second thoughts about

cooperating and, though I didn’t know it, was hit by

another round of cancer complications. He stopped

returning my calls, and I put the project aside for a

while.

Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the

afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2009. He was at home in

Palo Alto with only his sister, the writer Mona Simpson.

His wife and their three children had taken a quick trip

to go skiing, but he was not healthy enough to join

them. He was in a reﬂective mood, and we talked for

more than an hour. He began by recalling that he had

wanted to build a frequency counter when he was

twelve, and he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the

founder of HP, in the phone book and call him to get

parts. Jobs said that the past twelve years of his life,

since his return to Apple, had been his most productive

in terms of creating new products. But his more

important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his

friend David Packard had done, which was create a

company that was so imbued with innovative creativity

that it would outlive them.

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person

as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read

something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of

Polaroid, said about the importance of people who

could stand at the intersection of humanities and

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 22

sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It

was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography

(and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be

valid). The creativity that can occur when a feel for both

the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong

personality was the topic that most interested me in my

biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that

it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the

twenty-ﬁrst century.

I asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to

write his biography. “I think you’re good at getting

people to talk,” he replied. That was an unexpected

answer. I knew that I would have to interview scores of

people he had ﬁred, abused, abandoned, or otherwise

infuriated, and I feared he would not be comfortable

with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out

to be skittish when word trickled back to him of people

that I was interviewing. But after a couple of months, he

began encouraging people to talk to me, even foes and

former girlfriends. Nor did he try to put anything off-

limits. “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as

getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three

and the way I handled that,” he said. “But I don’t have

any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.”

He didn’t seek any control over what I wrote, or even

ask to read it in advance. His only involvement came

when my publisher was choosing the cover art. When

he saw an early version of a proposed cover treatment,

he disliked it so much that he asked to have input in

designing a new version. I was both amused and

willing, so I readily assented.

I ended up having more than forty interviews and

conversations with him. Some were formal ones in his

Palo Alto living room, others were done during long

walks and drives or by telephone. During my two years

of visits, he became increasingly intimate and

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 23

revealing, though at times I witnessed what his veteran

colleagues at Apple used to call his “reality distortion

ﬁeld.” Sometimes it was the inadvertent misﬁring of

memory cells that happens to us all; at other times he

was spinning his own version of reality both to me and

to himself. To check and ﬂesh out his story, I

interviewed more than a hundred friends, relatives,

competitors, adversaries, and colleagues.

His wife also did not request any restrictions or

control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would

publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be

honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is

one of the smartest and most grounded people I have

ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that

are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me

early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at

spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to

see that it’s all told truthfully.”

I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have

succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in

this drama who will remember some of the events

differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in

Jobs’s distortion ﬁeld. As happened when I wrote a

book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was

good preparation for this project, I found that people

had such strong positive and negative emotions about

Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But

I’ve done the best I can to balance conﬂicting accounts

fairly and be transparent about the sources I used.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and

searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur

whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive

revolutionized six industries: personal computers,

animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and

digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail

stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 24

reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new

market for digital content based on apps rather than just

websites. Along the way he produced not only

transforming products but also, on his second try, a

lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is ﬁlled

with creative designers and daredevil engineers who

could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right

before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he

started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most

valuable company.

This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a

time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain

its innovative edge, and when societies around the

world are trying to build creative digital-age economies,

Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness,

imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that

the best way to create value in the twenty-ﬁrst century

was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a

company where leaps of the imagination were

combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and

his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently:

They developed not merely modest product advances

based on focus groups, but whole new devices and

services that consumers did not yet know they needed.

He was not a model boss or human being, tidily

packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could

drive those around him to fury and despair. But his

personality and passions and products were all

interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software

tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale

is thus both instructive and cautionary, ﬁlled with

lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and

values.

Shakespeare’s

Henry V

—the story of a willful and

immature prince who becomes a passionate but

sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but ﬂawed

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 25

king—begins with the exhortation “O for a Muse of ﬁre,

that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.”

For Steve Jobs, the ascent to the brightest heaven of

invention begins with a tale of two sets of parents, and

of growing up in a valley that was just learning how to

turn silicon into gold.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 26

STEVE JOBS

Paul Jobs with Steve, 1956

The Los Altos house with the garage where Apple

was born

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 27

In the Homestead High yearbook, 1972

With the “SWAB JOB” school prank sign

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 28

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 29

CHAPTER ONE

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 30

CHILDHOOD

Abandoned and Chosen

The Adoption

When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast

Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his

crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where

their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he

would ﬁnd himself a wife within two weeks. He was a

taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a

passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his

looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-

humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the

fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group

she had originally planned to go out with that evening.

Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to

Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a

happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them

more than forty years later.

Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy

farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father

was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended

up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery

exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered

through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic

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

though he didn’t know how to swim. He was deployed

on the USS

General M. C. Meigs

and spent much of the

war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent

as a machinist and ﬁreman earned him

commendations, but he occasionally found himself in

minor trouble and never rose above the rank of

seaman.

Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 31

had landed after ﬂeeing the Turks in Armenia, and they

moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when

she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely

mentioned to anyone: She had been married before,

but her husband had been killed in the war. So when

she met Paul Jobs on that ﬁrst date, she was primed to

start a new life.

Like many who lived through the war, they had

experienced enough excitement that, when it was over,

they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and

lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they

moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a

few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job

as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion

was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his

spare time buying, restoring, and selling them.

Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time

used car salesman.

Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952

she convinced her husband to move back there. They

got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the

Paciﬁc, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a

job working for a ﬁnance company as a “repo man,”

picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid their

loans and repossessing them. He also bought,

repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent

enough living in the process.

There was, however, something missing in their

lives. They wanted children, but Clara had suffered an

ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was

implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and

she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after

nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a

child.

Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural

Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 32

Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay,

where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled

successfully in various other businesses, including real

estate and photoengraving. He was very strict,

especially regarding his daughter’s relationships, and

he had strongly disapproved of her ﬁrst love, an artist

who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he

threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a

graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell

in love with Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a Muslim

teaching assistant from Syria.

Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a

prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil reﬁneries

and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in

Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much

controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother,

he later said, was a “traditional Muslim woman” who

was a “conservative, obedient housewife.” Like the

Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on

education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding

school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an

undergraduate degree at the American University in

Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to

pursue a doctoral degree in political science.

In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with

Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs,

where she learned from his family to cook Syrian

dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin she

discovered that she was pregnant. They were both

twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her

father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to

disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an

easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early

1955, Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she

was taken into the care of a kindly doctor who sheltered

unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 33

arranged closed adoptions.

Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be

adopted by college graduates. So the doctor arranged

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

when a boy was born—on February 24, 1955—the

designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and

backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son

not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a

passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife

who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara

named their new baby Steven Paul Jobs.

When Joanne found out that her baby had been

placed with a couple who had not even graduated from

high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers.

The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had

settled into the Jobs household. Eventually Joanne

relented, with the stipulation that the couple promise—

indeed sign a pledge—to fund a savings account to pay

for the boy’s college education.

There was another reason that Joanne was balky

about signing the adoption papers. Her father was

about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon

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

members, sometimes tearing up at the memory, that

once they were married, she could get their baby boy

back.

Arthur Schieble died in August 1955, after the

adoption was ﬁnalized. Just after Christmas that year,

Joanne and Abdulfattah were married in St. Philip the

Apostle Catholic Church in Green Bay. He got his PhD

in international politics the next year, and then they had

another child, a girl named Mona. After she and Jandali

divorced in 1962, Joanne embarked on a dreamy and

peripatetic life that her daughter, who grew up to

become the acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would

capture in her book

Anywhere but Here

. Because

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 34

Steve’s adoption had been closed, it would be twenty

years before they would all ﬁnd each other.

Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was

adopted. “My parents were very open with me about

that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on

the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years

old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “So does

that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl

asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according

to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying.

And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’

They were very serious and looked me straight in the

eye. They said, ‘We speciﬁcally picked you out.’ Both of

my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And

they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.”

Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts

became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded

himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that

he was given up at birth left some scars. “I think his

desire for complete control of whatever he makes

derives directly from his personality and the fact that he

was abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague,

Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and

he sees the product as an extension of himself.” Greg

Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college,

saw another effect. “Steve talked to me a lot about

being abandoned and the pain that caused,” he said. “It

made him independent. He followed the beat of a

different drummer, and that came from being in a

different world than he was born into.”

Later in life, when he was the same age his

biological father had been when he abandoned him,

Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He

eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann

Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up

for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass,” and it helps

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 35

to explain some of his behavior. “He who is abandoned

is an abandoner,” she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who

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

the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs.

“The key question about Steve is why he can’t control

himself at times from being so reﬂexively cruel and

harmful to some people,” he said. “That goes back to

being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem

was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.”

Jobs dismissed this. “There’s some notion that

because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I

could do well and make my parents wish they had me

back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,” he

insisted. “Knowing I was adopted may have made me

feel more independent, but I have never felt

abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made

me feel special.” He would later bristle whenever

anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his

“adoptive” parents or implied that they were not his

“real” parents. “They were my parents 1,000%,” he said.

When speaking about his biological parents, on the

other hand, he was curt: “They were my sperm and egg

bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm

bank thing, nothing more.”

Silicon Valley

The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created

for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the

late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl

they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a

tract house in the suburbs. The ﬁnance company where

Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him

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

live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain

View, a less expensive town just to the south.

There Paul tried to pass along his love of

mechanics and cars. “Steve, this is your workbench

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 36

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

their garage. Jobs remembered being impressed by his

father’s focus on craftsmanship. “I thought my dad’s

sense of design was pretty good,” he said, “because he

knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he

would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a

hammer so I could work with him.”

Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back

and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs

showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels

and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply

in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the

backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though

they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even

cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

His father continued to refurbish and resell used

cars, and he festooned the garage with pictures of his

favorites. He would point out the detailing of the design

to his son: the lines, the vents, the chrome, the trim of

the seats. After work each day, he would change into

his dungarees and retreat to the garage, often with

Steve tagging along. “I ﬁgured I could get him nailed

down with a little mechanical ability, but he really wasn’t

interested in getting his hands dirty,” Paul later recalled.

“He never really cared too much about mechanical

things.”

“I wasn’t that into ﬁxing cars,” Jobs admitted. “But I

was eager to hang out with my dad.” Even as he was

growing more aware that he had been adopted, he was

becoming more attached to his father. One day when

he was about eight, he discovered a photograph of his

father from his time in the Coast Guard. “He’s in the

engine room, and he’s got his shirt off and looks like

James Dean. It was one of those

Oh wow

moments for

a kid.

Wow, oooh

, my parents were actually once very

young and really good-looking.”

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 37

Through cars, his father gave Steve his ﬁrst

exposure to electronics. “My dad did not have a deep

understanding of electronics, but he’d encountered it a

lot in automobiles and other things he would ﬁx. He

showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very

interested in that.” Even more interesting were the trips

to scavenge for parts. “Every weekend, there’d be a

junkyard trip. We’d be looking for a generator, a

carburetor, all sorts of components.” He remembered

watching his father negotiate at the counter. “He was a

good bargainer, because he knew better than the guys

at the counter what the parts should cost.” This helped

fulﬁll the pledge his parents made when he was

adopted. “My college fund came from my dad paying

$50 for a Ford Falcon or some other beat-up car that

didn’t run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it

for $250—and not telling the IRS.”

The Jobses’ house and the others in their

neighborhood were built by the real estate developer

Joseph Eichler, whose company spawned more than

eleven thousand homes in various California

subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by

Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for

the American “everyman,” Eichler built inexpensive

houses that featured ﬂoor-to-ceiling glass walls, open

ﬂoor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction,

concrete slab ﬂoors, and lots of sliding glass doors.

“Eichler did a great thing,” Jobs said on one of our

walks around the neighborhood. “His houses were

smart and cheap and good. They brought clean design

and simple taste to lower-income people. They had

awesome little features, like radiant heating in the

ﬂoors. You put carpet on them, and we had nice toasty

ﬂoors when we were kids.”

Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes

instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 38

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

bring really great design and simple capability to

something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he

pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. “It was

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

with the ﬁrst Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.”

Across the street from the Jobs family lived a man

who had become successful as a real estate agent. “He

wasn’t that bright,” Jobs recalled, “but he seemed to be

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

worked so hard, I remember. He took these night

classes, passed the license test, and got into real

estate. Then the bottom fell out of the market.” As a

result, the family found itself ﬁnancially strapped for a

year or so while Steve was in elementary school. His

mother took a job as a bookkeeper for Varian

Associates, a company that made scientiﬁc instruments,

and they took out a second mortgage. One day his

fourth-grade teacher asked him, “What is it you don’t

understand about the universe?” Jobs replied, “I don’t

understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke.” He

was proud that his father never adopted a servile

attitude or slick style that may have made him a better

salesman. “You had to suck up to people to sell real

estate, and he wasn’t good at that and it wasn’t in his

nature. I admired him for that.” Paul Jobs went back to

being a mechanic.

His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son

later praised more than emulated. He was also

resolute. Jobs described one example:

Nearby was an engineer who was working at

Westinghouse. He was a single guy, beatnik type. He

had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both

my parents worked, so I would come here right after

school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk and hit

her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 39

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

stood him down—saying “She’s here, but you’re not

coming in.” He stood right there. We like to think

everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was

one of those engineers who had messed-up lives.

What made the neighborhood different from the

thousands of other spindly-tree subdivisions across

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

engineers. “When we moved here, there were apricot

and plum orchards on all of these corners,” Jobs

recalled. “But it was beginning to boom because of

military investment.” He soaked up the history of the

valley and developed a yearning to play his own role.

Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being

asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane

cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. The ﬁlm

was dropped in canisters and returned to the NASA

Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from

where Jobs lived. “The ﬁrst computer terminal I ever

saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,”

he said. “I fell totally in love with it.”

Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during

the 1950s. The Lockheed Missiles and Space Division,

which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, was

founded in 1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time

Jobs moved to the area four years later, it employed

twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away,

Westinghouse built facilities that produced tubes and

electrical transformers for the missile systems. “You had

all these military companies on the cutting edge,” he

recalled. “It was mysterious and high-tech and made

living here very exciting.”

In the wake of the defense industries there arose a

booming economy based on technology. Its roots

stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his

new wife moved into a house in Palo Alto that had a

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 40

shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced.

The house had a garage—an appendage that would

prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which

they tinkered around until they had their ﬁrst product, an

audio oscillator. By the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was a

fast-growing company making technical instruments.

Fortunately there was a place nearby for

entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. In a

move that would help transform the area into the cradle

of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of

engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-

hundred-acre industrial park on university land for

private companies that could commercialize the ideas

of his students. Its ﬁrst tenant was Varian Associates,

where Clara Jobs worked. “Terman came up with this

great idea that did more than anything to cause the tech

industry to grow up here,” Jobs said. By the time Jobs

was ten, HP had nine thousand employees and was the

blue-chip company where every engineer seeking

ﬁnancial stability wanted to work.

The most important technology for the region’s

growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William

Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the

transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to

Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build

transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive

germanium that was then commonly used. But

Shockley became increasingly erratic and abandoned

his silicon transistor project, which led eight of his

engineers—most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon

Moore—to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

That company grew to twelve thousand employees, but

it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power

struggle to become CEO. He took Gordon Moore and

founded a company that they called Integrated

Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 41

abbreviated to Intel. Their third employee was Andrew

Grove, who later would grow the company by shifting its

focus from memory chips to microprocessors. Within a

few years there would be more than ﬁfty companies in

the area making semiconductors.

The exponential growth of this industry was

correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered

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

integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors

that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it

doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could

be expected to continue. This was reafﬁrmed in 1971,

when Intel was able to etch a complete central

processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which

was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held

generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of

performance to price allowed two generations of young

entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to

create cost projections for their forward-leaning

products.

The chip industry gave the region a new name

when Don Hoeﬂer, a columnist for the weekly trade

paper

Electronic News

, began a series in January 1971

entitled “Silicon Valley USA.” The forty-mile Santa Clara

Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco

through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial

backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once

connected California’s twenty-one mission churches

and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies

and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital

investment in the United States each year. “Growing up,

I got inspired by the history of the place,” Jobs said.

“That made me want to be a part of it.”

Like most kids, he became infused with the

passions of the grown-ups around him. “Most of the

dads in the neighborhood did really neat stuff, like

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 42

photovoltaics and batteries and radar,” Jobs recalled. “I

grew up in awe of that stuff and asking people about it.”

The most important of these neighbors, Larry Lang,

lived seven doors away. “He was my model of what an

HP engineer was supposed to be: a big ham radio

operator, hard-core electronics guy,” Jobs recalled. “He

would bring me stuff to play with.” As we walked up to

Lang’s old house, Jobs pointed to the driveway. “He

took a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker,

and he put it on this driveway. He had me talk into the

carbon mike and it ampliﬁed out of the speaker.” Jobs

had been taught by his father that microphones always

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

told my dad that he was wrong.”

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

When Steve protested otherwise, his father said he was

crazy. “It can’t work without an ampliﬁer. There’s some

trick.”

“I kept saying no to my dad, telling him he had to

see it, and ﬁnally he actually walked down with me and

saw it. And he said, ‘Well I’ll be a bat out of hell.’”

Jobs recalled the incident vividly because it was

his ﬁrst realization that his father did not know

everything. Then a more disconcerting discovery began

to dawn on him: He was smarter than his parents. He

had always admired his father’s competence and

savvy. “He was not an educated man, but I had always

thought he was pretty damn smart. He didn’t read much,

but he could do a lot. Almost everything mechanical, he

could ﬁgure it out.” Yet the carbon microphone incident,

Jobs said, began a jarring process of realizing that he

was in fact more clever and quick than his parents. “It

was a very big moment that’s burned into my mind.

When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt

tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never

forget that moment.” This discovery, he later told friends,

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 43

along with the fact that he was adopted, made him feel

apart—detached and separate—from both his family

and the world.

Another layer of awareness occurred soon after.

Not only did he discover that he was brighter than his

parents, but he discovered that they knew this. Paul and

Clara Jobs were loving parents, and they were willing

to adapt their lives to suit a son who was very smart—

and also willful. They would go to great lengths to

accommodate him. And soon Steve discovered this fact

as well. “Both my parents got me. They felt a lot of

responsibility once they sensed that I was special. They

found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in

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

So he grew up not only with a sense of having

once been abandoned, but also with a sense that he

was special. In his own mind, that was more important

in the formation of his personality.

School

Even before Jobs started elementary school, his

mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led

to some problems once he got to school. “I was kind of

bored for the ﬁrst few years, so I occupied myself by

getting into trouble.” It also soon became clear that

Jobs, by both nature and nurture, was not disposed to

accept authority. “I encountered authority of a different

kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not

like it. And they really almost got me. They came close

to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

His school, Monta Loma Elementary, was a series

of low-slung 1950s buildings four blocks from his

house. He countered his boredom by playing pranks. “I

had a good friend named Rick Ferrentino, and we’d get

into all sorts of trouble,” he recalled. “Like we made little

posters announcing ‘Bring Your Pet to School Day.’ It

was crazy, with dogs chasing cats all over, and the

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 44

teachers were beside themselves.” Another time they

convinced some kids to tell them the combination

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

switched all of the locks, and nobody could get their

bikes. It took them until late that night to straighten

things out.” When he was in third grade, the pranks

became a bit more dangerous. “One time we set off an

explosive under the chair of our teacher, Mrs. Thurman.

We gave her a nervous twitch.”

Not surprisingly, he was sent home two or three

times before he ﬁnished third grade. By then, however,

his father had begun to treat him as special, and in his

calm but ﬁrm manner he made it clear that he expected

the school to do the same. “Look, it’s not his fault,” Paul

Jobs told the teachers, his son recalled. “If you can’t

keep him interested, it’s your fault.” His parents never

punished him for his transgressions at school. “My

father’s father was an alcoholic and whipped him with a

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

parents, he added, “knew the school was at fault for

trying to make me memorize stupid stuff rather than

stimulating me.” He was already starting to show the

admixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and

detachment, that would mark him for the rest of his life.

When it came time for him to go into fourth grade,

the school decided it was best to put Jobs and

Ferrentino into separate classes. The teacher for the

advanced class was a spunky woman named Imogene

Hill, known as “Teddy,” and she became, Jobs said,

“one of the saints of my life.” After watching him for a

couple of weeks, she ﬁgured that the best way to

handle him was to bribe him. “After school one day, she

gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and

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

thought, ‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of

these giant lollipops that seemed as big as the world.

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 45

And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it

mostly right, I will give you this and ﬁve dollars.’ And I

handed it back within two days.” After a few months, he

no longer required the bribes. “I just wanted to learn

and to please her.”

She reciprocated by getting him a hobby kit for

grinding a lens and making a camera. “I learned more

from her than any other teacher, and if it hadn’t been for

her I’m sure I would have gone to jail.” It reinforced,

once again, the idea that he was special. “In my class, it

was just me she cared about. She saw something in

me.”

It was not merely intelligence that she saw. Years

later she liked to show off a picture of that year’s class

on Hawaii Day. Jobs had shown up without the

suggested Hawaiian shirt, but in the picture he is front

and center wearing one. He had, literally, been able to

talk the shirt off another kid’s back.

Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill had Jobs

tested. “I scored at the high school sophomore level,”

he recalled. Now that it was clear, not only to himself

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

intellectually special, the school made the remarkable

proposal that he skip two grades and go right into

seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep him

challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more

sensibly, to have him skip only one grade.

The transition was wrenching. He was a socially

awkward loner who found himself with kids a year

older. Worse yet, the sixth grade was in a different

school, Crittenden Middle. It was only eight blocks from

Monta Loma Elementary, but in many ways it was a

world apart, located in a neighborhood ﬁlled with ethnic

gangs. “Fights were a daily occurrence; as were

shakedowns in bathrooms,” wrote the Silicon Valley

journalist Michael S. Malone. “Knives were regularly

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 46

brought to school as a show of macho.” Around the time

that Jobs arrived, a group of students were jailed for a

gang rape, and the bus of a neighboring school was

destroyed after its team beat Crittenden’s in a wrestling

match.

Jobs was often bullied, and in the middle of

seventh grade he gave his parents an ultimatum. “I

insisted they put me in a different school,” he recalled.

Financially this was a tough demand. His parents were

barely making ends meet, but by this point there was

little doubt that they would eventually bend to his will.

“When they resisted, I told them I would just quit going

to school if I had to go back to Crittenden. So they

researched where the best schools were and scraped

together every dime and bought a house for $21,000 in

a nicer district.”

The move was only three miles to the south, to a

former apricot orchard in Los Altos that had been turned

into a subdivision of cookie-cutter tract homes. Their

house, at 2066 Crist Drive, was one story with three

bedrooms and an all-important attached garage with a

roll-down door facing the street. There Paul Jobs could

tinker with cars and his son with electronics.

Its other signiﬁcant attribute was that it was just

over the line inside what was then the Cupertino-

Sunnyvale School District, one of the safest and best in

the valley. “When I moved here, these corners were still

orchards,” Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his

old house. “The guy who lived right there taught me

how to be a good organic gardener and to compost. He

grew everything to perfection. I never had better food in

my life. That’s when I began to appreciate organic fruits

and vegetables.”

Even though they were not fervent about their

faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious

upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 47

most Sundays. That came to an end when he was

thirteen. In July 1968

Life

magazine published a

shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in

Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the

church’s pastor. “If I raise my ﬁnger, will God know

which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”

The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows

everything.”

Jobs then pulled out the

Life

cover and asked,

“Well, does God know about this and what’s going to

happen to those children?”

“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God

knows about that.”

Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have

anything to do with worshipping such a God, and he

never went back to church. He did, however, spend

years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen

Buddhism. Reﬂecting years later on his spiritual

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

emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received

dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it

becomes too based on faith rather than on living like

Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me.

“I think different religions are different doors to the same

house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and

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

Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a

company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for

electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he

crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers

were devising. His son was fascinated by the need for

perfection. “Lasers require precision alignment,” Jobs

said. “The really sophisticated ones, for airborne

applications or medical, had very precise features. They

would tell my dad something like, ‘This is what we want,

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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 48

coefﬁcients of expansion are all the same.’ And he had

to ﬁgure out how to do it.” Most pieces had to be made

from scratch, which meant that Paul had to create

custom tools and dies. His son was impressed, but he

rarely went to the machine shop. “It would have been

fun if he had gotten to teach me how to use a mill and

lathe. But unfortunately I never went, because I was

more interested in electronics.”

One summer Paul took Steve to Wisconsin to visit

the family’s dairy farm. Rural life did not appeal to

Steve, but one image stuck with him. He saw a calf

being born, and he was amazed when the tiny animal

struggled up within minutes and began to walk. “It was

not something she had learned, but it was instead

hardwired into her,” he recalled. “A human baby

couldn’t do that. I found it remarkable, even though no

one else did.” He put it in hardware-software terms: “It

was as if something in the animal’s body and in its brain

had been engineered to work together instantly rather

than being learned.”

In ninth grade Jobs went to Homestead High,

which had a sprawling campus of two-story cinderblock

buildings painted pink that served two thousand

students. “It was designed by a famous prison

architect,” Jobs recalled. “They wanted to make it

indestructible.” He had developed a love of walking,

and he walked the ﬁfteen blocks to school by himself

each day.

He had few friends his own age, but he got to

know some seniors who were immersed in the

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

geek and hippie worlds were beginning to show some

overlap. “My friends were the really smart kids,” he said.

“I was interested in math and science and electronics.

They were too, and also into LSD and the whole

counterculture trip.”

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 49

His pranks by then typically involved electronics.

At one point he wired his house with speakers. But

since speakers can also be used as microphones, he

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

in on what was happening in other rooms. One night,

when he had his headphones on and was listening in

on his parents’ bedroom, his father caught him and

angrily demanded that he dismantle the system. He

spent many evenings visiting the garage of Larry Lang,

the engineer who lived down the street from his old

house. Lang eventually gave Jobs the carbon

microphone that had fascinated him, and he turned him

on to Heathkits, those assemble-it-yourself kits for

making ham radios and other electronic gear that were

beloved by the soldering set back then. “Heathkits

came with all the boards and parts color-coded, but the

manual also explained the theory of how it operated,”

Jobs recalled. “It made you realize you could build and

understand anything. Once you built a couple of radios,

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

that as well,’ even if you didn’t. I was very lucky,

because when I was a kid both my dad and the

Heathkits made me believe I could build anything.”

Lang also got him into the Hewlett-Packard

Explorers Club, a group of ﬁfteen or so students who

met in the company cafeteria on Tuesday nights. “They

would get an engineer from one of the labs to come and

talk about what he was working on,” Jobs recalled. “My

dad would drive me there. I was in heaven. HP was a

pioneer of light-emitting diodes. So we talked about

what to do with them.” Because his father now worked

for a laser company, that topic particularly interested

him. One night he cornered one of HP’s laser engineers

after a talk and got a tour of the holography lab. But the

most lasting impression came from seeing the small

computers the company was developing. “I saw my ﬁrst

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 50

desktop computer there. It was called the 9100A, and it

was a gloriﬁed calculator but also really the ﬁrst desktop

computer. It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a

beauty of a thing. I fell in love with it.”

The kids in the Explorers Club were encouraged

to do projects, and Jobs decided to build a frequency

counter, which measures the number of pulses per

second in an electronic signal. He needed some parts

that HP made, so he picked up the phone and called

the CEO. “Back then, people didn’t have unlisted

numbers. So I looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto and

called him at home. And he answered and chatted with

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

got me a job in the plant where they made frequency

counters.” Jobs worked there the summer after his

freshman year at Homestead High. “My dad would drive

me in the morning and pick me up in the evening.”

His work mainly consisted of “just putting nuts and

bolts on things” on an assembly line. There was some

resentment among his fellow line workers toward the

pushy kid who had talked his way in by calling the CEO.

“I remember telling one of the supervisors, ‘I love this

stuff, I love this stuff,’ and then I asked him what he liked

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

easier time ingratiating himself with the engineers who

worked one ﬂoor above. “They served doughnuts and

coffee every morning at ten. So I’d go upstairs and hang

out with them.”

Jobs liked to work. He also had a newspaper route

—his father would drive him when it was raining—and

during his sophomore year spent weekends and the

summer as a stock clerk at a cavernous electronics

store, Haltek. It was to electronics what his father’s

junkyards were to auto parts: a scavenger’s paradise

sprawling over an entire city block with new, used,

salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 51

warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and

piled in an outdoor yard. “Out in the back, near the bay,

they had a fenced-in area with things like Polaris

submarine interiors that had been ripped and sold for

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

right there. The colors were military greens and grays,

but they had these switches and bulb covers of amber

and red. There were these big old lever switches that,

when you ﬂipped them, it was awesome, like you were

blowing up Chicago.”

At the wooden counters up front, laden with thick

catalogues in tattered binders, people would haggle for

switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest

memory chips. His father used to do that for auto parts,

and he succeeded because he knew the value of each

better than the clerks. Jobs followed suit. He developed

a knowledge of electronic parts that was honed by his

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

electronic ﬂea markets, such as the San Jose swap

meet, haggle for a used circuit board that contained

some valuable chips or components, and then sell

those to his manager at Haltek.

Jobs was able to get his ﬁrst car, with his father’s

help, when he was ﬁfteen. It was a two-tone Nash

Metropolitan that his father had ﬁtted out with an MG

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

tell his father that, or miss out on the chance to have his

own car. “In retrospect, a Nash Metropolitan might seem

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

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

a car, so that was great.” Within a year he had saved up

enough from his various jobs that he could trade up to a

red Fiat 850 coupe with an Abarth engine. “My dad

helped me buy and inspect it. The satisfaction of getting

paid and saving up for something, that was very

exciting.”

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 52

That same summer, between his sophomore and

junior years at Homestead, Jobs began smoking

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

was ﬁfteen, and then began using pot regularly.” At one

point his father found some dope in his son’s Fiat.

“What’s this?” he asked. Jobs coolly replied, “That’s

marijuana.” It was one of the few times in his life that he

faced his father’s anger. “That was the only real ﬁght I

ever got in with my dad,” he said. But his father again

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

use pot again, but I wouldn’t promise.” In fact by his

senior year he was also dabbling in LSD and hash as

well as exploring the mind-bending effects of sleep

deprivation. “I was starting to get stoned a bit more. We

would also drop acid occasionally, usually in ﬁelds or in

cars.”

He also ﬂowered intellectually during his last two

years in high school and found himself at the

intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who

were geekily immersed in electronics and those who

were into literature and creative endeavors. “I started to

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

outside of just science and technology—Shakespeare,

Plato. I loved

King Lear

.” His other favorites included

Moby-Dick

and the poems of Dylan Thomas. I asked

him why he related to King Lear and Captain Ahab, two

of the most willful and driven characters in literature, but

he didn’t respond to the connection I was making, so I

let it drop. “When I was a senior I had this phenomenal

AP English class. The teacher was this guy who looked

like Ernest Hemingway. He took a bunch of us

snowshoeing in Yosemite.”

One course that Jobs took would become part of

Silicon Valley lore: the electronics class taught by John

McCollum, a former Navy pilot who had a showman’s

ﬂair for exciting his students with such tricks as ﬁring up

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 53

a Tesla coil. His little stockroom, to which he would lend

the key to pet students, was crammed with transistors

and other components he had scored.

McCollum’s classroom was in a shed-like building

on the edge of the campus, next to the parking lot. “This

is where it was,” Jobs recalled as he peered in the

window, “and here, next door, is where the auto shop

class used to be.” The juxtaposition highlighted the shift

from the interests of his father’s generation. “Mr.

McCollum felt that electronics class was the new auto

shop.”

McCollum believed in military discipline and

respect for authority. Jobs didn’t. His aversion to

authority was something he no longer tried to hide, and

he affected an attitude that combined wiry and weird

intensity with aloof rebelliousness. McCollum later said,

“He was usually off in a corner doing something on his

own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to

do with either me or the rest of the class.” He never

trusted Jobs with a key to the stockroom. One day Jobs

needed a part that was not available, so he made a

collect call to the manufacturer, Burroughs in Detroit,

and said he was designing a new product and wanted

to test out the part. It arrived by air freight a few days

later. When McCollum asked how he had gotten it, Jobs

described—with deﬁant pride—the collect call and the

tale he had told. “I was furious,” McCollum said. “That

was not the way I wanted my students to behave.”

Jobs’s response was, “I don’t have the money for the

phone call. They’ve got plenty of money.”

Jobs took McCollum’s class for only one year,

rather than the three that it was offered. For one of his

projects, he made a device with a photocell that would

switch on a circuit when exposed to light, something

any high school science student could have done. He

was far more interested in playing with lasers,

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 54

something he learned from his father. With a few

friends, he created light shows for parties by bouncing

lasers off mirrors that were attached to the speakers of

his stereo system.

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 55

CHAPTER TWO

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 56

ODD COUPLE

The Two Steves

Woz

While a student in McCollum’s class, Jobs became

friends with a graduate who was the teacher’s all-time

favorite and a school legend for his wizardry in the

class. Stephen Wozniak, whose younger brother had

been on a swim team with Jobs, was almost ﬁve years

older than Jobs and far more knowledgeable about

electronics. But emotionally and socially he was still a

high school geek.

Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father’s

knee. But their lessons were different. Paul Jobs was a

high school dropout who, when ﬁxing up cars, knew

how to turn a tidy proﬁt by striking the right deal on

parts. Francis Wozniak, known as Jerry, was a brilliant

engineering graduate from Cal Tech, where he had

quarterbacked the football team, who became a rocket

scientist at Lockheed. He exalted engineering and

looked down on those in business, marketing, and

sales. “I remember him telling me that engineering was

the highest level of importance you could reach in the

world,” Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It takes society to

a new level.”

One of Steve Wozniak’s ﬁrst memories was going

to his father’s workplace on a weekend and being

shown electronic parts, with his dad “putting them on a

table with me so I got to play with them.” He watched

with fascination as his father tried to get a waveform line

on a video screen to stay ﬂat so he could show that one

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

that whatever my dad was doing, it was important and

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 57

good.” Woz, as he was known even then, would ask

about the resistors and transistors lying around the

house, and his father would pull out a blackboard to

illustrate what they did. “He would explain what a

resistor was by going all the way back to atoms and

electrons. He explained how resistors worked when I

was in second grade, not by equations but by having

me picture it.”

Woz’s father taught him something else that

became ingrained in his childlike, socially awkward

personality: Never lie. “My dad believed in honesty.

Extreme honesty. That’s the biggest thing he taught me.

I never lie, even to this day.” (The only partial exception

was in the service of a good practical joke.) In addition,

he imbued his son with an aversion to extreme

ambition, which set Woz apart from Jobs. At an Apple

product launch event in 2010, forty years after they met,

Woz reﬂected on their differences. “My father told me,

‘You always want to be in the middle,’” he said. “I didn’t

want to be up with the high-level people like Steve. My

dad was an engineer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I

was way too shy ever to be a business leader like

Steve.”

By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one

of the “electronics kids.” He had an easier time making

eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he

developed the chunky and stooped look of a guy who

spends most of his time hunched over circuit boards. At

the same age when Jobs was puzzling over a carbon

microphone that his dad couldn’t explain, Wozniak was

using transistors to build an intercom system featuring

ampliﬁers, relays, lights, and buzzers that connected

the kids’ bedrooms of six houses in the neighborhood.

And at an age when Jobs was building Heathkits,

Wozniak was assembling a transmitter and receiver

from Hallicrafters, the most sophisticated radios

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 58

available.

Woz spent a lot of time at home reading his

father’s electronics journals, and he became enthralled

by stories about new computers, such as the powerful

ENIAC. Because Boolean algebra came naturally to

him, he marveled at how simple, rather than complex,

the computers were. In eighth grade he built a

calculator that included one hundred transistors, two

hundred diodes, and two hundred resistors on ten

circuit boards. It won top prize in a local contest run by

the Air Force, even though the competitors included

students through twelfth grade.

Woz became more of a loner when the boys his

age began going out with girls and partying, endeavors

that he found far more complex than designing circuits.

“Where before I was popular and riding bikes and

everything, suddenly I was socially shut out,” he

recalled. “It seemed like nobody spoke to me for the

longest time.” He found an outlet by playing juvenile

pranks. In twelfth grade he built an electronic

metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that

keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like

a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries,

taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he

rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened.

Later that day he got called to the principal’s ofﬁce. He

thought it was because he had won, yet again, the

school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by

the police. The principal had been summoned when the

device was found, bravely ran onto the football ﬁeld

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

tried and failed to suppress his laughter. He actually got

sent to the juvenile detention center, where he spent

the night. It was a memorable experience. He taught the

other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to

the ceiling fans and connect them to the bars so people

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 59

got shocked when touching them.

Getting shocked was a badge of honor for Woz.

He prided himself on being a hardware engineer, which

meant that random shocks were routine. He once

devised a roulette game where four people put their

thumbs in a slot; when the ball landed, one would get

shocked. “Hardware guys will play this game, but

software guys are too chicken,” he noted.

During his senior year he got a part-time job at

Sylvania and had the chance to work on a computer for

the ﬁrst time. He learned FORTRAN from a book and

read the manuals for most of the systems of the day,

starting with the Digital Equipment PDP-8. Then he

studied the specs for the latest microchips and tried to

redesign the computers using these newer parts. The

challenge he set himself was to replicate the design

using the fewest components possible. Each night he

would try to improve his drawing from the night before.

By the end of his senior year, he had become a master.

“I was now designing computers with half the number of

chips the actual company had in their own design, but

only on paper.” He never told his friends. After all, most

seventeen-year-olds were getting their kicks in other

ways.

On Thanksgiving weekend of his senior year,

Wozniak visited the University of Colorado. It was

closed for the holiday, but he found an engineering

student who took him on a tour of the labs. He begged

his father to let him go there, even though the out-of-

state tuition was more than the family could easily

afford. They struck a deal: He would be allowed to go

for one year, but then he would transfer to De Anza

Community College back home. After arriving at

Colorado in the fall of 1969, he spent so much time

playing pranks (such as producing reams of printouts

saying “Fuck Nixon”) that he failed a couple of his

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courses and was put on probation. In addition, he

created a program to calculate Fibonacci numbers that

burned up so much computer time the university

threatened to bill him for the cost. So he readily lived up

to his bargain with his parents and transferred to De

Anza.

After a pleasant year at De Anza, Wozniak took

time off to make some money. He found work at a

company that made computers for the California Motor

Vehicle Department, and a coworker made him a

wonderful offer: He would provide some spare chips so

Wozniak could make one of the computers he had been

sketching on paper. Wozniak decided to use as few

chips as possible, both as a personal challenge and

because he did not want to take advantage of his

colleague’s largesse.

Much of the work was done in the garage of a

friend just around the corner, Bill Fernandez, who was

still at Homestead High. To lubricate their efforts, they

drank large amounts of Cragmont cream soda, riding

their bikes to the Sunnyvale Safeway to return the

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

we started referring to it as the Cream Soda Computer,”

Wozniak recalled. It was basically a calculator capable

of multiplying numbers entered by a set of switches and

displaying the results in binary code with little lights.

When it was ﬁnished, Fernandez told Wozniak

there was someone at Homestead High he should

meet. “His name is Steve. He likes to do pranks like you

do, and he’s also into building electronics like you are.”

It may have been the most signiﬁcant meeting in a

Silicon Valley garage since Hewlett went into Packard’s

thirty-two years earlier. “Steve and I just sat on the

sidewalk in front of Bill’s house for the longest time, just

sharing stories—mostly about pranks we’d pulled, and

also what kind of electronic designs we’d done,”

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Wozniak recalled. “We had so much in common.

Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people

what kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it

right away. And I liked him. He was kind of skinny and

wiry and full of energy.” Jobs was also impressed. “Woz

was the ﬁrst person I’d met who knew more electronics

than I did,” he once said, stretching his own expertise. “I

liked him right away. I was a little more mature than my

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

evened out. Woz was very bright, but emotionally he

was my age.”

In addition to their interest in computers, they

shared a passion for music. “It was an incredible time

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

when Beethoven and Mozart were alive. Really. People

will look back on it that way. And Woz and I were deeply

into it.” In particular, Wozniak turned Jobs on to the

glories of Bob Dylan. “We tracked down this guy in

Santa Cruz who put out this newsletter on Dylan,” Jobs

said. “Dylan taped all of his concerts, and some of the

people around him were not scrupulous, because soon

there were tapes all around. Bootlegs of everything.

And this guy had them all.”

Hunting down Dylan tapes soon became a joint

venture. “The two of us would go tramping through San

Jose and Berkeley and ask about Dylan bootlegs and

collect them,” said Wozniak. “We’d buy brochures of

Dylan lyrics and stay up late interpreting them. Dylan’s

words struck chords of creative thinking.” Added Jobs, “I

had more than a hundred hours, including every

concert on the ’65 and ’66 tour,” the one where Dylan

went electric. Both of them bought high-end TEAC reel-

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

record many concerts on one tape,” said Wozniak. Jobs

matched his obsession: “Instead of big speakers I

bought a pair of awesome headphones and would just

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lie in my bed and listen to that stuff for hours.”

Jobs had formed a club at Homestead High to put

on music-and-light shows and also play pranks. (They

once glued a gold-painted toilet seat onto a ﬂower

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

name of the principal. Even though they had already

graduated, Wozniak and his friend Allen Baum joined

forces with Jobs, at the end of his junior year, to

produce a farewell gesture for the departing seniors.

Showing off the Homestead campus four decades later,

Jobs paused at the scene of the escapade and pointed.

“See that balcony? That’s where we did the banner

prank that sealed our friendship.” On a big bedsheet

Baum had tie-dyed with the school’s green and white

colors, they painted a huge hand ﬂipping the middle-

ﬁnger salute. Baum’s nice Jewish mother helped them

draw it and showed them how to do the shading and

shadows to make it look more real. “I know what that is,”

she snickered. They devised a system of ropes and

pulleys so that it could be dramatically lowered as the

graduating class marched past the balcony, and they

signed it “SWAB JOB,” the initials of Wozniak and Baum

combined with part of Jobs’s name. The prank became

part of school lore—and got Jobs suspended one more

time.

Another prank involved a pocket device Wozniak

built that could emit TV signals. He would take it to a

room where a group of people were watching TV, such

as in a dorm, and secretly press the button so that the

screen would get fuzzy with static. When someone got

up and whacked the set, Wozniak would let go of the

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

unsuspecting viewers hopping up and down at his will,

he would make things harder. He would keep the

picture fuzzy until someone touched the antenna.

Eventually he would make people think they had to

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 63

hold the antenna while standing on one foot or touching

the top of the set. Years later, at a keynote presentation

where he was having his own trouble getting a video to

work, Jobs broke from his script and recounted the fun

they had with the device. “Woz would have it in his

pocket and we’d go into a dorm . . . where a bunch of

folks would be, like, watching

Star Trek

, and he’d screw

up the TV, and someone would go up to ﬁx it, and just

as they had the foot off the ground he would turn it back

on, and as they put their foot back on the ground he’d

screw it up again.” Contorting himself into a pretzel

onstage, Jobs concluded to great laughter, “And within

ﬁve minutes he would have someone like this.”

The Blue Box

The ultimate combination of pranks and

electronics—and the escapade that helped to create

Apple—was launched one Sunday afternoon when

Wozniak read an article in

Esquire

that his mother had

left for him on the kitchen table. It was September 1971,

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

his third college. The story, Ron Rosenbaum’s “Secrets

of the Little Blue Box,” described how hackers and

phone phreakers had found ways to make long-

distance calls for free by replicating the tones that

routed signals on the AT&T network. “Halfway through

the article, I had to call my best friend, Steve Jobs, and

read parts of this long article to him,” Wozniak recalled.

He knew that Jobs, then beginning his senior year, was

one of the few people who would share his excitement.

A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker

known as Captain Crunch because he had discovered

that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with

the breakfast cereal was the same 2600 Hertz tone

used by the phone network’s call-routing switches. It

could fool the system into allowing a long-distance call

to go through without extra charges. The article

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 64

revealed that other tones that served to route calls

could be found in an issue of the

Bell System Technical

Journal

, which AT&T immediately began asking

libraries to pull from their shelves.

As soon as Jobs got the call from Wozniak that

Sunday afternoon, he knew they would have to get their

hands on the technical journal right away. “Woz picked

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

SLAC [the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center] to see if

we could ﬁnd it,” Jobs recounted. It was Sunday and the

library was closed, but they knew how to get in through

a door that was rarely locked. “I remember that we were

furiously digging through the stacks, and it was Woz

who ﬁnally found the journal with all the frequencies. It

was like, holy shit, and we opened it and there it was.

We kept saying to ourselves, ‘It’s real. Holy shit, it’s

real.’ It was all laid out—the tones, the frequencies.”

Wozniak went to Sunnyvale Electronics before it

closed that evening and bought the parts to make an

analog tone generator. Jobs had built a frequency

counter when he was part of the HP Explorers Club,

and they used it to calibrate the desired tones. With a

dial, they could replicate and tape-record the sounds

speciﬁed in the article. By midnight they were ready to

test it. Unfortunately the oscillators they used were not

quite stable enough to replicate the right chirps to fool

the phone company. “We could see the instability using

Steve’s frequency counter,” recalled Wozniak, “and we

just couldn’t make it work. I had to leave for Berkeley

the next morning, so we decided I would work on

building a digital version once I got there.”

No one had ever created a digital version of a

Blue Box, but Woz was made for the challenge. Using

diodes and transistors from Radio Shack, and with the

help of a music student in his dorm who had perfect

pitch, he got it built before Thanksgiving. “I have never

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 65

designed a circuit I was prouder of,” he said. “I still think

it was incredible.”

One night Wozniak drove down from Berkeley to

Jobs’s house to try it. They attempted to call Wozniak’s

uncle in Los Angeles, but they got a wrong number. It

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

you for free! We’re calling you for free!” Wozniak

shouted. The person on the other end was confused

and annoyed. Jobs chimed in, “We’re calling from

California! From California! With a Blue Box.” This

probably bafﬂed the man even more, since he was also

in California.

At ﬁrst the Blue Box was used for fun and pranks.

The most daring of these was when they called the

Vatican and Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger

wanting to speak to the pope. “Ve are at de summit

meeting in Moscow, and ve need to talk to de pope,”

Woz intoned. He was told that it was 5:30 a.m. and the

pope was sleeping. When he called back, he got a

bishop who was supposed to serve as the translator.

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

realized that Woz wasn’t Henry Kissinger,” Jobs

recalled. “We were at a public phone booth.”

It was then that they reached an important

milestone, one that would establish a pattern in their

partnerships: Jobs came up with the idea that the Blue

Box could be more than merely a hobby; they could

build and sell them. “I got together the rest of the

components, like the casing and power supply and

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

said, foreshadowing roles he would play when they

founded Apple. The ﬁnished product was about the size

of two decks of playing cards. The parts cost about $40,

and Jobs decided they should sell it for $150.

Following the lead of other phone phreaks such as

Captain Crunch, they gave themselves handles.

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 66

Wozniak became “Berkeley Blue,” Jobs was “Oaf

Tobark.” They took the device to college dorms and

gave demonstrations by attaching it to a phone and

speaker. While the potential customers watched, they

would call the Ritz in London or a dial-a-joke service in

Australia. “We made a hundred or so Blue Boxes and

sold almost all of them,” Jobs recalled.

The fun and proﬁts came to an end at a Sunnyvale

pizza parlor. Jobs and Wozniak were about to drive to

Berkeley with a Blue Box they had just ﬁnished making.

Jobs needed money and was eager to sell, so he

pitched the device to some guys at the next table. They

were interested, so Jobs went to a phone booth and

demonstrated it with a call to Chicago. The prospects

said they had to go to their car for money. “So we walk

over to the car, Woz and me, and I’ve got the Blue Box

in my hand, and the guy gets in, reaches under the

seat, and he pulls out a gun,” Jobs recounted. He had

never been that close to a gun, and he was terriﬁed. “So

he’s pointing the gun right at my stomach, and he says,

‘Hand it over, brother.’ My mind raced. There was the

car door here, and I thought maybe I could slam it on

his legs and we could run, but there was this high

probability that he would shoot me. So I slowly handed

it to him, very carefully.” It was a weird sort of robbery.

The guy who took the Blue Box actually gave Jobs a

phone number and said he would try to pay for it if it

worked. When Jobs later called the number, the guy

said he couldn’t ﬁgure out how to use it. So Jobs, in his

felicitous way, convinced the guy to meet him and

Wozniak at a public place. But they ended up deciding

not to have another encounter with the gunman, even

on the off chance they could get their $150.

The partnership paved the way for what would be

a bigger adventure together. “If it hadn’t been for the

Blue Boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple,” Jobs

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 67

later reﬂected. “I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I

learned how to work together, and we gained the

conﬁdence that we could solve technical problems and

actually put something into production.” They had

created a device with a little circuit board that could

control billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. “You

cannot believe how much conﬁdence that gave us.”

Woz came to the same conclusion: “It was probably a

bad idea selling them, but it gave us a taste of what we

could do with my engineering skills and his vision.” The

Blue Box adventure established a template for a

partnership that would soon be born. Wozniak would be

the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that

he would have been happy just to give away, and Jobs

would ﬁgure out how to make it user-friendly, put it

together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks.

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 68

CHAPTER THREE

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 69

THE DROPOUT

Turn On, Tune In . . .

Chrisann Brennan

Toward the end of his senior year at Homestead,

in the spring of 1972, Jobs started going out with a girl

named Chrisann Brennan, who was about his age but

still a junior. With her light brown hair, green eyes, high

cheekbones, and fragile aura, she was very attractive.

She was also enduring the breakup of her parents’

marriage, which made her vulnerable. “We worked

together on an animated movie, then started going out,

and she became my ﬁrst real girlfriend,” Jobs recalled.

As Brennan later said, “Steve was kind of crazy. That’s

why I was attracted to him.”

Jobs’s craziness was of the cultivated sort. He had

begun his lifelong experiments with compulsive diets,

eating only fruits and vegetables, so he was as lean

and tight as a whippet. He learned to stare at people

without blinking, and he perfected long silences

punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking. This odd

mix of intensity and aloofness, combined with his

shoulder-length hair and scraggly beard, gave him the

aura of a crazed shaman. He oscillated between

charismatic and creepy. “He shufﬂed around and

looked half-mad,” recalled Brennan. “He had a lot of

angst. It was like a big darkness around him.”

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he

turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat ﬁeld just

outside Sunnyvale. “It was great,” he recalled. “I had

been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the

wheat ﬁeld was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful

feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor

of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.”

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That summer of 1972, after his graduation, he and

Brennan moved to a cabin in the hills above Los Altos.

“I’m going to go live in a cabin with Chrisann,” he

announced to his parents one day. His father was

furious. “No you’re not,” he said. “Over my dead body.”

They had recently fought about marijuana, and once

again the younger Jobs was willful. He just said good-

bye and walked out.

Brennan spent a lot of her time that summer

painting; she was talented, and she did a picture of a

clown for Jobs that he kept on the wall. Jobs wrote

poetry and played guitar. He could be brutally cold and

rude to her at times, but he was also entrancing and

able to impose his will. “He was an enlightened being

who was cruel,” she recalled. “That’s a strange

combination.”

Midway through the summer, Jobs was almost

killed when his red Fiat caught ﬁre. He was driving on

Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a

high school friend, Tim Brown, who looked back, saw

ﬂames coming from the engine, and casually said to

Jobs, “Pull over, your car is on ﬁre.” Jobs did. His father,

despite their arguments, drove out to the hills to tow the

Fiat home.

In order to ﬁnd a way to make money for a new

car, Jobs got Wozniak to drive him to De Anza College

to look on the help-wanted bulletin board. They

discovered that the Westgate Shopping Center in San

Jose was seeking college students who could dress up

in costumes and amuse the kids. So for $3 an hour,

Jobs, Wozniak, and Brennan donned heavy full-body

costumes and headgear to play Alice in Wonderland,

the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit. Wozniak, in his

earnest and sweet way, found it fun. “I said, ‘I want to do

it, it’s my chance, because I love children.’ I think Steve

looked at it as a lousy job, but I looked at it as a fun

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 71

adventure.” Jobs did indeed ﬁnd it a pain. “It was hot,

the costumes were heavy, and after a while I felt like I

wanted to smack some of the kids.” Patience was never

one of his virtues.

Reed College

Seventeen years earlier, Jobs’s parents had made

a pledge when they adopted him: He would go to

college. So they had worked hard and saved dutifully

for his college fund, which was modest but adequate by

the time he graduated. But Jobs, becoming ever more

willful, did not make it easy. At ﬁrst he toyed with not

going to college at all. “I think I might have headed to

New York if I didn’t go to college,” he recalled, musing

on how different his world—and perhaps all of ours—

might have been if he had chosen that path. When his

parents pushed him to go to college, he responded in a

passive-aggressive way. He did not consider state

schools, such as Berkeley, where Woz then was,

despite the fact that they were more affordable. Nor did

he look at Stanford, just up the road and likely to offer a

scholarship. “The kids who went to Stanford, they

already knew what they wanted to do,” he said. “They

weren’t really artistic. I wanted something that was more

artistic and interesting.”

Instead he insisted on applying only to Reed

College, a private liberal arts school in Portland,

Oregon, that was one of the most expensive in the

nation. He was visiting Woz at Berkeley when his father

called to say an acceptance letter had arrived from

Reed, and he tried to talk Steve out of going there. So

did his mother. It was far more than they could afford,

they said. But their son responded with an ultimatum: If

he couldn’t go to Reed, he wouldn’t go anywhere. They

relented, as usual.

Reed had only one thousand students, half the

number at Homestead High. It was known for its free-

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 72

spirited hippie lifestyle, which combined somewhat

uneasily with its rigorous academic standards and core

curriculum. Five years earlier Timothy Leary, the guru of

psychedelic enlightenment, had sat cross-legged at the

Reed College commons while on his League for

Spiritual Discovery (LSD) college tour, during which he

exhorted his listeners, “Like every great religion of the

past we seek to ﬁnd the divinity within. . . . These

ancient goals we deﬁne in the metaphor of the present

—turn on, tune in, drop out.” Many of Reed’s students

took all three of those injunctions seriously; the dropout

rate during the 1970s was more than one-third.

When it came time for Jobs to matriculate in the fall

of 1972, his parents drove him up to Portland, but in

another small act of rebellion he refused to let them

come on campus. In fact he refrained from even saying

good-bye or thanks. He recounted the moment later

with uncharacteristic regret:

It’s one of the things in life I really feel ashamed

about. I was not very sensitive, and I hurt their feelings. I

shouldn’t have. They had done so much to make sure I

could go there, but I just didn’t want them around. I

didn’t want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to

be like an orphan who had bummed around the country

on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no roots,

no connections, no background.

In late 1972, there was a fundamental shift

happening in American campus life. The nation’s

involvement in the Vietnam War, and the draft that

accompanied it, was winding down. Political activism at

colleges receded and in many late-night dorm

conversations was replaced by an interest in pathways

to personal fulﬁllment. Jobs found himself deeply

inﬂuenced by a variety of books on spirituality and

enlightenment, most notably

Be Here Now,

a guide to

meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 73

Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. “It was profound,”

Jobs said. “It transformed me and many of my friends.”

The closest of those friends was another wispy-

bearded freshman named Daniel Kottke, who met Jobs

a week after they arrived at Reed and shared his

interest in Zen, Dylan, and acid. Kottke, from a wealthy

New York suburb, was smart but low-octane, with a

sweet ﬂower-child demeanor made even mellower by

his interest in Buddhism. That spiritual quest had

caused him to eschew material possessions, but he

was nonetheless impressed by Jobs’s tape deck.

“Steve had a TEAC reel-to-reel and massive quantities

of Dylan bootlegs,” Kottke recalled. “He was both really

cool and high-tech.”

Jobs started spending much of his time with Kottke

and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Holmes, even after he

insulted her at their ﬁrst meeting by grilling her about

how much money it would take to get her to have sex

with another man. They hitchhiked to the coast together,

engaged in the typical dorm raps about the meaning of

life, attended the love festivals at the local Hare Krishna

temple, and went to the Zen center for free vegetarian

meals. “It was a lot of fun,” said Kottke, “but also

philosophical, and we took Zen very seriously.”

Jobs began sharing with Kottke other books,

including

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

by Shunryu

Suzuki,

Autobiography of a Yogi

by Paramahansa

Yogananda, and

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

by Chögyam Trungpa. They created a meditation room

in the attic crawl space above Elizabeth Holmes’s room

and ﬁxed it up with Indian prints, a dhurrie rug, candles,

incense, and meditation cushions. “There was a hatch

in the ceiling leading to an attic which had a huge

amount of space,” Jobs said. “We took psychedelic

drugs there sometimes, but mainly we just meditated.”

Jobs’s engagement with Eastern spirituality, and

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 74

especially Zen Buddhism, was not just some passing

fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his

typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his

personality. “Steve is very much Zen,” said Kottke. “It

was a deep inﬂuence. You see it in his whole approach

of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.” Jobs also

became deeply inﬂuenced by the emphasis that

Buddhism places on intuition. “I began to realize that an

intuitive understanding and consciousness was more

signiﬁcant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical

analysis,” he later said. His intensity, however, made it

difﬁcult for him to achieve inner peace; his Zen

awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm,

peace of mind, or interpersonal mellowness.

He and Kottke enjoyed playing a nineteenth-

century German variant of chess called Kriegspiel, in

which the players sit back-to-back; each has his own

board and pieces and cannot see those of his

opponent. A moderator informs them if a move they

want to make is legal or illegal, and they have to try to

ﬁgure out where their opponent’s pieces are. “The

wildest game I played with them was during a lashing

rainstorm sitting by the ﬁreside,” recalled Holmes, who

served as moderator. “They were tripping on acid. They

were moving so fast I could barely keep up with them.”

Another book that deeply inﬂuenced Jobs during

his freshman year was

Diet for a Small Planet

Frances Moore Lappé, which extolled the personal and

planetary beneﬁts of vegetarianism. “That’s when I

swore off meat pretty much for good,” he recalled. But

the book also reinforced his tendency to embrace

extreme diets, which included purges, fasts, or eating

only one or two foods, such as carrots or apples, for

weeks on end.

Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians

during their freshman year. “Steve got into it even more

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 75

than I did,” said Kottke. “He was living off Roman Meal

cereal.” They would go shopping at a farmers’ co-op,

where Jobs would buy a box of cereal, which would last

a week, and other bulk health food. “He would buy ﬂats

of dates and almonds and lots of carrots, and he got a

Champion juicer and we’d make carrot juice and carrot

salads. There is a story about Steve turning orange

from eating so many carrots, and there is some truth to

that.” Friends remember him having, at times, a sunset-

like orange hue.

Jobs’s dietary habits became even more

obsessive when he read

Mucusless Diet Healing

System

by Arnold Ehret, an early twentieth-century

German-born nutrition fanatic. He believed in eating

nothing but fruits and starchless vegetables, which he

said prevented the body from forming harmful mucus,

and he advocated cleansing the body regularly through

prolonged fasts. That meant the end of even Roman

Meal cereal—or any bread, grains, or milk. Jobs began

warning friends of the mucus dangers lurking in their

bagels. “I got into it in my typical nutso way,” he said. At

one point he and Kottke went for an entire week eating

only apples, and then Jobs began to try even purer

fasts. He started with two-day fasts, and eventually tried

to stretch them to a week or more, breaking them

carefully with large amounts of water and leafy

vegetables. “After a week you start to feel fantastic,” he

said. “You get a ton of vitality from not having to digest

all this food. I was in great shape. I felt I could get up

and walk to San Francisco anytime I wanted.”

Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and

spirituality, acid and rock—Jobs rolled together, in an

amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were

hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus

subculture of the era. And even though he barely

indulged it at Reed, there was still an undercurrent of

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 76

electronic geekiness in his soul that would someday

combine surprisingly well with the rest of the mix.

Robert Friedland

In order to raise some cash one day, Jobs decided

to sell his IBM Selectric typewriter. He walked into the

room of the student who had offered to buy it only to

discover that he was having sex with his girlfriend. Jobs

started to leave, but the student invited him to take a

seat and wait while they ﬁnished. “I thought, ‘This is

kind of far out,’” Jobs later recalled. And thus began his

relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few

people in Jobs’s life who were able to mesmerize him.

He adopted some of Friedland’s charismatic traits and

for a few years treated him almost like a guru—until he

began to see him as a charlatan.

Friedland was four years older than Jobs, but still

an undergraduate. The son of an Auschwitz survivor

who became a prosperous Chicago architect, he had

originally gone to Bowdoin, a liberal arts college in

Maine. But while a sophomore, he was arrested for

possession of 24,000 tablets of LSD worth $125,000.

The local newspaper pictured him with shoulder-length

wavy blond hair smiling at the photographers as he was

led away. He was sentenced to two years at a federal

prison in Virginia, from which he was paroled in 1972.

That fall he headed off to Reed, where he immediately

ran for student body president, saying that he needed to

clear his name from the “miscarriage of justice” he had

suffered. He won.

Friedland had heard Baba Ram Dass, the author

Be Here Now

, give a speech in Boston, and like Jobs

and Kottke had gotten deeply into Eastern spirituality.

During the summer of 1973, he traveled to India to meet

Ram Dass’s Hindu guru, Neem Karoli Baba, famously

known to his many followers as Maharaj-ji. When he

returned that fall, Friedland had taken a spiritual name

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 77

and walked around in sandals and ﬂowing Indian

robes. He had a room off campus, above a garage, and

Jobs would go there many afternoons to seek him out.

He was entranced by the apparent intensity of

Friedland’s conviction that a state of enlightenment truly

existed and could be attained. “He turned me on to a

different level of consciousness,” Jobs said.

Friedland found Jobs fascinating as well. “He was

always walking around barefoot,” he later told a

reporter. “The thing that struck me was his intensity.

Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry

to an irrational extreme.” Jobs had honed his trick of

using stares and silences to master other people. “One

of his numbers was to stare at the person he was

talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs,

ask some question, and would want a response without

the other person averting their eyes.”

According to Kottke, some of Jobs’s personality

traits—including a few that lasted throughout his career

—were borrowed from Friedland. “Friedland taught

Steve the reality distortion ﬁeld,” said Kottke. “He was

charismatic and a bit of a con man and could bend

situations to his very strong will. He was mercurial, sure

of himself, a little dictatorial. Steve admired that, and he

became more like that after spending time with Robert.”

Jobs also absorbed how Friedland made himself

the center of attention. “Robert was very much an

outgoing, charismatic guy, a real salesman,” Kottke

recalled. “When I ﬁrst met Steve he was shy and self-

effacing, a very private guy. I think Robert taught him a

lot about selling, about coming out of his shell, of

opening up and taking charge of a situation.” Friedland

projected a high-wattage aura. “He would walk into a

room and you would instantly notice him. Steve was the

absolute opposite when he came to Reed. After he

spent time with Robert, some of it started to rub off.”

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On Sunday evenings Jobs and Friedland would

go to the Hare Krishna temple on the western edge of

Portland, often with Kottke and Holmes in tow. They

would dance and sing songs at the top of their lungs.

“We would work ourselves into an ecstatic frenzy,”

Holmes recalled. “Robert would go insane and dance

like crazy. Steve was more subdued, as if he was

embarrassed to let loose.” Then they would be treated

to paper plates piled high with vegetarian food.

Friedland had stewardship of a 220-acre apple

farm, about forty miles southwest of Portland, that was

owned by an eccentric millionaire uncle from

Switzerland named Marcel Müller. After Friedland

became involved with Eastern spirituality, he turned it

into a commune called the All One Farm, and Jobs

would spend weekends there with Kottke, Holmes, and

like-minded seekers of enlightenment. The farm had a

main house, a large barn, and a garden shed, where

Kottke and Holmes slept. Jobs took on the task of

pruning the Gravenstein apple trees. “Steve ran the

apple orchard,” said Friedland. “We were in the organic

cider business. Steve’s job was to lead a crew of freaks

to prune the orchard and whip it back into shape.”

Monks and disciples from the Hare Krishna temple

would come and prepare vegetarian feasts redolent of

cumin, coriander, and turmeric. “Steve would be

starving when he arrived, and he would stuff himself,”

Holmes recalled. “Then he would go and purge. For

years I thought he was bulimic. It was very upsetting,

because we had gone to all that trouble of creating

these feasts, and he couldn’t hold it down.”

Jobs was also beginning to have a little trouble

stomaching Friedland’s cult leader style. “Perhaps he

saw a little bit too much of Robert in himself,” said

Kottke. Although the commune was supposed to be a

refuge from materialism, Friedland began operating it

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 79

more as a business; his followers were told to chop and

sell ﬁrewood, make apple presses and wood stoves,

and engage in other commercial endeavors for which

they were not paid. One night Jobs slept under the table

in the kitchen and was amused to notice that people

kept coming in and stealing each other’s food from the

refrigerator. Communal economics were not for him. “It

started to get very materialistic,” Jobs recalled.

“Everybody got the idea they were working very hard for

Robert’s farm, and one by one they started to leave. I

got pretty sick of it.”

Many years later, after Friedland had become a

billionaire copper and gold mining executive—working

out of Vancouver, Singapore, and Mongolia—I met him

for drinks in New York. That evening I emailed Jobs and

mentioned my encounter. He telephoned me from

California within an hour and warned me against

listening to Friedland. He said that when Friedland was

in trouble because of environmental abuses committed

by some of his mines, he had tried to contact Jobs to

intervene with Bill Clinton, but Jobs had not responded.

“Robert always portrayed himself as a spiritual person,

but he crossed the line from being charismatic to being

a con man,” Jobs said. “It was a strange thing to have

one of the spiritual people in your young life turn out to

be, symbolically and in reality, a gold miner.”

. . . Drop Out

Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked

being at Reed, just not taking the required classes. In

fact he was surprised when he found out that, for all of

its hippie aura, there were strict course requirements.

When Wozniak came to visit, Jobs waved his schedule

at him and complained, “They are making me take all

these courses.” Woz replied, “Yes, that’s what they do in

college.” Jobs refused to go to the classes he was

assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted, such

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 80

as a dance class where he could enjoy both the

creativity and the chance to meet girls. “I would never

have refused to take the courses you were supposed to,

that’s a difference in our personality,” Wozniak

marveled.

Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about

spending so much of his parents’ money on an

education that did not seem worthwhile. “All of my

working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my

college tuition,” he recounted in a famous

commencement address at Stanford. “I had no idea

what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how

college was going to help me ﬁgure it out. And here I

was spending all of the money my parents had saved

their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it

would all work out okay.”

He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just

wanted to quit paying tuition and taking classes that

didn’t interest him. Remarkably, Reed tolerated that.

“He had a very inquiring mind that was enormously

attractive,” said the dean of students, Jack Dudman. “He

refused to accept automatically received truths, and he

wanted to examine everything himself.” Dudman

allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in

the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition.

“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the

required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin

dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,” he

said. Among them was a calligraphy class that

appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that

were beautifully drawn. “I learned about serif and sans

serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space

between different letter combinations, about what

makes great typography great. It was beautiful,

historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t

capture, and I found it fascinating.”

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 81

It was yet another example of Jobs consciously

positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and

technology. In all of his products, technology would be

married to great design, elegance, human touches, and

even romance. He would be in the fore of pushing

friendly graphical user interfaces. The calligraphy

course would become iconic in that regard. “If I had

never dropped in on that single course in college, the

Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or

proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just

copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer

would have them.”

In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian

existence on the fringes of Reed. He went barefoot

most of the time, wearing sandals when it snowed.

Elizabeth Holmes made meals for him, trying to keep up

with his obsessive diets. He returned soda bottles for

spare change, continued his treks to the free Sunday

dinners at the Hare Krishna temple, and wore a down

jacket in the heatless garage apartment he rented for

$20 a month. When he needed money, he found work

at the psychology department lab maintaining the

electronic equipment that was used for animal behavior

experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan would

come to visit. Their relationship sputtered along

erratically. But mostly he tended to the stirrings of his

own soul and personal quest for enlightenment.

“I came of age at a magical time,” he reﬂected

later. “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also

by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic

drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD

was a profound experience, one of the most important

things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another

side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it

wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of

what was important—creating great things instead of

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making money, putting things back into the stream of

history and of human consciousness as much as I

could.”

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CHAPTER FOUR

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ATARI AND INDIA

Zen and the Art of Game Design

Atari

In February 1974, after eighteen months of

hanging around Reed, Jobs decided to move back to

his parents’ home in Los Altos and look for a job. It was

not a difﬁcult search. At peak times during the 1970s,

the classiﬁed section of the

San Jose Mercury

carried

up to sixty pages of technology help-wanted ads. One

of those caught Jobs’s eye. “Have fun, make money,” it

said. That day Jobs walked into the lobby of the video

game manufacturer Atari and told the personnel

director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and

attire, that he wouldn’t leave until they gave him a job.

Atari’s founder was a burly entrepreneur named

Nolan Bushnell, who was a charismatic visionary with a

nice touch of showmanship in him—in other words,

another role model waiting to be emulated. After he

became famous, he liked driving around in a Rolls,

smoking dope, and holding staff meetings in a hot tub.

As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do,

he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole

and intimidate and distort reality with the power of his

personality. His chief engineer was Al Alcorn, beefy and

jovial and a bit more grounded, the house grown-up

trying to implement the vision and curb the enthusiasms

of Bushnell. Their big hit thus far was a video game

called Pong, in which two players tried to volley a blip

on a screen with two movable lines that acted as

paddles. (If you’re under thirty, ask your parents.)

When Jobs arrived in the Atari lobby wearing

sandals and demanding a job, Alcorn was the one who

was summoned. “I was told, ‘We’ve got a hippie kid in

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the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire

him. Should we call the cops or let him in?’ I said bring

him on in!”

Jobs thus became one of the ﬁrst ﬁfty employees

at Atari, working as a technician for $5 an hour. “In

retrospect, it was weird to hire a dropout from Reed,”

Alcorn recalled. “But I saw something in him. He was

very intelligent, enthusiastic, excited about tech.” Alcorn

assigned him to work with a straitlaced engineer named

Don Lang. The next day Lang complained, “This guy’s

a goddamn hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me?

And he’s impossible to deal with.” Jobs clung to the

belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would prevent

not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use

deodorant or shower regularly. It was a ﬂawed theory.

Lang and others wanted to let Jobs go, but

Bushnell worked out a solution. “The smell and

behavior wasn’t an issue with me,” he said. “Steve was

prickly, but I kind of liked him. So I asked him to go on

the night shift. It was a way to save him.” Jobs would

come in after Lang and others had left and work

through most of the night. Even thus isolated, he

became known for his brashness. On those occasions

when he happened to interact with others, he was

prone to informing them that they were “dumb shits.” In

retrospect, he stands by that judgment. “The only

reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad,”

Jobs recalled.

Despite his arrogance (or perhaps because of it)

he was able to charm Atari’s boss. “He was more

philosophical than the other people I worked with,”

Bushnell recalled. “We used to discuss free will versus

determinism. I tended to believe that things were much

more determined, that we were programmed. If we had

perfect information, we could predict people’s actions.

Steve felt the opposite.” That outlook accorded with his

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faith in the power of the will to bend reality.

Jobs helped improve some of the games by

pushing the chips to produce fun designs, and

Bushnell’s inspiring willingness to play by his own rules

rubbed off on him. In addition, he intuitively appreciated

the simplicity of Atari’s games. They came with no

manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a

stoned freshman could ﬁgure them out. The only

instructions for Atari’s

Star Trek

game were “1. Insert

quarter. 2. Avoid Klingons.”

Not all of his coworkers shunned Jobs. He

became friends with Ron Wayne, a draftsman at Atari,

who had earlier started a company that built slot

machines. It subsequently failed, but Jobs became

fascinated with the idea that it was possible to start your

own company. “Ron was an amazing guy,” said Jobs.

“He started companies. I had never met anybody like

that.” He proposed to Wayne that they go into business

together; Jobs said he could borrow $50,000, and they

could design and market a slot machine. But Wayne

had already been burned in business, so he declined. “I

said that was the quickest way to lose $50,000,” Wayne

recalled, “but I admired the fact that he had a burning

drive to start his own business.”

One weekend Jobs was visiting Wayne at his

apartment, engaging as they often did in philosophical

discussions, when Wayne said that there was

something he needed to tell him. “Yeah, I think I know

what it is,” Jobs replied. “I think you like men.” Wayne

said yes. “It was my ﬁrst encounter with someone who I

knew was gay,” Jobs recalled. “He planted the right

perspective of it for me.” Jobs grilled him: “When you

see a beautiful woman, what do you feel?” Wayne

replied, “It’s like when you look at a beautiful horse. You

can appreciate it, but you don’t want to sleep with it.

You appreciate beauty for what it is.” Wayne said that it

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is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to

him. “Nobody at Atari knew, and I could count on my

toes and ﬁngers the number of people I told in my

whole life. But I guess it just felt right to tell him, that he

would understand, and it didn’t have any effect on our

relationship.”

India

One reason Jobs was eager to make some money

in early 1974 was that Robert Friedland, who had gone

to India the summer before, was urging him to take his

own spiritual journey there. Friedland had studied in

India with Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji), who had

been the guru to much of the sixties hippie movement.

Jobs decided he should do the same, and he recruited

Daniel Kottke to go with him. Jobs was not motivated by

mere adventure. “For me it was a serious search,” he

said. “I’d been turned on to the idea of enlightenment

and trying to ﬁgure out who I was and how I ﬁt into

things.” Kottke adds that Jobs’s quest seemed driven

partly by not knowing his birth parents. “There was a

hole in him, and he was trying to ﬁll it.”

When Jobs told the folks at Atari that he was

quitting to go search for a guru in India, the jovial Alcorn

was amused. “He comes in and stares at me and

declares, ‘I’m going to ﬁnd my guru,’ and I say, ‘No shit,

that’s super. Write me!’ And he says he wants me to

help pay, and I tell him, ‘Bullshit!’” Then Alcorn had an

idea. Atari was making kits and shipping them to

Munich, where they were built into ﬁnished machines

and distributed by a wholesaler in Turin. But there was

a problem: Because the games were designed for the

American rate of sixty frames per second, there were

frustrating interference problems in Europe, where the

rate was ﬁfty frames per second. Alcorn sketched out a

ﬁx with Jobs and then offered to pay for him to go to

Europe to implement it. “It’s got to be cheaper to get to

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India from there,” he said. Jobs agreed. So Alcorn sent

him on his way with the exhortation, “Say hi to your guru

for me.”

Jobs spent a few days in Munich, where he solved

the interference problem, but in the process he

ﬂummoxed the dark-suited German managers. They

complained to Alcorn that he dressed and smelled like

a bum and behaved rudely. “I said, ‘Did he solve the

problem?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘If you got any

more problems, you just call me, I got more guys just

like him!’ They said, ‘No, no we’ll take care of it next

time.’” For his part, Jobs was upset that the Germans

kept trying to feed him meat and potatoes. “They don’t

even have a word for vegetarian,” he complained

(incorrectly) in a phone call to Alcorn.

He had a better time when he took the train to see

the distributor in Turin, where the Italian pastas and his

host’s camaraderie were more simpatico. “I had a

wonderful couple of weeks in Turin, which is this

charged-up industrial town,” he recalled. “The

distributor took me every night to dinner at this place

where there were only eight tables and no menu. You’d

just tell them what you wanted, and they made it. One of

the tables was on reserve for the chairman of Fiat. It

was really super.” He next went to Lugano, Switzerland,

where he stayed with Friedland’s uncle, and from there

took a ﬂight to India.

When he got off the plane in New Delhi, he felt

waves of heat rising from the tarmac, even though it

was only April. He had been given the name of a hotel,

but it was full, so he went to one his taxi driver insisted

was good. “I’m sure he was getting some baksheesh,

because he took me to this complete dive.” Jobs asked

the owner whether the water was ﬁltered and foolishly

believed the answer. “I got dysentery pretty fast. I was

sick, really sick, a really high fever. I dropped from 160

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pounds to 120 in about a week.”

Once he got healthy enough to move, he decided

that he needed to get out of Delhi. So he headed to the

town of Haridwar, in western India near the source of

the Ganges, which was having a festival known as the

Kumbh Mela. More than ten million people poured into

a town that usually contained fewer than 100,000

residents. “There were holy men all around. Tents with

this teacher and that teacher. There were people riding

elephants, you name it. I was there for a few days, but I

decided that I needed to get out of there too.”

He went by train and bus to a village near Nainital

in the foothills of the Himalayas. That was where Neem

Karoli Baba lived, or had lived. By the time Jobs got

there, he was no longer alive, at least in the same

incarnation. Jobs rented a room with a mattress on the

ﬂoor from a family who helped him recuperate by

feeding him vegetarian meals. “There was a copy there

Autobiography of a Yogi

in English that a previous

traveler had left, and I read it several times because

there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from

village to village and recovered from my dysentery.”

Among those who were part of the community there

was Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was working

to eradicate smallpox and who later ran Google’s

philanthropic arm and the Skoll Foundation. He

became Jobs’s lifelong friend.

At one point Jobs was told of a young Hindu holy

man who was holding a gathering of his followers at the

Himalayan estate of a wealthy businessman. “It was a

chance to meet a spiritual being and hang out with his

followers, but it was also a chance to have a good meal.

I could smell the food as we got near, and I was very

hungry.” As Jobs was eating, the holy man—who was

not much older than Jobs—picked him out of the crowd,

pointed at him, and began laughing maniacally. “He

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came running over and grabbed me and made a

tooting sound and said, ‘You are just like a baby,’”

recalled Jobs. “I was not relishing this attention.” Taking

Jobs by the hand, he led him out of the worshipful

crowd and walked him up to a hill, where there was a

well and a small pond. “We sit down and he pulls out

this straight razor. I’m thinking he’s a nutcase and begin

to worry. Then he pulls out a bar of soap—I had long

hair at the time—and he lathered up my hair and

shaved my head. He told me that he was saving my

health.”

Daniel Kottke arrived in India at the beginning of

the summer, and Jobs went back to New Delhi to meet

him. They wandered, mainly by bus, rather aimlessly.

By this point Jobs was no longer trying to ﬁnd a guru

who could impart wisdom, but instead was seeking

enlightenment through ascetic experience, deprivation,

and simplicity. He was not able to achieve inner calm.

Kottke remembers him getting into a furious shouting

match with a Hindu woman in a village marketplace

who, Jobs alleged, had been watering down the milk

she was selling them.

Yet Jobs could also be generous. When they got

to the town of Manali, Kottke’s sleeping bag was stolen

with his traveler’s checks in it. “Steve covered my food

expenses and bus ticket back to Delhi,” Kottke recalled.

He also gave Kottke the rest of his own money, $100, to

tide him over.

During his seven months in India, he had written to

his parents only sporadically, getting mail at the

American Express ofﬁce in New Delhi when he passed

through, and so they were somewhat surprised when

they got a call from the Oakland airport asking them to

pick him up. They immediately drove up from Los Altos.

“My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian

cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate

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brown-red from the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting

there and my parents walked past me about ﬁve times

and ﬁnally my mother came up and said ‘Steve?’ and I

said ‘Hi!’”

They took him back home, where he continued

trying to ﬁnd himself. It was a pursuit with many paths

toward enlightenment. In the mornings and evenings he

would meditate and study Zen, and in between he

would drop in to audit physics or engineering courses

at Stanford.

The Search

Jobs’s interest in Eastern spirituality, Hinduism,

Zen Buddhism, and the search for enlightenment was

not merely the passing phase of a nineteen-year-old.

Throughout his life he would seek to follow many of the

basic precepts of Eastern religions, such as the

emphasis on experiential

prajñā,

wisdom or cognitive

understanding that is intuitively experienced through

concentration of the mind. Years later, sitting in his Palo

Alto garden, he reﬂected on the lasting inﬂuence of his

trip to India:

Coming back to America was, for me, much more

of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in

the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we

do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is

far more developed than in the rest of the world.

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than

intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my

work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human

characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement

of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they

never learned it. They learned something else, which is

in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not.

That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.

Coming back after seven months in Indian

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villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as

well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and

observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you

try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does

calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more

subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to

blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be

in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and

you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see

so much more than you could see before. It’s a

discipline; you have to practice it.

Zen has been a deep inﬂuence in my life ever

since. At one point I was thinking about going to Japan

and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my

spiritual advisor urged me to stay here. He said there is

nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I

learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing

to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will

appear next door.

Jobs did in fact ﬁnd a teacher right in his own

neighborhood. Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote

Zen Mind,

Beginner’s Mind

and ran the San Francisco Zen Center,

used to come to Los Altos every Wednesday evening to

lecture and meditate with a small group of followers.

After a while he asked his assistant, Kobun Chino

Otogawa, to open a full-time center there. Jobs became

a faithful follower, along with his occasional girlfriend,

Chrisann Brennan, and Daniel Kottke and Elizabeth

Holmes. He also began to go by himself on retreats to

the Tassajara Zen Center, a monastery near Carmel

where Kobun also taught.

Kottke found Kobun amusing. “His English was

atrocious,” he recalled. “He would speak in a kind of

haiku, with poetic, suggestive phrases. We would sit

and listen to him, and half the time we had no idea what

he was going on about. I took the whole thing as a kind

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of lighthearted interlude.” Holmes was more into the

scene. “We would go to Kobun’s meditations, sit on zafu

cushions, and he would sit on a dais,” she said. “We

learned how to tune out distractions. It was a magical

thing. One evening we were meditating with Kobun

when it was raining, and he taught us how to use

ambient sounds to bring us back to focus on our

meditation.”

As for Jobs, his devotion was intense. “He became

really serious and self-important and just generally

unbearable,” according to Kottke. He began meeting

with Kobun almost daily, and every few months they

went on retreats together to meditate. “I ended up

spending as much time as I could with him,” Jobs

recalled. “He had a wife who was a nurse at Stanford

and two kids. She worked the night shift, so I would go

over and hang out with him in the evenings. She would

get home about midnight and shoo me away.” They

sometimes discussed whether Jobs should devote

himself fully to spiritual pursuits, but Kobun counseled

otherwise. He assured Jobs that he could keep in touch

with his spiritual side while working in a business. The

relationship turned out to be lasting and deep;

seventeen years later Kobun would perform Jobs’s

wedding ceremony.

Jobs’s compulsive search for self-awareness also

led him to undergo primal scream therapy, which had

recently been developed and popularized by a Los

Angeles psychotherapist named Arthur Janov. It was

based on the Freudian theory that psychological

problems are caused by the repressed pains of

childhood; Janov argued that they could be resolved by

re-suffering these primal moments while fully

expressing the pain—sometimes in screams. To Jobs,

this seemed preferable to talk therapy because it

involved intuitive feeling and emotional action rather

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than just rational analyzing. “This was not something to

think about,” he later said. “This was something to do: to

close your eyes, hold your breath, jump in, and come

out the other end more insightful.”

A group of Janov’s adherents ran a program

called the Oregon Feeling Center in an old hotel in

Eugene that was managed by Jobs’s Reed College

guru Robert Friedland, whose All One Farm commune

was nearby. In late 1974, Jobs signed up for a twelve-

week course of therapy there costing $1,000. “Steve

and I were both into personal growth, so I wanted to go

with him,” Kottke recounted, “but I couldn’t afford it.”

Jobs conﬁded to close friends that he was driven

by the pain he was feeling about being put up for

adoption and not knowing about his birth parents.

“Steve had a very profound desire to know his physical

parents so he could better know himself,” Friedland

later said. He had learned from Paul and Clara Jobs

that his birth parents had both been graduate students

at a university and that his father might be Syrian. He

had even thought about hiring a private investigator, but

he decided not to do so for the time being. “I didn’t want

to hurt my parents,” he recalled, referring to Paul and

Clara.

“He was struggling with the fact that he had been

adopted,” according to Elizabeth Holmes. “He felt that it

was an issue that he needed to get hold of emotionally.”

Jobs admitted as much to her. “This is something that is

bothering me, and I need to focus on it,” he said. He

was even more open with Greg Calhoun. “He was

doing a lot of soul-searching about being adopted, and

he talked about it with me a lot,” Calhoun recalled. “The

primal scream and the mucusless diets, he was trying to

cleanse himself and get deeper into his frustration

about his birth. He told me he was deeply angry about

the fact that he had been given up.”

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John Lennon had undergone the same primal

scream therapy in 1970, and in December of that year

he released the song “Mother” with the Plastic Ono

Band. It dealt with Lennon’s own feelings about a father

who had abandoned him and a mother who had been

killed when he was a teenager. The refrain includes the

haunting chant “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home.”

Jobs used to play the song often.

Jobs later said that Janov’s teachings did not

prove very useful. “He offered a ready-made, buttoned-

down answer which turned out to be far too

oversimplistic. It became obvious that it was not going

to yield any great insight.” But Holmes contended that it

made him more conﬁdent: “After he did it, he was in a

different place. He had a very abrasive personality, but

there was a peace about him for a while. His

conﬁdence improved and his feelings of inadequacy

were reduced.”

Jobs came to believe that he could impart that

feeling of conﬁdence to others and thus push them to

do things they hadn’t thought possible. Holmes had

broken up with Kottke and joined a religious cult in San

Francisco that expected her to sever ties with all past

friends. But Jobs rejected that injunction. He arrived at

the cult house in his Ford Ranchero one day and

announced that he was driving up to Friedland’s apple

farm and she was to come. Even more brazenly, he

said she would have to drive part of the way, even

though she didn’t know how to use the stick shift. “Once

we got on the open road, he made me get behind the

wheel, and he shifted the car until we got up to 55 miles

per hour,” she recalled. “Then he puts on a tape of

Dylan’s

Blood on the Tracks

, lays his head in my lap,

and goes to sleep. He had the attitude that he could do

anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my

hands. So that made me do something I didn’t think I

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could do.”

It was the brighter side of what would become

known as his reality distortion ﬁeld. “If you trust him, you

can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that

something should happen, then he’s just going to make

it happen.”

Breakout

One day in early 1975 Al Alcorn was sitting in his

ofﬁce at Atari when Ron Wayne burst in. “Hey, Stevie is

back!” he shouted.

“Wow, bring him on in,” Alcorn replied.

Jobs shufﬂed in barefoot, wearing a saffron robe

and carrying a copy of

Be Here Now

, which he handed

to Alcorn and insisted he read. “Can I have my job

back?” he asked.

“He looked like a Hare Krishna guy, but it was

great to see him,” Alcorn recalled. “So I said, sure!”

Once again, for the sake of harmony, Jobs worked

mostly at night. Wozniak, who was living in an

apartment nearby and working at HP, would come by

after dinner to hang out and play the video games. He

had become addicted to Pong at a Sunnyvale bowling

alley, and he was able to build a version that he hooked

up to his home TV set.

One day in the late summer of 1975, Nolan

Bushnell, defying the prevailing wisdom that paddle

games were over, decided to develop a single-player

version of Pong; instead of competing against an

opponent, the player would volley the ball into a wall

that lost a brick whenever it was hit. He called Jobs into

his ofﬁce, sketched it out on his little blackboard, and

asked him to design it. There would be a bonus,

Bushnell told him, for every chip fewer than ﬁfty that he

used. Bushnell knew that Jobs was not a great

engineer, but he assumed, correctly, that he would

recruit Wozniak, who was always hanging around. “I

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looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell recalled.

“Woz was a better engineer.”

Wozniak was thrilled when Jobs asked him to help

and proposed splitting the fee. “This was the most

wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that

people would use,” he recalled. Jobs said it had to be

done in four days and with the fewest chips possible.

What he hid from Wozniak was that the deadline was

one that Jobs had imposed, because he needed to get

to the All One Farm to help prepare for the apple

harvest. He also didn’t mention that there was a bonus

tied to keeping down the number of chips.

“A game like this might take most engineers a few

months,” Wozniak recalled. “I thought that there was no

way I could do it, but Steve made me sure that I could.”

So he stayed up four nights in a row and did it. During

the day at HP, Wozniak would sketch out his design on

paper. Then, after a fast-food meal, he would go right to

Atari and stay all night. As Wozniak churned out the

design, Jobs sat on a bench to his left implementing it

by wire-wrapping the chips onto a breadboard. “While

Steve was breadboarding, I spent time playing my

favorite game ever, which was the auto racing game

Gran Trak 10,” Wozniak said.

Astonishingly, they were able to get the job done

in four days, and Wozniak used only forty-ﬁve chips.

Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply

gave Wozniak half of the base fee and not the bonus

Bushnell paid for saving ﬁve chips. It would be another

ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown

the tale in a book on the history of Atari titled

Zap

) that

Jobs had been paid this bonus. “I think that Steve

needed the money, and he just didn’t tell me the truth,”

Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there

are long pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain.

“I wish he had just been honest. If he had told me he

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needed the money, he should have known I would

have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your

friends.” To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental

difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to

me, and I still don’t understand why he would’ve gotten

paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,”

he said. “But, you know, people are different.”

When Jobs learned this story was published, he

called Wozniak to deny it. “He told me that he didn’t

remember doing it, and that if he did something like that

he would remember it, so he probably didn’t do it,”

Wozniak recalled. When I asked Jobs directly, he

became unusually quiet and hesitant. “I don’t know

where that allegation comes from,” he said. “I gave him

half the money I ever got. That’s how I’ve always been

with Woz. I mean, Woz stopped working in 1978. He

never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got

exactly the same shares of Apple stock that I did.”

Is it possible that memories are muddled and that

Jobs did not, in fact, shortchange Wozniak? “There’s a

chance that my memory is all wrong and messed up,”

Wozniak told me, but after a pause he reconsidered.

“But no. I remember the details of this one, the $350

check.” He conﬁrmed his memory with Nolan Bushnell

and Al Alcorn. “I remember talking about the bonus

money to Woz, and he was upset,” Bushnell said. “I said

yes, there was a bonus for each chip they saved, and

he just shook his head and then clucked his tongue.”

Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it

was not worth rehashing. Jobs is a complex person, he

said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of

the traits that make him successful. Wozniak would

never have been that way, but as he points out, he also

could never have built Apple. “I would rather let it pass,”

he said when I pressed the point. “It’s not something I

want to judge Steve by.”

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 99

The Atari experience helped shape Jobs’s

approach to business and design. He appreciated the

user-friendliness of Atari’s insert-quarter-avoid-

Klingons games. “That simplicity rubbed off on him and

made him a very focused product person,” said Ron

Wayne. Jobs also absorbed some of Bushnell’s take-

no-prisoners attitude. “Nolan wouldn’t take no for an

answer,” according to Alcorn, “and this was Steve’s ﬁrst

impression of how things got done. Nolan was never

abusive, like Steve sometimes is. But he had the same

driven attitude. It made me cringe, but dammit, it got

things done. In that way Nolan was a mentor for Jobs.”

Bushnell agreed. “There is something indeﬁnable

in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” he said.

“He was interested not just in engineering, but also the

business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you

can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend

to be completely in control and people will assume that

you are.’”

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CHAPTER FIVE

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 101

THE APPLE I

Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .

Machines of Loving Grace

In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley

during the late 1960s, various cultural currents ﬂowed

together. There was the technology revolution that

began with the growth of military contractors and soon

included electronics ﬁrms, microchip makers, video

game designers, and computer companies. There was

a hacker subculture—ﬁlled with wireheads, phreakers,

cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks—that

included engineers who didn’t conform to the HP mold

and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths

of the subdivisions. There were quasi-academic groups

doing studies on the effects of LSD; participants

included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation

Research Center in Palo Alto, who later helped develop

the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and

Ken Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-

light shows featuring a house band that became the

Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, born

out of the Bay Area’s beat generation, and the

rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech

Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various

self-fulﬁllment movements pursuing paths to personal

enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and

yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation, Esalen

and est.

This fusion of ﬂower power and processor power,

enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve

Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics

classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and

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dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just

something going on here,” he said, looking back at the

time and place. “The best music came from here—the

Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis

Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like

the

Whole Earth Catalog

.”

Initially the technologists and the hippies did not

interface well. Many in the counterculture saw

computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of

the Pentagon and the power structure. In

The Myth of

the Machine

, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that

computers were sucking away our freedom and

destroying “life-enhancing values.” An injunction on

punch cards of the period—“Do not fold, spindle or

mutilate”—became an ironic phrase of the antiwar Left.

But by the early 1970s a shift was under way.

“Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of

bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of

individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff

wrote in his study of the counterculture’s convergence

with the computer industry,

What the Dormouse Said

. It

was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard Brautigan’s

1967 poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving

Grace,” and the cyberdelic fusion was certiﬁed when

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had

become the new LSD and years later revised his

famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”

The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs,

often discussed with him why those immersed in the

rock-drugs-rebel counterculture of the Bay Area ended

up helping to create the personal computer industry.

“The people who invented the twenty-ﬁrst century were

pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West

Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said.

“The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England,

Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different

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thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that

is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”

One person who encouraged the denizens of the

counterculture to make common cause with the hackers

was Stewart Brand. A puckish visionary who generated

fun and ideas over many decades, Brand was a

participant in one of the early sixties LSD studies in

Palo Alto. He joined with his fellow subject Ken Kesey

to produce the acid-celebrating Trips Festival,

appeared in the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s

The

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

, and worked with Doug

Engelbart to create a seminal sound-and-light

presentation of new technologies called the Mother of

All Demos. “Most of our generation scorned computers

as the embodiment of centralized control,” Brand later

noted. “But a tiny contingent—later called hackers—

embraced computers and set about transforming them

into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true

royal road to the future.”

Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which

began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and

educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to

extend its reach with the

Whole Earth Catalog

. On its

ﬁrst cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from

space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying

philosophy was that technology could be our friend.

Brand wrote on the ﬁrst page of the ﬁrst edition, “A

realm of intimate, personal power is developing—

power of the individual to conduct his own education,

ﬁnd his own inspiration, shape his own environment,

and share his adventure with whoever is interested.

Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by

the

Whole Earth Catalog

.” Buckminster Fuller followed

with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments

and mechanisms that work reliably.”

Jobs became a

Whole Earth

fan. He was

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particularly taken by the ﬁnal issue, which came out in

1971, when he was still in high school, and he brought

it with him to college and then to the All One Farm. “On

the back cover of their ﬁnal issue” Jobs recalled, “was a

photograph of an early morning country road, the kind

you might ﬁnd yourself hitchhiking on if you were so

adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry.

Stay Foolish.’” Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest

embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog sought

to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the

counterculture and technology,” he said. “He got the

notion of tools for human use.”

Brand’s catalog was published with the help of the

Portola Institute, a foundation dedicated to the ﬂedgling

ﬁeld of computer education. The foundation also helped

launch the People’s Computer Company, which was

not a company at all but a newsletter and organization

with the motto “Computer power to the people.” There

were occasional Wednesday-night potluck dinners, and

two of the regulars, Gordon French and Fred Moore,

decided to create a more formal club where news about

personal electronics could be shared.

They were energized by the arrival of the January

1975 issue of

Popular Mechanics

, which had on its

cover the ﬁrst personal computer kit, the Altair. The

Altair wasn’t much—just a $495 pile of parts that had to

be soldered to a board that would then do little—but for

hobbyists and hackers it heralded the dawn of a new

era. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the magazine and

started working on a version of BASIC, an easy-to-use

programming language, for the Altair. It also caught the

attention of Jobs and Wozniak. And when an Altair kit

arrived at the People’s Computer Company, it became

the centerpiece for the ﬁrst meeting of the club that

French and Moore had decided to launch.

The Homebrew Computer Club

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The group became known as the Homebrew

Computer Club, and it encapsulated the

Whole Earth

fusion between the counterculture and technology. It

would become to the personal computer era something

akin to what the Turk’s Head coffeehouse was to the

age of Dr. Johnson, a place where ideas were

exchanged and disseminated. Moore wrote the ﬂyer for

the ﬁrst meeting, held on March 5, 1975, in French’s

Menlo Park garage: “Are you building your own

computer? Terminal, TV, typewriter?” it asked. “If so,

you might like to come to a gathering of people with

like-minded interests.”

Allen Baum spotted the ﬂyer on the HP bulletin

board and called Wozniak, who agreed to go with him.

“That night turned out to be one of the most important

nights of my life,” Wozniak recalled. About thirty other

people showed up, spilling out of French’s open garage

door, and they took turns describing their interests.

Wozniak, who later admitted to being extremely

nervous, said he liked “video games, pay movies for

hotels, scientiﬁc calculator design, and TV terminal

design,” according to the minutes prepared by Moore.

There was a demonstration of the new Altair, but more

important to Wozniak was seeing the speciﬁcation

sheet for a microprocessor.

As he thought about the microprocessor—a chip

that had an entire central processing unit on it—he had

an insight. He had been designing a terminal, with a

keyboard and monitor, that would connect to a distant

minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could put

some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the

terminal itself, so it could become a small stand-alone

computer on a desktop. It was an enduring idea:

keyboard, screen, and computer all in one integrated

personal package. “This whole vision of a personal

computer just popped into my head,” he said. “That

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night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later

become known as the Apple I.”

At ﬁrst he planned to use the same microprocessor

that was in the Altair, an Intel 8080. But each of those

“cost almost more than my monthly rent,” so he looked

for an alternative. He found one in the Motorola 6800,

which a friend at HP was able to get for $40 apiece.

Then he discovered a chip made by MOS Technologies

that was electronically the same but cost only $20. It

would make his machine affordable, but it would carry a

long-term cost. Intel’s chips ended up becoming the

industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its

computers were incompatible with it.

After work each day, Wozniak would go home for a

TV dinner and then return to HP to moonlight on his

computer. He spread out the parts in his cubicle, ﬁgured

out their placement, and soldered them onto his

motherboard. Then he began writing the software that

would get the microprocessor to display images on the

screen. Because he could not afford to pay for computer

time, he wrote the code by hand. After a couple of

months he was ready to test it. “I typed a few keys on

the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were

displayed on the screen.” It was Sunday, June 29,

1975, a milestone for the personal computer. “It was the

ﬁrst time in history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had

typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up

on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”

Jobs was impressed. He peppered Wozniak with

questions: Could the computer ever be networked?

Was it possible to add a disk for memory storage? He

also began to help Woz get components. Particularly

important were the dynamic random-access memory

chips. Jobs made a few calls and was able to score

some from Intel for free. “Steve is just that sort of

person,” said Wozniak. “I mean, he knew how to talk to

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 107

a sales representative. I could never have done that. I’m

too shy.”

Jobs began to accompany Wozniak to Homebrew

meetings, carrying the TV monitor and helping to set

things up. The meetings now attracted more than one

hundred enthusiasts and had been moved to the

auditorium of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Presiding with a pointer and a free-form manner was

Lee Felsenstein, another embodiment of the merger

between the world of computing and the counterculture.

He was an engineering school dropout, a participant in

the Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He

had written for the alternative newspaper

Berkeley Barb

and then gone back to being a computer engineer.

Woz was usually too shy to talk in the meetings,

but people would gather around his machine afterward,

and he would proudly show off his progress. Moore had

tried to instill in the Homebrew an ethos of swapping

and sharing rather than commerce. “The theme of the

club,” Woz said, “was ‘Give to help others.’” It was an

expression of the hacker ethic that information should

be free and all authority mistrusted. “I designed the

Apple I because I wanted to give it away for free to other

people,” said Wozniak.

This was not an outlook that Bill Gates embraced.

After he and Paul Allen had completed their BASIC

interpreter for the Altair, Gates was appalled that

members of the Homebrew were making copies of it

and sharing it without paying him. So he wrote what

would become a famous letter to the club: “As the

majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal

your software. Is this fair? . . . One thing you do is

prevent good software from being written. Who can

afford to do professional work for nothing? . . . I would

appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up.”

Steve Jobs, similarly, did not embrace the notion

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that Wozniak’s creations, be it a Blue Box or a

computer, wanted to be free. So he convinced Wozniak

to stop giving away copies of his schematics. Most

people didn’t have time to build it themselves anyway,

Jobs argued. “Why don’t we build and sell printed

circuit boards to them?” It was an example of their

symbiosis. “Every time I’d design something great,

Steve would ﬁnd a way to make money for us,” said

Wozniak. Wozniak admitted that he would have never

thought of doing that on his own. “It never crossed my

mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s

hold them in the air and sell a few.’”

Jobs worked out a plan to pay a guy he knew at

Atari to draw the circuit boards and then print up ﬁfty or

so. That would cost about $1,000, plus the fee to the

designer. They could sell them for $40 apiece and

perhaps clear a proﬁt of $700. Wozniak was dubious

that they could sell them all. “I didn’t see how we would

make our money back,” he recalled. He was already in

trouble with his landlord for bouncing checks and now

had to pay each month in cash.

Jobs knew how to appeal to Wozniak. He didn’t

argue that they were sure to make money, but instead

that they would have a fun adventure. “Even if we lose

our money, we’ll have a company,” said Jobs as they

were driving in his Volkswagen bus. “For once in our

lives, we’ll have a company.” This was enticing to

Wozniak, even more than any prospect of getting rich.

He recalled, “I was excited to think about us like that. To

be two best friends starting a company. Wow. I knew

right then that I’d do it. How could I not?”

In order to raise the money they needed, Wozniak

sold his HP 65 calculator for $500, though the buyer

ended up stifﬁng him for half of that. For his part, Jobs

sold his Volkswagen bus for $1,500. But the person

who bought it came to ﬁnd him two weeks later and said

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the engine had broken down, and Jobs agreed to pay

for half of the repairs. Despite these little setbacks, they

now had, with their own small savings thrown in, about

$1,300 in working capital, the design for a product, and

a plan. They would start their own computer company.

Apple Is Born

Now that they had decided to start a business,

they needed a name. Jobs had gone for another visit to

the All One Farm, where he had been pruning the

Gravenstein apple trees, and Wozniak picked him up at

the airport. On the ride down to Los Altos, they bandied

around options. They considered some typical tech

words, such as Matrix, and some neologisms, such as

Executek, and some straightforward boring names, like

Personal Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was

the next day, when Jobs wanted to start ﬁling the

papers. Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was

on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just

come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited,

and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word

‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the

phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name did

not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick

with Apple. And they did.

Apple. It was a smart choice. The word instantly

signaled friendliness and simplicity. It managed to be

both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie.

There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature

earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American.

And the two words together—Apple Computer—

provided an amusing disjuncture. “It doesn’t quite make

sense,” said Mike Markkula, who soon thereafter

became the ﬁrst chairman of the new company. “So it

forces your brain to dwell on it. Apple and computers,

that doesn’t go together! So it helped us grow brand

awareness.”

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Wozniak was not yet ready to commit full-time. He

was an HP company man at heart, or so he thought,

and he wanted to keep his day job there. Jobs realized

he needed an ally to help corral Wozniak and

adjudicate if there was a disagreement. So he enlisted

his friend Ron Wayne, the middle-aged engineer at

Atari who had once started a slot machine company.

Wayne knew that it would not be easy to make

Wozniak quit HP, nor was it necessary right away.

Instead the key was to convince him that his computer

designs would be owned by the Apple partnership.

“Woz had a parental attitude toward the circuits he

developed, and he wanted to be able to use them in

other applications or let HP use them,” Wayne said.

“Jobs and I realized that these circuits would be the

core of Apple. We spent two hours in a roundtable

discussion at my apartment, and I was able to get Woz

to accept this.” His argument was that a great engineer

would be remembered only if he teamed with a great

marketer, and this required him to commit his designs to

the partnership. Jobs was so impressed and grateful

that he offered Wayne a 10% stake in the new

partnership, turning him into a tie-breaker if Jobs and

Wozniak disagreed over an issue.

“They were very different, but they made a

powerful team,” said Wayne. Jobs at times seemed to

be driven by demons, while Woz seemed a naïf who

was toyed with by angels. Jobs had a bravado that

helped him get things done, occasionally by

manipulating people. He could be charismatic, even

mesmerizing, but also cold and brutal. Wozniak, in

contrast, was shy and socially awkward, which made

him seem childishly sweet. “Woz is very bright in some

areas, but he’s almost like a savant, since he was so

stunted when it came to dealing with people he didn’t

know,” said Jobs. “We were a good pair.” It helped that

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Jobs was awed by Wozniak’s engineering wizardry,

and Wozniak was awed by Jobs’s business drive. “I

never wanted to deal with people and step on toes, but

Steve could call up people he didn’t know and make

them do things,” Wozniak recalled. “He could be rough

on people he didn’t think were smart, but he never

treated me rudely, even in later years when maybe I

couldn’t answer a question as well as he wanted.”

Even after Wozniak became convinced that his

new computer design should become the property of

the Apple partnership, he felt that he had to offer it ﬁrst

to HP, since he was working there. “I believed it was my

duty to tell HP about what I had designed while working

for them. That was the right thing and the ethical thing.”

So he demonstrated it to his managers in the spring of

1976. The senior executive at the meeting was

impressed, and seemed torn, but he ﬁnally said it was

not something that HP could develop. It was a hobbyist

product, at least for now, and didn’t ﬁt into the

company’s high-quality market segments. “I was

disappointed,” Wozniak recalled, “but now I was free to

enter into the Apple partnership.”

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak went to

Wayne’s apartment in Mountain View to draw up the

partnership agreement. Wayne said he had some

experience “writing in legalese,” so he composed the

three-page document himself. His “legalese” got the

better of him. Paragraphs began with various ﬂourishes:

“Be it noted herewith . . . Be it further noted herewith . . .

Now the refore [

sic

], in consideration of the respective

assignments of interests . . .” But the division of shares

and proﬁts was clear—45%-45%-10%—and it was

stipulated that any expenditures of more than $100

would require agreement of at least two of the partners.

Also, the responsibilities were spelled out. “Wozniak

shall assume both general and major responsibility for

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the conduct of Electrical Engineering; Jobs shall

assume general responsibility for Electrical

Engineering and Marketing, and Wayne shall assume

major responsibility for Mechanical Engineering and

Documentation.” Jobs signed in lowercase script,

Wozniak in careful cursive, and Wayne in an illegible

squiggle.

Wayne then got cold feet. As Jobs started planning

to borrow and spend more money, he recalled the

failure of his own company. He didn’t want to go

through that again. Jobs and Wozniak had no personal

assets, but Wayne (who worried about a global

ﬁnancial Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his

mattress. Because they had structured Apple as a

simple partnership rather than a corporation, the

partners would be personally liable for the debts, and

Wayne was afraid potential creditors would go after

him. So he returned to the Santa Clara County ofﬁce

just eleven days later with a “statement of withdrawal”

and an amendment to the partnership agreement. “By

virtue of a re-assessment of understandings by and

between all parties,” it began, “Wayne shall hereinafter

cease to function in the status of ‘Partner.’” It noted that

in payment for his 10% of the company, he received

$800, and shortly afterward $1,500 more.

Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the

end of 2010 it would have been worth approximately

$2.6 billion. Instead he was then living alone in a small

home in Pahrump, Nevada, where he played the penny

slot machines and lived off his social security check. He

later claimed he had no regrets. “I made the best

decision for me at the time. Both of them were real

whirlwinds, and I knew my stomach and it wasn’t ready

for such a ride.”

Jobs and Wozniak took the stage together for a

presentation to the Homebrew Computer Club shortly

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after they signed Apple into existence. Wozniak held up

one of their newly produced circuit boards and

described the microprocessor, the eight kilobytes of

memory, and the version of BASIC he had written. He

also emphasized what he called the main thing: “a

human-typable keyboard instead of a stupid, cryptic

front panel with a bunch of lights and switches.” Then it

was Jobs’s turn. He pointed out that the Apple, unlike

the Altair, had all the essential components built in.

Then he challenged them with a question: How much

would people be willing to pay for such a wonderful

machine? He was trying to get them to see the amazing

value of the Apple. It was a rhetorical ﬂourish he would

use at product presentations over the ensuing decades.

The audience was not very impressed. The Apple

had a cut-rate microprocessor, not the Intel 8080. But

one important person stayed behind to hear more. His

name was Paul Terrell, and in 1975 he had opened a

computer store, which he dubbed the Byte Shop, on

Camino Real in Menlo Park. Now, a year later, he had

three stores and visions of building a national chain.

Jobs was thrilled to give him a private demo. “Take a

look at this,” he said. “You’re going to like what you

see.” Terrell was impressed enough to hand Jobs and

Woz his card. “Keep in touch,” he said.

“I’m keeping in touch,” Jobs announced the next

day when he walked barefoot into the Byte Shop. He

made the sale. Terrell agreed to order ﬁfty computers.

But there was a condition: He didn’t want just $50

printed circuit boards, for which customers would then

have to buy all the chips and do the assembly. That

might appeal to a few hard-core hobbyists, but not to

most customers. Instead he wanted the boards to be

fully assembled. For that he was willing to pay about

$500 apiece, cash on delivery.

Jobs immediately called Wozniak at HP. “Are you

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sitting down?” he asked. Wozniak said he wasn’t. Jobs

nevertheless proceeded to give him the news. “I was

shocked, just completely shocked,” Wozniak recalled. “I

will never forget that moment.”

To ﬁll the order, they needed about $15,000 worth

of parts. Allen Baum, the third prankster from

Homestead High, and his father agreed to loan them

$5,000. Jobs tried to borrow more from a bank in Los

Altos, but the manager looked at him and, not

surprisingly, declined. He went to Haltek Supply and

offered an equity stake in Apple in return for the parts,

but the owner decided they were “a couple of young,

scruffy-looking guys,” and declined. Alcorn at Atari

would sell them chips only if they paid cash up front.

Finally, Jobs was able to convince the manager of

Cramer Electronics to call Paul Terrell to conﬁrm that he

had really committed to a $25,000 order. Terrell was at

a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that

he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent).

The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had

just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was

it real? Terrell conﬁrmed that it was, and the store

agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit.

Garage Band

The Jobs house in Los Altos became the

assembly point for the ﬁfty Apple I boards that had to be

delivered to the Byte Shop within thirty days, when the

payment for the parts would come due. All available

hands were enlisted: Jobs and Wozniak, plus Daniel

Kottke, his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes (who had

broken away from the cult she’d joined), and Jobs’s

pregnant sister, Patty. Her vacated bedroom as well as

the kitchen table and garage were commandeered as

work space. Holmes, who had taken jewelry classes,

was given the task of soldering chips. “Most I did well,

but I got ﬂux on a few of them,” she recalled. This didn’t

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please Jobs. “We don’t have a chip to spare,” he railed,

correctly. He shifted her to bookkeeping and paperwork

at the kitchen table, and he did the soldering himself.

When they completed a board, they would hand it off to

Wozniak. “I would plug each assembled board into the

TV and keyboard to test it to see if it worked,” he said. “If

it did, I put it in a box. If it didn’t, I’d ﬁgure what pin

hadn’t gotten into the socket right.”

Paul Jobs suspended his sideline of repairing old

cars so that the Apple team could have the whole

garage. He put in a long old workbench, hung a

schematic of the computer on the new plasterboard wall

he built, and set up rows of labeled drawers for the

components. He also built a burn box bathed in heat

lamps so the computer boards could be tested by

running overnight at high temperatures. When there

was the occasional eruption of temper, an occurrence

not uncommon around his son, Paul would impart some

of his calm. “What’s the matter?” he would say. “You got

a feather up your ass?” In return he occasionally asked

to borrow back the TV set so he could watch the end of

a football game. During some of these breaks, Jobs and

Kottke would go outside and play guitar on the lawn.

Clara Jobs didn’t mind losing most of her house to

piles of parts and houseguests, but she was frustrated

by her son’s increasingly quirky diets. “She would roll

her eyes at his latest eating obsessions,” recalled

Holmes. “She just wanted him to be healthy, and he

would be making weird pronouncements like, ‘I’m a

fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in

the moonlight.’”

After a dozen assembled boards had been

approved by Wozniak, Jobs drove them over to the Byte

Shop. Terrell was a bit taken aback. There was no

power supply, case, monitor, or keyboard. He had

expected something more ﬁnished. But Jobs stared him

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down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.

After thirty days Apple was on the verge of being

proﬁtable. “We were able to build the boards more

cheaply than we thought, because I got a good deal on

parts,” Jobs recalled. “So the ﬁfty we sold to the Byte

Shop almost paid for all the material we needed to

make a hundred boards.” Now they could make a real

proﬁt by selling the remaining ﬁfty to their friends and

Homebrew compatriots.

Elizabeth Holmes ofﬁcially became the part-time

bookkeeper at $4 an hour, driving down from San

Francisco once a week and ﬁguring out how to port

Jobs’s checkbook into a ledger. In order to make Apple

seem like a real company, Jobs hired an answering

service, which would relay messages to his mother.

Ron Wayne drew a logo, using the ornate line-drawing

style of Victorian illustrated ﬁction, that featured Newton

sitting under a tree framed by a quote from Wordsworth:

“A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of

thought, alone.” It was a rather odd motto, one that ﬁt

Wayne’s self-image more than Apple Computer.

Perhaps a better Wordsworth line would have been the

poet’s description of those involved in the start of the

French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be

alive / But to be young was very heaven!” As Wozniak

later exulted, “We were participating in the biggest

revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so

happy to be a part of it.”

Woz had already begun thinking about the next

version of the machine, so they started calling their

current model the Apple I. Jobs and Woz would drive up

and down Camino Real trying to get the electronics

stores to sell it. In addition to the ﬁfty sold by the Byte

Shop and almost ﬁfty sold to friends, they were building

another hundred for retail outlets. Not surprisingly, they

had contradictory impulses: Wozniak wanted to sell

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them for about what it cost to build them, but Jobs

wanted to make a serious proﬁt. Jobs prevailed. He

picked a retail price that was about three times what it

cost to build the boards and a 33% markup over the

$500 wholesale price that Terrell and other stores paid.

The result was $666.66. “I was always into repeating

digits,” Wozniak said. “The phone number for my dial-a-

joke service was 255-6666.” Neither of them knew that

in the Book of Revelation 666 symbolized the “number

of the beast,” but they soon were faced with complaints,

especially after 666 was featured in that year’s hit

movie,

The Omen

. (In 2010 one of the original Apple I

computers was sold at auction by Christie’s for

$213,000.)

The ﬁrst feature story on the new machine

appeared in the July 1976 issue of

Interface

, a now-

defunct hobbyist magazine. Jobs and friends were still

making them by hand in his house, but the article

referred to him as the director of marketing and “a

former private consultant to Atari.” It made Apple sound

like a real company. “Steve communicates with many of

the computer clubs to keep his ﬁnger on the heartbeat

of this young industry,” the article reported, and it

quoted him explaining, “If we can rap about their needs,

feelings and motivations, we can respond appropriately

by giving them what they want.”

By this time they had other competitors, in addition

to the Altair, most notably the IMSAI 8080 and

Processor Technology Corporation’s SOL-20. The latter

was designed by Lee Felsenstein and Gordon French

of the Homebrew Computer Club. They all had the

chance to go on display during Labor Day weekend of

1976, at the ﬁrst annual Personal Computer Festival,

held in a tired hotel on the decaying boardwalk of

Atlantic City, New Jersey. Jobs and Wozniak took a

TWA ﬂight to Philadelphia, cradling one cigar box with

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 118

the Apple I and another with the prototype for the

successor that Woz was working on. Sitting in the row

behind them was Felsenstein, who looked at the Apple I

and pronounced it “thoroughly unimpressive.” Wozniak

was unnerved by the conversation in the row behind

him. “We could hear them talking in advanced business

talk,” he recalled, “using businesslike acronyms we’d

never heard before.”

Wozniak spent most of his time in their hotel room,

tweaking his new prototype. He was too shy to stand at

the card table that Apple had been assigned near the

back of the exhibition hall. Daniel Kottke had taken the

train down from Manhattan, where he was now

attending Columbia, and he manned the table while

Jobs walked the ﬂoor to inspect the competition. What

he saw did not impress him. Wozniak, he felt reassured,

was the best circuit engineer, and the Apple I (and

surely its successor) could beat the competition in terms

of functionality. However, the SOL-20 was better

looking. It had a sleek metal case, a keyboard, a power

supply, and cables. It looked as if it had been produced

by grown-ups. The Apple I, on the other hand,

appeared as scruffy as its creators.

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CHAPTER SIX

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THE APPLE II

Dawn of a New Age

An Integrated Package

As Jobs walked the ﬂoor of the Personal Computer

Festival, he came to the realization that Paul Terrell of

the Byte Shop had been right: Personal computers

should come in a complete package. The next Apple,

he decided, needed to have a great case and a built-in

keyboard, and be integrated end to end, from the power

supply to the software. “My vision was to create the ﬁrst

fully packaged computer,” he recalled. “We were no

longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to

assemble their own computers, who knew how to buy

transformers and keyboards. For every one of them

there were a thousand people who would want the

machine to be ready to run.”

In their hotel room on that Labor Day weekend of

1976, Wozniak tinkered with the prototype of the new

machine, to be named the Apple II, that Jobs hoped

would take them to this next level. They brought the

prototype out only once, late at night, to test it on the

color projection television in one of the conference

rooms. Wozniak had come up with an ingenious way to

goose the machine’s chips into creating color, and he

wanted to see if it would work on the type of television

that uses a projector to display on a movie-like screen.

“I ﬁgured a projector might have a different color

circuitry that would choke on my color method,” he

recalled. “So I hooked up the Apple II to this projector

and it worked perfectly.” As he typed on his keyboard,

colorful lines and swirls burst on the screen across the

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room. The only outsider who saw this ﬁrst Apple II was

the hotel’s technician. He said he had looked at all the

machines, and this was the one he would be buying.

To produce the fully packaged Apple II would

require signiﬁcant capital, so they considered selling

the rights to a larger company. Jobs went to Al Alcorn

and asked for the chance to pitch it to Atari’s

management. He set up a meeting with the company’s

president, Joe Keenan, who was a lot more

conservative than Alcorn and Bushnell. “Steve goes in

to pitch him, but Joe couldn’t stand him,” Alcorn

recalled. “He didn’t appreciate Steve’s hygiene.” Jobs

was barefoot, and at one point put his feet up on a desk.

“Not only are we not going to buy this thing,” Keenan

shouted, “but get your feet off my desk!” Alcorn recalled

thinking, “Oh, well. There goes that possibility.”

In September Chuck Peddle of the Commodore

computer company came by the Jobs house to get a

demo. “We’d opened Steve’s garage to the sunlight,

and he came in wearing a suit and a cowboy hat,”

Wozniak recalled. Peddle loved the Apple II, and he

arranged a presentation for his top brass a few weeks

later at Commodore headquarters. “You might want to

buy us for a few hundred thousand dollars,” Jobs said

when they got there. Wozniak was stunned by this

“ridiculous” suggestion, but Jobs persisted. The

Commodore honchos called a few days later to say

they had decided it would be cheaper to build their own

machine. Jobs was not upset. He had checked out

Commodore and decided that its leadership was

“sleazy.” Wozniak did not rue the lost money, but his

engineering sensibilities were offended when the

company came out with the Commodore PET nine

months later. “It kind of sickened me. They made a real

crappy product by doing it so quick. They could have

had Apple.”

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The Commodore ﬂirtation brought to the surface a

potential conﬂict between Jobs and Wozniak: Were they

truly equal in what they contributed to Apple and what

they should get out of it? Jerry Wozniak, who exalted

the value of engineers over mere entrepreneurs and

marketers, thought most of the money should be going

to his son. He confronted Jobs personally when he

came by the Wozniak house. “You don’t deserve shit,”

he told Jobs. “You haven’t produced anything.” Jobs

began to cry, which was not unusual. He had never

been, and would never be, adept at containing his

emotions. He told Steve Wozniak that he was willing to

call off the partnership. “If we’re not ﬁfty-ﬁfty,” he said to

his friend, “you can have the whole thing.” Wozniak,

however, understood better than his father the

symbiosis they had. If it had not been for Jobs, he might

still be handing out schematics of his boards for free at

the back of Homebrew meetings. It was Jobs who had

turned his ingenious designs into a budding business,

just as he had with the Blue Box. He agreed they

should remain partners.

It was a smart call. To make the Apple II successful

required more than just Wozniak’s awesome circuit

design. It would need to be packaged into a fully

integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs’s role.

He began by asking their erstwhile partner Ron

Wayne to design a case. “I assumed they had no

money, so I did one that didn’t require any tooling and

could be fabricated in a standard metal shop,” he said.

His design called for a Plexiglas cover attached by

metal straps and a rolltop door that slid down over the

keyboard.

Jobs didn’t like it. He wanted a simple and elegant

design, which he hoped would set Apple apart from the

other machines, with their clunky gray metal cases.

While haunting the appliance aisles at Macy’s, he was

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struck by the Cuisinart food processors and decided

that he wanted a sleek case made of light molded

plastic. At a Homebrew meeting, he offered a local

consultant, Jerry Manock, $1,500 to produce such a

design. Manock, dubious about Jobs’s appearance,

asked for the money up front. Jobs refused, but Manock

took the job anyway. Within weeks he had produced a

simple foam-molded plastic case that was uncluttered

and exuded friendliness. Jobs was thrilled.

Next came the power supply. Digital geeks like

Wozniak paid little attention to something so analog

and mundane, but Jobs decided it was a key

component. In particular he wanted—as he would his

entire career—to provide power in a way that avoided

the need for a fan. Fans inside computers were not Zen-

like; they distracted. He dropped by Atari to consult with

Alcorn, who knew old-fashioned electrical engineering.

“Al turned me on to this brilliant guy named Rod Holt,

who was a chain-smoking Marxist who had been

through many marriages and was an expert on

everything,” Jobs recalled. Like Manock and others

meeting Jobs for the ﬁrst time, Holt took a look at him

and was skeptical. “I’m expensive,” Holt said. Jobs

sensed he was worth it and said that cost was no

problem. “He just conned me into working,” said Holt,

who ended up joining Apple full-time.

Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt

built one like those used in oscilloscopes. It switched

the power on and off not sixty times per second, but

thousands of times; this allowed it to store the power for

far less time, and thus throw off less heat. “That

switching power supply was as revolutionary as the

Apple II logic board was,” Jobs later said. “Rod doesn’t

get a lot of credit for this in the history books, but he

should. Every computer now uses switching power

supplies, and they all rip off Rod’s design.” For all of

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Wozniak’s brilliance, this was not something he could

have done. “I only knew vaguely what a switching

power supply was,” Woz admitted.

Jobs’s father had once taught him that a drive for

perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even

of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of

the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the

initial design because the lines were not straight

enough.

This passion for perfection led him to indulge his

instinct to control. Most hackers and hobbyists liked to

customize, modify, and jack various things into their

computers. To Jobs, this was a threat to a seamless

end-to-end user experience. Wozniak, a hacker at

heart, disagreed. He wanted to include eight slots on

the Apple II for users to insert whatever smaller circuit

boards and peripherals they might want. Jobs insisted

there be only two, for a printer and a modem. “Usually

I’m really easy to get along with, but this time I told him,

‘If that’s what you want, go get yourself another

computer,’” Wozniak recalled. “I knew that people like

me would eventually come up with things to add to any

computer.” Wozniak won the argument that time, but he

could sense his power waning. “I was in a position to do

that then. I wouldn’t always be.”

Mike Markkula

All of this required money. “The tooling of this

plastic case was going to cost, like, $100,000,” Jobs

said. “Just to get this whole thing into production was

going to be, like, $200,000.” He went back to Nolan

Bushnell, this time to get him to put in some money and

take a minority equity stake. “He asked me if I would put

$50,000 in and he would give me a third of the

company,” said Bushnell. “I was so smart, I said no. It’s

kind of fun to think about that, when I’m not crying.”

Bushnell suggested that Jobs try Don Valentine, a

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straight-shooting former marketing manager at National

Semiconductor who had founded Sequoia Capital, a

pioneering venture capital ﬁrm. Valentine arrived at the

Jobses’ garage in a Mercedes wearing a blue suit,

button-down shirt, and rep tie. His ﬁrst impression was

that Jobs looked and smelled odd. “Steve was trying to

be the embodiment of the counterculture. He had a

wispy beard, was very thin, and looked like Ho Chi

Minh.”

Valentine, however, did not become a preeminent

Silicon Valley investor by relying on surface

appearances. What bothered him more was that Jobs

knew nothing about marketing and seemed content to

peddle his product to individual stores one by one. “If

you want me to ﬁnance you,” Valentine told him, “you

need to have one person as a partner who understands

marketing and distribution and can write a business

plan.” Jobs tended to be either bristly or solicitous when

older people offered him advice. With Valentine he was

the latter. “Send me three suggestions,” he replied.

Valentine did, Jobs met them, and he clicked with one

of them, a man named Mike Markkula, who would end

up playing a critical role at Apple for the next two

decades.

Markkula was only thirty-three, but he had already

retired after working at Fairchild and then Intel, where

he made millions on his stock options when the chip

maker went public. He was a cautious and shrewd man,

with the precise moves of someone who had been a

gymnast in high school, and he excelled at ﬁguring out

pricing strategies, distribution networks, marketing, and

ﬁnance. Despite being slightly reserved, he had a

ﬂashy side when it came to enjoying his newly minted

wealth. He built himself a house in Lake Tahoe and

later an outsize mansion in the hills of Woodside. When

he showed up for his ﬁrst meeting at Jobs’s garage, he

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was driving not a dark Mercedes like Valentine, but a

highly polished gold Corvette convertible. “When I

arrived at the garage, Woz was at the workbench and

immediately began showing off the Apple II,” Markkula

recalled. “I looked past the fact that both guys needed a

haircut and was amazed by what I saw on that

workbench. You can always get a haircut.”

Jobs immediately liked Markkula. “He was short

and he had been passed over for the top marketing job

at Intel, which I suspect made him want to prove

himself.” He also struck Jobs as decent and fair. “You

could tell that if he could screw you, he wouldn’t. He

had a real moral sense to him.” Wozniak was equally

impressed. “I thought he was the nicest person ever,”

he recalled. “Better still, he actually liked what we had!”

Markkula proposed to Jobs that they write a

business plan together. “If it comes out well, I’ll invest,”

Markkula said, “and if not, you’ve got a few weeks of my

time for free.” Jobs began going to Markkula’s house in

the evenings, kicking around projections and talking

through the night. “We made a lot of assumptions, such

as about how many houses would have a personal

computer, and there were nights we were up until 4

a.m.,” Jobs recalled. Markkula ended up writing most of

the plan. “Steve would say, ‘I will bring you this section

next time,’ but he usually didn’t deliver on time, so I

ended up doing it.”

Markkula’s plan envisioned ways of getting

beyond the hobbyist market. “He talked about

introducing the computer to regular people in regular

homes, doing things like keeping track of your favorite

recipes or balancing your checkbook,” Wozniak

recalled. Markkula made a wild prediction: “We’re going

to be a Fortune 500 company in two years,” he said.

“This is the start of an industry. It happens once in a

decade.” It would take Apple seven years to break into

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the Fortune 500, but the spirit of Markkula’s prediction

turned out to be true.

Markkula offered to guarantee a line of credit of up

to $250,000 in return for being made a one-third equity

participant. Apple would incorporate, and he along with

Jobs and Wozniak would each own 26% of the stock.

The rest would be reserved to attract future investors.

The three met in the cabana by Markkula’s swimming

pool and sealed the deal. “I thought it was unlikely that

Mike would ever see that $250,000 again, and I was

impressed that he was willing to risk it,” Jobs recalled.

Now it was necessary to convince Wozniak to

come on board full-time. “Why can’t I keep doing this on

the side and just have HP as my secure job for life?” he

asked. Markkula said that wouldn’t work, and he gave

Wozniak a deadline of a few days to decide. “I felt very

insecure in starting a company where I would be

expected to push people around and control what they

did,” Wozniak recalled. “I’d decided long ago that I

would never become someone authoritative.” So he

went to Markkula’s cabana and announced that he was

not leaving HP.

Markkula shrugged and said okay. But Jobs got

very upset. He cajoled Wozniak; he got friends to try to

convince him; he cried, yelled, and threw a couple of

ﬁts. He even went to Wozniak’s parents’ house, burst

into tears, and asked Jerry for help. By this point

Wozniak’s father had realized there was real money to

be made by capitalizing on the Apple II, and he joined

forces on Jobs’s behalf. “I started getting phone calls at

work and home from my dad, my mom, my brother, and

various friends,” Wozniak recalled. “Every one of them

told me I’d made the wrong decision.” None of that

worked. Then Allen Baum, their Buck Fry Club mate at

Homestead High, called. “You really ought to go ahead

and do it,” he said. He argued that if he joined Apple

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full-time, he would not have to go into management or

give up being an engineer. “That was exactly what I

needed to hear,” Wozniak later said. “I could stay at the

bottom of the organization chart, as an engineer.” He

called Jobs and declared that he was now ready to

come on board.

On January 3, 1977, the new corporation, the

Apple Computer Co., was ofﬁcially created, and it

bought out the old partnership that had been formed by

Jobs and Wozniak nine months earlier. Few people

noticed. That month the Homebrew surveyed its

members and found that, of the 181 who owned

personal computers, only six owned an Apple. Jobs

was convinced, however, that the Apple II would

change that.

Markkula would become a father ﬁgure to Jobs.

Like Jobs’s adoptive father, he would indulge Jobs’s

strong will, and like his biological father, he would end

up abandoning him. “Markkula was as much a father-

son relationship as Steve ever had,” said the venture

capitalist Arthur Rock. He began to teach Jobs about

marketing and sales. “Mike really took me under his

wing,” Jobs recalled. “His values were much aligned

with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a

company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should

be making something you believe in and making a

company that will last.”

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper

titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed

three points. The ﬁrst was

empathy

, an intimate

connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will

truly understand their needs better than any other

company.” The second was

focus

: “In order to do a

good job of those things that we decide to do, we must

eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third

and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was

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impute

. It emphasized that people form an opinion

about a company or product based on the signals that it

conveys. “People

judge a book by its cover,” he

wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest

quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them

in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as

slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional

manner, we will

impute

the desired qualities.”

For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand

the needs and desires of customers better than any

other business leader, he would focus on a handful of

core products, and he would care, sometimes

obsessively, about marketing and image and even the

details of packaging. “When you open the box of an

iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set

the tone for how you perceive the product,” he said.

“Mike taught me that.”

Regis McKenna

The ﬁrst step in this process was convincing the

Valley’s premier publicist, Regis McKenna, to take on

Apple as a client. McKenna was from a large working-

class Pittsburgh family, and bred into his bones was a

steeliness that he cloaked with charm. A college

dropout, he had worked for Fairchild and National

Semiconductor before starting his own PR and

advertising ﬁrm. His two specialties were doling out

exclusive interviews with his clients to journalists he

had cultivated and coming up with memorable ad

campaigns that created brand awareness for products

such as microchips. One of these was a series of

colorful magazine ads for Intel that featured racing cars

and poker chips rather than the usual dull performance

charts. These caught Jobs’s eye. He called Intel and

asked who created them. “Regis McKenna,” he was

told. “I asked them what Regis McKenna was,” Jobs

recalled, “and they told me he was a person.” When

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Jobs phoned, he couldn’t get through to McKenna.

Instead he was transferred to Frank Burge, an account

executive, who tried to put him off. Jobs called back

almost every day.

Burge ﬁnally agreed to drive out to the Jobs

garage. “Holy Christ, this guy is going to be something

else,” he recalled thinking. “What’s the least amount of

time I can spend with this clown without being rude.”

Then, when he was confronted with the unwashed and

shaggy Jobs, two things hit him: “First, he was an

incredibly smart young man. Second, I didn’t

understand a ﬁftieth of what he was talking about.”

So Jobs and Wozniak were invited to have a

meeting with, as his impish business cards read, “Regis

McKenna, himself.” This time it was the normally shy

Wozniak who became prickly. McKenna glanced at an

article Wozniak was writing about Apple and suggested

that it was too technical and needed to be livened up. “I

don’t want any PR man touching my copy,” Wozniak

snapped. McKenna suggested it was time for them to

leave his ofﬁce. “But Steve called me back right away

and said he wanted to meet again,” McKenna recalled.

“This time he came without Woz, and we hit it off.”

McKenna had his team get to work on brochures

for the Apple II. The ﬁrst thing they did was to replace

Ron Wayne’s ornate Victorian woodcut-style logo,

which ran counter to McKenna’s colorful and playful

advertising style. So an art director, Rob Janoff, was

assigned to create a new one. “Don’t make it cute,”

Jobs ordered. Janoff came up with a simple apple

shape in two versions, one whole and the other with a

bite taken out of it. The ﬁrst looked too much like a

cherry, so Jobs chose the one with a bite. He also

picked a version that was striped in six colors, with

psychedelic hues sandwiched between whole-earth

green and sky blue, even though that made printing the

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logo signiﬁcantly more expensive. Atop the brochure

McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo da

Vinci, that would become the deﬁning precept of Jobs’s

design philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate

sophistication.”

The First Launch Event

The introduction of the Apple II was scheduled to

coincide with the ﬁrst West Coast Computer Faire, to be

held in April 1977 in San Francisco, organized by a

Homebrew stalwart, Jim Warren. Jobs signed Apple up

for a booth as soon as he got the information packet. He

wanted to secure a location right at the front of the hall

as a dramatic way to launch the Apple II, and so he

shocked Wozniak by paying $5,000 in advance. “Steve

decided that this was our big launch,” said Wozniak.

“We would show the world we had a great machine and

a great company.”

It was an application of Markkula’s admonition that

it was important to “impute” your greatness by making a

memorable impression on people, especially when

launching a new product. That was reﬂected in the care

that Jobs took with Apple’s display area. Other

exhibitors had card tables and poster board signs.

Apple had a counter draped in black velvet and a large

pane of backlit Plexiglas with Janoff’s new logo. They

put on display the only three Apple IIs that had been

ﬁnished, but empty boxes were piled up to give the

impression that there were many more on hand.

Jobs was furious that the computer cases had

arrived with tiny blemishes on them, so he had his

handful of employees sand and polish them. The

imputing even extended to gussying up Jobs and

Wozniak. Markkula sent them to a San Francisco tailor

for three-piece suits, which looked faintly ridiculous on

them, like tuxes on teenagers. “Markkula explained how

we would all have to dress up nicely, how we should

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appear and look, how we should act,” Wozniak

recalled.

It was worth the effort. The Apple II looked solid yet

friendly in its sleek beige case, unlike the intimidating

metal-clad machines and naked boards on the other

tables. Apple got three hundred orders at the show, and

Jobs met a Japanese textile maker, Mizushima Satoshi,

who became Apple’s ﬁrst dealer in Japan.

The fancy clothes and Markkula’s injunctions

could not, however, stop the irrepressible Wozniak from

playing some practical jokes. One program that he

displayed tried to guess people’s nationality from their

last name and then produced the relevant ethnic jokes.

He also created and distributed a hoax brochure for a

new computer called the “Zaltair,” with all sorts of fake

ad-copy superlatives like “Imagine a car with ﬁve

wheels.” Jobs brieﬂy fell for the joke and even took

pride that the Apple II stacked up well against the Zaltair

in the comparison chart. He didn’t realize who had

pulled the prank until eight years later, when Woz gave

him a framed copy of the brochure as a birthday gift.

Mike Scott

Apple was now a real company, with a dozen

employees, a line of credit, and the daily pressures that

can come from customers and suppliers. It had even

moved out of the Jobses’ garage, ﬁnally, into a rented

ofﬁce on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, about

a mile from where Jobs and Wozniak went to high

school.

Jobs did not wear his growing responsibilities

gracefully. He had always been temperamental and

bratty. At Atari his behavior had caused him to be

banished to the night shift, but at Apple that was not

possible. “He became increasingly tyrannical and sharp

in his criticism,” according to Markkula. “He would tell

people, ‘That design looks like shit.’” He was

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particularly rough on Wozniak’s young programmers,

Randy Wigginton and Chris Espinosa. “Steve would

come in, take a quick look at what I had done, and tell

me it was shit without having any idea what it was or

why I had done it,” said Wigginton, who was just out of

high school.

There was also the issue of his hygiene. He was

still convinced, against all evidence, that his vegan

diets meant that he didn’t need to use a deodorant or

take regular showers. “We would have to literally put

him out the door and tell him to go take a shower,” said

Markkula. “At meetings we had to look at his dirty feet.”

Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in

the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his

colleagues.

Markkula was averse to confrontation, so he

decided to bring in a president, Mike Scott, to keep a

tighter rein on Jobs. Markkula and Scott had joined

Fairchild on the same day in 1967, had adjoining

ofﬁces, and shared the same birthday, which they

celebrated together each year. At their birthday lunch in

February 1977, when Scott was turning thirty-two,

Markkula invited him to become Apple’s new president.

On paper he looked like a great choice. He was

running a manufacturing line for National

Semiconductor, and he had the advantage of being a

manager who fully understood engineering. In person,

however, he had some quirks. He was overweight,

afﬂicted with tics and health problems, and so tightly

wound that he wandered the halls with clenched ﬁsts.

He also could be argumentative. In dealing with Jobs,

that could be good or bad.

Wozniak quickly embraced the idea of hiring Scott.

Like Markkula, he hated dealing with the conﬂicts that

Jobs engendered. Jobs, not surprisingly, had more

conﬂicted emotions. “I was only twenty-two, and I knew I

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wasn’t ready to run a real company,” he said. “But

Apple was my baby, and I didn’t want to give it up.”

Relinquishing any control was agonizing to him. He

wrestled with the issue over long lunches at Bob’s Big

Boy hamburgers (Woz’s favorite place) and at the Good

Earth restaurant (Jobs’s). He ﬁnally acquiesced,

reluctantly.

Mike Scott, called “Scotty” to distinguish him from

Mike Markkula, had one primary duty: managing Jobs.

This was usually accomplished by Jobs’s preferred

mode of meeting, which was taking a walk together. “My

very ﬁrst walk was to tell him to bathe more often,” Scott

recalled. “He said that in exchange I had to read his

fruitarian diet book and consider it as a way to lose

weight.” Scott never adopted the diet or lost much

weight, and Jobs made only minor modiﬁcations to his

hygiene. “Steve was adamant that he bathed once a

week, and that was adequate as long as he was eating

a fruitarian diet.”

Jobs’s desire for control and disdain for authority

was destined to be a problem with the man who was

brought in to be his regent, especially when Jobs

discovered that Scott was one of the only people he

had yet encountered who would not bend to his will.

“The question between Steve and me was who could

be most stubborn, and I was pretty good at that,” Scott

said. “He needed to be sat on, and he sure didn’t like

that.” Jobs later said, “I never yelled at anyone more

than I yelled at Scotty.”

An early showdown came over employee badge

numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak and #2 to Jobs.

Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t

let him have it, because that would stoke his ego even

more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried.

Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge

#0. Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge,

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but the Bank of America required a positive integer for

its payroll system and Jobs’s remained #2.

There was a more fundamental disagreement that

went beyond personal petulance. Jay Elliot, who was

hired by Jobs after a chance meeting in a restaurant,

noted Jobs’s salient trait: “His obsession is a passion

for the product, a passion for product perfection.” Mike

Scott, on the other hand, never let a passion for the

perfect take precedence over pragmatism. The design

of the Apple II case was one of many examples. The

Pantone company, which Apple used to specify colors

for its plastic, had more than two thousand shades of

beige. “None of them were good enough for Steve,”

Scott marveled. “He wanted to create a different shade,

and I had to stop him.” When the time came to tweak the

design of the case, Jobs spent days agonizing over just

how rounded the corners should be. “I didn’t care how

rounded they were,” said Scott, “I just wanted it

decided.” Another dispute was over engineering

benches. Scott wanted a standard gray; Jobs insisted

on special-order benches that were pure white. All of

this ﬁnally led to a showdown in front of Markkula about

whether Jobs or Scott had the power to sign purchase

orders; Markkula sided with Scott. Jobs also insisted

that Apple be different in how it treated customers. He

wanted a one-year warranty to come with the Apple II.

This ﬂabbergasted Scott; the usual warranty was ninety

days. Again Jobs dissolved into tears during one of

their arguments over the issue. They walked around the

parking lot to calm down, and Scott decided to relent on

this one.

Wozniak began to rankle at Jobs’s style. “Steve

was too tough on people. I wanted our company to feel

like a family where we all had fun and shared whatever

we made.” Jobs, for his part, felt that Wozniak simply

would not grow up. “He was very childlike. He did a

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great version of BASIC, but then never could buckle

down and write the ﬂoating-point BASIC we needed, so

we ended up later having to make a deal with Microsoft.

He was just too unfocused.”

But for the time being the personality clashes were

manageable, mainly because the company was doing

so well. Ben Rosen, the analyst whose newsletters

shaped the opinions of the tech world, became an

enthusiastic proselytizer for the Apple II. An

independent developer came up with the ﬁrst

spreadsheet and personal ﬁnance program for

personal computers, VisiCalc, and for a while it was

available only on the Apple II, turning the computer into

something that businesses and families could justify

buying. The company began attracting inﬂuential new

investors. The pioneering venture capitalist Arthur Rock

had initially been unimpressed when Markkula sent

Jobs to see him. “He looked as if he had just come back

from seeing that guru he had in India,” Rock recalled,

“and he kind of smelled that way too.” But after Rock

scoped out the Apple II, he made an investment and

joined the board.

The Apple II would be marketed, in various

models, for the next sixteen years, with close to six

million sold. More than any other machine, it launched

the personal computer industry. Wozniak deserves the

historic credit for the design of its awe-inspiring circuit

board and related operating software, which was one of

the era’s great feats of solo invention. But Jobs was the

one who integrated Wozniak’s boards into a friendly

package, from the power supply to the sleek case. He

also created the company that sprang up around

Wozniak’s machines. As Regis McKenna later said,

“Woz designed a great machine, but it would be sitting

in hobby shops today were it not for Steve Jobs.”

Nevertheless most people considered the Apple II to be

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Wozniak’s creation. That would spur Jobs to pursue the

next great advance, one that he could call his own.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

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CHRISANN AND LISA

He Who Is Abandoned . . .

Ever since they had lived together in a cabin

during the summer after he graduated from high school,

Chrisann Brennan had woven in and out of Jobs’s life.

When he returned from India in 1974, they spent time

together at Robert Friedland’s farm. “Steve invited me

up there, and we were just young and easy and free,”

she recalled. “There was an energy there that went to

my heart.”

When they moved back to Los Altos, their

relationship drifted into being, for the most part, merely

friendly. He lived at home and worked at Atari; she had

a small apartment and spent a lot of time at Kobun

Chino’s Zen center. By early 1975 she had begun a

relationship with a mutual friend, Greg Calhoun. “She

was with Greg, but went back to Steve occasionally,”

according to Elizabeth Holmes. “That was pretty much

the way it was with all of us. We were sort of shifting

back and forth; it was the seventies, after all.”

Calhoun had been at Reed with Jobs, Friedland,

Kottke, and Holmes. Like the others, he became deeply

involved with Eastern spirituality, dropped out of Reed,

and found his way to Friedland’s farm. There he moved

into an eight-by twenty-foot chicken coop that he

converted into a little house by raising it onto

cinderblocks and building a sleeping loft inside. In the

spring of 1975 Brennan moved in with him, and the next

year they decided to make their own pilgrimage to

India. Jobs advised Calhoun not to take Brennan with

him, saying that she would interfere with his spiritual

quest, but they went together anyway. “I was just so

impressed by what happened to Steve on his trip to

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India that I wanted to go there,” she said.

Theirs was a serious trip, beginning in March 1976

and lasting almost a year. At one point they ran out of

money, so Calhoun hitchhiked to Iran to teach English

in Tehran. Brennan stayed in India, and when

Calhoun’s teaching stint was over they hitchhiked to

meet each other in the middle, in Afghanistan. The

world was a very different place back then.

After a while their relationship frayed, and they

returned from India separately. By the summer of 1977

Brennan had moved back to Los Altos, where she lived

for a while in a tent on the grounds of Kobun Chino’s

Zen center. By this time Jobs had moved out of his

parents’ house and was renting a $600 per month

suburban ranch house in Cupertino with Daniel Kottke.

It was an odd scene of free-spirited hippie types living

in a tract house they dubbed Rancho Suburbia. “It was

a four-bedroom house, and we occasionally rented one

of the bedrooms out to all sorts of crazy people,

including a stripper for a while,” recalled Jobs. Kottke

couldn’t quite ﬁgure out why Jobs had not just gotten

his own house, which he could have afforded by then. “I

think he just wanted to have a roommate,” Kottke

speculated.

Even though her relationship with Jobs was

sporadic, Brennan soon moved in as well. This made

for a set of living arrangements worthy of a French

farce. The house had two big bedrooms and two tiny

ones. Jobs, not surprisingly, commandeered the largest

of them, and Brennan (who was not really living with

him) moved into the other big bedroom. “The two

middle rooms were like for babies, and I didn’t want

either of them, so I moved into the living room and slept

on a foam pad,” said Kottke. They turned one of the

small rooms into space for meditating and dropping

acid, like the attic space they had used at Reed. It was

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ﬁlled with foam packing material from Apple boxes.

“Neighborhood kids used to come over and we would

toss them in it and it was great fun,” said Kottke, “but

then Chrisann brought home some cats who peed in

the foam, and then we had to get rid of it.”

Living in the house at times rekindled the physical

relationship between Brennan and Jobs, and within a

few months she was pregnant. “Steve and I were in and

out of a relationship for ﬁve years before I got pregnant,”

she said. “We didn’t know how to be together and we

didn’t know how to be apart.” When Greg Calhoun

hitchhiked from Colorado to visit them on Thanksgiving

1977, Brennan told him the news: “Steve and I got back

together, and now I’m pregnant, but now we are on

again and off again, and I don’t know what to do.”

Calhoun noticed that Jobs was disconnected from

the whole situation. He even tried to convince Calhoun

to stay with them and come to work at Apple. “Steve

was just not dealing with Chrisann or the pregnancy,”

he recalled. “He could be very engaged with you in one

moment, but then very disengaged. There was a side to

him that was frighteningly cold.”

When Jobs did not want to deal with a distraction,

he sometimes just ignored it, as if he could will it out of

existence. At times he was able to distort reality not just

for others but even for himself. In the case of Brennan’s

pregnancy, he simply shut it out of his mind. When

confronted, he would deny that he knew he was the

father, even though he admitted that he had been

sleeping with her. “I wasn’t sure it was my kid, because I

was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one she was sleeping

with,” he told me later. “She and I were not really even

going out when she got pregnant. She just had a room

in our house.” Brennan had no doubt that Jobs was the

father. She had not been involved with Greg or any

other men at the time.

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Was he lying to himself, or did he not know that he

was the father? “I just think he couldn’t access that part

of his brain or the idea of being responsible,” Kottke

said. Elizabeth Holmes agreed: “He considered the

option of parenthood and considered the option of not

being a parent, and he decided to believe the latter. He

had other plans for his life.”

There was no discussion of marriage. “I knew that

she was not the person I wanted to marry, and we

would never be happy, and it wouldn’t last long,” Jobs

later said. “I was all in favor of her getting an abortion,

but she didn’t know what to do. She thought about it

repeatedly and decided not to, or I don’t know that she

ever really decided—I think time just decided for her.”

Brennan told me that it was her choice to have the

baby: “He said he was ﬁne with an abortion but never

pushed for it.” Interestingly, given his own background,

he was adamantly against one option. “He strongly

discouraged me putting the child up for adoption,” she

said.

There was a disturbing irony. Jobs and Brennan

were both twenty-three, the same age that Joanne

Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali had been when they

had Jobs. He had not yet tracked down his biological

parents, but his adoptive parents had told him some of

their tale. “I didn’t know then about this coincidence of

our ages, so it didn’t affect my discussions with

Chrisann,” he later said. He dismissed the notion that

he was somehow following his biological father’s

pattern of getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was

twenty-three, but he did admit that the ironic resonance

gave him pause. “When I did ﬁnd out that he was

twenty-three when he got Joanne pregnant with me, I

thought, whoa!”

The relationship between Jobs and Brennan

quickly deteriorated. “Chrisann would get into this kind

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of victim mode, when she would say that Steve and I

were ganging up on her,” Kottke recalled. “Steve would

just laugh and not take her seriously.” Brennan was not,

as even she later admitted, very emotionally stable. She

began breaking plates, throwing things, trashing the

house, and writing obscene words in charcoal on the

wall. She said that Jobs kept provoking her with his

callousness: “He was an enlightened being who was

cruel.” Kottke was caught in the middle. “Daniel didn’t

have that DNA of ruthlessness, so he was a bit ﬂipped

by Steve’s behavior,” according to Brennan. “He would

go from ‘Steve’s not treating you right’ to laughing at me

with Steve.”

Robert Friedland came to her rescue. “He heard

that I was pregnant, and he said to come on up to the

farm to have the baby,” she recalled. “So I did.”

Elizabeth Holmes and other friends were still living

there, and they found an Oregon midwife to help with

the delivery. On May 17, 1978, Brennan gave birth to a

baby girl. Three days later Jobs ﬂew up to be with them

and help name the new baby. The practice on the

commune was to give children Eastern spiritual names,

but Jobs insisted that she had been born in America

and ought to have a name that ﬁt. Brennan agreed.

They named her Lisa Nicole Brennan, not giving her

the last name Jobs. And then he left to go back to work

at Apple. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with her

or with me,” said Brennan.

She and Lisa moved to a tiny, dilapidated house in

back of a home in Menlo Park. They lived on welfare

because Brennan did not feel up to suing for child

support. Finally, the County of San Mateo sued Jobs to

try to prove paternity and get him to take ﬁnancial

responsibility. At ﬁrst Jobs was determined to ﬁght the

case. His lawyers wanted Kottke to testify that he had

never seen them in bed together, and they tried to line

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up evidence that Brennan had been sleeping with other

men. “At one point I yelled at Steve on the phone, ‘You

know that is not true,’” Brennan recalled. “He was going

to drag me through court with a little baby and try to

prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been

the father of that baby.”

A year after Lisa was born, Jobs agreed to take a

paternity test. Brennan’s family was surprised, but Jobs

knew that Apple would soon be going public and he

decided it was best to get the issue resolved. DNA tests

were new, and the one that Jobs took was done at

UCLA. “I had read about DNA testing, and I was happy

to do it to get things settled,” he said. The results were

pretty dispositive. “Probability of paternity . . . is

94.41%,” the report read. The California courts ordered

Jobs to start paying $385 a month in child support, sign

an agreement admitting paternity, and reimburse the

county $5,856 in back welfare payments. He was given

visitation rights but for a long time didn’t exercise them.

Even then Jobs continued at times to warp the

reality around him. “He ﬁnally told us on the board,”

Arthur Rock recalled, “but he kept insisting that there

was a large probability that he wasn’t the father. He was

delusional.” He told a reporter for

Time

, Michael Moritz,

that when you analyzed the statistics, it was clear that

“28% of the male population in the United States could

be the father.” It was not only a false claim but an odd

one. Worse yet, when Chrisann Brennan later heard

what he said, she mistakenly thought that Jobs was

hyperbolically claiming that she might have slept with

28% of the men in the United States. “He was trying to

paint me as a slut or a whore,” she recalled. “He spun

the whore image onto me in order to not take

responsibility.”

Years later Jobs was remorseful for the way he

behaved, one of the few times in his life he admitted as

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much:

I wish I had handled it differently. I could not see

myself as a father then, so I didn’t face up to it. But when

the test results showed she was my daughter, it’s not

true that I doubted it. I agreed to support her until she

was eighteen and give some money to Chrisann as

well. I found a house in Palo Alto and ﬁxed it up and let

them live there rent-free. Her mother found her great

schools which I paid for. I tried to do the right thing. But

if I could do it over, I would do a better job.

Once the case was resolved, Jobs began to move

on with his life—maturing in some respects, though not

all. He put aside drugs, eased away from being a strict

vegan, and cut back the time he spent on Zen retreats.

He began getting stylish haircuts and buying suits and

shirts from the upscale San Francisco haberdashery

Wilkes Bashford. And he settled into a serious

relationship with one of Regis McKenna’s employees, a

beautiful Polynesian-Polish woman named Barbara

Jasinski.

There was still, to be sure, a childlike rebellious

streak in him. He, Jasinski, and Kottke liked to go

skinny-dipping in Felt Lake on the edge of Interstate

280 near Stanford, and he bought a 1966 BMW R60/2

motorcycle that he adorned with orange tassels on the

handlebars. He could also still be bratty. He belittled

waitresses and frequently returned food with the

proclamation that it was “garbage.” At the company’s

ﬁrst Halloween party, in 1979, he dressed in robes as

Jesus Christ, an act of semi-ironic self-awareness that

he considered funny but that caused a lot of eye rolling.

Even his initial stirrings of domesticity had some quirks.

He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which

he adorned with a Maxﬁeld Parrish painting, a Braun

coffeemaker, and Henckels knives. But because he was

so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it

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remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or

couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the

center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on

the walls, and an Apple II on the ﬂoor.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

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XEROX AND LISA

Graphical User Interfaces

A New Baby

The Apple II took the company from Jobs’s garage

to the pinnacle of a new industry. Its sales rose

dramatically, from 2,500 units in 1977 to 210,000 in

1981. But Jobs was restless. The Apple II could not

remain successful forever, and he knew that, no matter

how much he had done to package it, from power cord

to case, it would always be seen as Wozniak’s

masterpiece. He needed his own machine. More than

that, he wanted a product that would, in his words,

make a dent in the universe.

At ﬁrst he hoped that the Apple III would play that

role. It would have more memory, the screen would

display eighty characters across rather than forty, and it

would handle uppercase and lowercase letters.

Indulging his passion for industrial design, Jobs

decreed the size and shape of the external case, and

he refused to let anyone alter it, even as committees of

engineers added more components to the circuit

boards. The result was piggybacked boards with poor

connectors that frequently failed. When the Apple III

began shipping in May 1980, it ﬂopped. Randy

Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed it up: “The

Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a

group orgy, and later everybody had this bad

headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone

says, ‘It’s not mine.’”

By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple

III and was thrashing about for ways to produce

something more radically different. At ﬁrst he ﬂirted with

the idea of touchscreens, but he found himself

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frustrated. At one demonstration of the technology, he

arrived late, ﬁdgeted awhile, then abruptly cut off the

engineers in the middle of their presentation with a

brusque “Thank you.” They were confused. “Would you

like us to leave?” one asked. Jobs said yes, then

berated his colleagues for wasting his time.

Then he and Apple hired two engineers from

Hewlett-Packard to conceive a totally new computer.

The name Jobs chose for it would have caused even

the most jaded psychiatrist to do a double take: the

Lisa. Other computers had been named after daughters

of their designers, but Lisa was a daughter Jobs had

abandoned and had not yet fully admitted was his.

“Maybe he was doing it out of guilt,” said Andrea

Cunningham, who worked at Regis McKenna on public

relations for the project. “We had to come up with an

acronym so that we could claim it was not named after

Lisa the child.” The one they reverse-engineered was

“local integrated systems architecture,” and despite

being meaningless it became the ofﬁcial explanation for

the name. Among the engineers it was referred to as

“Lisa: invented stupid acronym.” Years later, when I

asked about the name, Jobs admitted simply,

“Obviously it was named for my daughter.”

The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine

based on a sixteen-bit microprocessor, rather than the

eight-bit one used in the Apple II. Without the wizardry

of Wozniak, who was still working quietly on the Apple

II, the engineers began producing a straightforward

computer with a conventional text display, unable to

push the powerful microprocessor to do much exciting

stuff. Jobs began to grow impatient with how boring it

was turning out to be.

There was, however, one programmer who was

infusing the project with some life: Bill Atkinson. He was

a doctoral student in neuroscience who had

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experimented with his fair share of acid. When he was

asked to come work for Apple, he declined. But then

Apple sent him a nonrefundable plane ticket, and he

decided to use it and let Jobs try to persuade him. “We

are inventing the future,” Jobs told him at the end of a

three-hour pitch. “Think about surﬁng on the front edge

of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-

paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be

anywhere near as much fun. Come down here and

make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson did.

With his shaggy hair and droopy moustache that

did not hide the animation in his face, Atkinson had

some of Woz’s ingenuity along with Jobs’s passion for

awesome products. His ﬁrst job was to develop a

program to track a stock portfolio by auto-dialing the

Dow Jones service, getting quotes, then hanging up. “I

had to create it fast because there was a magazine ad

for the Apple II showing a hubby at the kitchen table

looking at an Apple screen ﬁlled with graphs of stock

prices, and his wife is beaming at him—but there wasn’t

such a program, so I had to create one.” Next he

created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a high-level

programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that

BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson,

“Since you’re so passionate about it, I’ll give you six

days to prove me wrong.” He did, and Jobs respected

him ever after.

By the fall of 1979 Apple was breeding three

ponies to be potential successors to the Apple II

workhorse. There was the ill-fated Apple III. There was

the Lisa project, which was beginning to disappoint

Jobs. And somewhere off Jobs’s radar screen, at least

for the moment, there was a small skunkworks project

for a low-cost machine that was being developed by a

colorful employee named Jef Raskin, a former

professor who had taught Bill Atkinson. Raskin’s goal

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was to make an inexpensive “computer for the masses”

that would be like an appliance—a self-contained unit

with computer, keyboard, monitor, and software all

together—and have a graphical interface. He tried to

turn his colleagues at Apple on to a cutting-edge

research center, right in Palo Alto, that was pioneering

such ideas.

Xerox PARC

The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research

Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established

in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It

was safely located, for better and for worse, three

thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox

corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its

visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two

great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to

predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are

serious about software should make their own

hardware.” Kay pushed the vision of a small personal

computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would be easy

enough for children to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers

began to develop user-friendly graphics that could

replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that

made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor

they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen

could have many documents and folders on it, and you

could use a mouse to point and click on the one you

wanted to use.

This graphical user interface—or GUI, pronounced

“gooey”—was facilitated by another concept pioneered

at Xerox PARC: bitmapping. Until then, most computers

were character-based. You would type a character on a

keyboard, and the computer would generate that

character on the screen, usually in glowing greenish

phosphor against a dark background. Since there were

a limited number of letters, numerals, and symbols, it

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didn’t take a whole lot of computer code or processing

power to accomplish this. In a bitmap system, on the

other hand, each and every pixel on the screen is

controlled by bits in the computer’s memory. To render

something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer

has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of

color displays, what color to be. This uses a lot of

computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics,

fonts, and gee-whiz screen displays.

Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became

features of Xerox PARC’s prototype computers, such as

the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language,

Smalltalk. Jef Raskin decided that these features were

the future of computing. So he began urging Jobs and

other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC.

Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as

an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs’s own more

precise terminology, “a shithead who sucks.” So Raskin

enlisted his friend Atkinson, who fell on the other side of

Jobs’s shithead/genius division of the world, to

convince Jobs to take an interest in what was

happening at Xerox PARC. What Raskin didn’t know

was that Jobs was working on a more complex deal.

Xerox’s venture capital division wanted to be part of the

second round of Apple ﬁnancing during the summer of

1979. Jobs made an offer: “I will let you invest a million

dollars in Apple if you will open the kimono at PARC.”

Xerox accepted. It agreed to show Apple its new

technology and in return got to buy 100,000 shares at

about $10 each.

By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s

$1 million worth of shares were worth $17.6 million. But

Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his

colleagues went to see Xerox PARC’s technology in

December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he hadn’t

been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration

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a few days later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox

scientists called upon to do the brieﬁngs, and he was

thrilled to show off the work that his bosses back east

had never seemed to appreciate. But the other briefer,

Adele Goldberg, was appalled that her company

seemed willing to give away its crown jewels. “It was

incredibly stupid, completely nuts, and I fought to

prevent giving Jobs much of anything,” she recalled.

Goldberg got her way at the ﬁrst brieﬁng. Jobs,

Raskin, and the Lisa team leader John Couch were

ushered into the main lobby, where a Xerox Alto had

been set up. “It was a very controlled show of a few

applications, primarily a word-processing one,”

Goldberg said. Jobs wasn’t satisﬁed, and he called

Xerox headquarters demanding more.

So he was invited back a few days later, and this

time he brought a larger team that included Bill

Atkinson and Bruce Horn, an Apple programmer who

had worked at Xerox PARC. They both knew what to

look for. “When I arrived at work, there was a lot of

commotion, and I was told that Jobs and a bunch of his

programmers were in the conference room,” said

Goldberg. One of her engineers was trying to keep

them entertained with more displays of the word-

processing program. But Jobs was growing impatient.

“Let’s stop this bullshit!” he kept shouting. So the Xerox

folks huddled privately and decided to open the kimono

a bit more, but only slowly. They agreed that Tesler

could show off Smalltalk, the programming language,

but he would demonstrate only what was known as the

“unclassiﬁed” version. “It will dazzle [Jobs] and he’ll

never know he didn’t get the conﬁdential disclosure,”

the head of the team told Goldberg.

They were wrong. Atkinson and others had read

some of the papers published by Xerox PARC, so they

knew they were not getting a full description. Jobs

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phoned the head of the Xerox venture capital division to

complain; a call immediately came back from corporate

headquarters in Connecticut decreeing that Jobs and

his group should be shown everything. Goldberg

stormed out in a rage.

When Tesler ﬁnally showed them what was truly

under the hood, the Apple folks were astonished.

Atkinson stared at the screen, examining each pixel so

closely that Tesler could feel the breath on his neck.

Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly.

“He was hopping around so much I don’t know how he

actually saw most of the demo, but he did, because he

kept asking questions,” Tesler recalled. “He was the

exclamation point for every step I showed.” Jobs kept

saying that he couldn’t believe that Xerox had not

commercialized the technology. “You’re sitting on a

gold mine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not

taking advantage of this.”

The Smalltalk demonstration showed three

amazing features. One was how computers could be

networked; the second was how object-oriented

programming worked. But Jobs and his team paid little

attention to these attributes because they were so

amazed by the third feature, the graphical interface that

was made possible by a bitmapped screen. “It was like

a veil being lifted from my eyes,” Jobs recalled. “I could

see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

When the Xerox PARC meeting ended after more

than two hours, Jobs drove Bill Atkinson back to the

Apple ofﬁce in Cupertino. He was speeding, and so

were his mind and mouth. “This is it!” he shouted,

emphasizing each word. “We’ve got to do it!” It was the

breakthrough he had been looking for: bringing

computers to the people, with the cheerful but

affordable design of an Eichler home and the ease of

use of a sleek kitchen appliance.

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“How long would this take to implement?” he

asked.

“I’m not sure,” Atkinson replied. “Maybe six

months.” It was a wildly optimistic assessment, but also

a motivating one.

“Great Artists Steal”

The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes

described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles

of industry. Jobs occasionally endorsed this view, with

pride. As he once said, “Picasso had a saying—‘good

artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always

been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Another assessment, also sometimes endorsed by

Jobs, is that what transpired was less a heist by Apple

than a fumble by Xerox. “They were copier-heads who

had no clue about what a computer could do,” he said

of Xerox’s management. “They just grabbed defeat from

the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox

could have owned the entire computer industry.”

Both assessments contain a lot of truth, but there is

more to it than that. There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot

noted, between the conception and the creation. In the

annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the

equation. Execution is just as important.

Jobs and his engineers signiﬁcantly improved the

graphical interface ideas they saw at Xerox PARC, and

then were able to implement them in ways that Xerox

never could accomplish. For example, the Xerox mouse

had three buttons, was complicated, cost $300 apiece,

and didn’t roll around smoothly; a few days after his

second Xerox PARC visit, Jobs went to a local industrial

design ﬁrm, IDEO, and told one of its founders, Dean

Hovey, that he wanted a simple single-button model

that cost $15, “and I want to be able to use it on Formica

and my blue jeans.” Hovey complied.

The improvements were in not just the details but

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the entire concept. The mouse at Xerox PARC could not

be used to drag a window around the screen. Apple’s

engineers devised an interface so you could not only

drag windows and ﬁles around, you could even drop

them into folders. The Xerox system required you to

select a command in order to do anything, ranging from

resizing a window to changing the extension that

located a ﬁle. The Apple system transformed the

desktop metaphor into virtual reality by allowing you to

directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate things.

And Apple’s engineers worked in tandem with its

designers—with Jobs spurring them on daily—to

improve the desktop concept by adding delightful icons

and menus that pulled down from a bar atop each

window and the capability to open ﬁles and folders with

a double click.

It’s not as if Xerox executives ignored what their

scientists had created at PARC. In fact they did try to

capitalize on it, and in the process they showed why

good execution is as important as good ideas. In 1981,

well before the Apple Lisa or Macintosh, they

introduced the Xerox Star, a machine that featured their

graphical user interface, mouse, bitmapped display,

windows, and desktop metaphor. But it was clunky (it

could take minutes to save a large ﬁle), costly ($16,595

at retail stores), and aimed mainly at the networked

ofﬁce market. It ﬂopped; only thirty thousand were ever

sold.

Jobs and his team went to a Xerox dealer to look

at the Star as soon as it was released. But he deemed it

so worthless that he told his colleagues they couldn’t

spend the money to buy one. “We were very relieved,”

he recalled. “We knew they hadn’t done it right, and that

we could—at a fraction of the price.” A few weeks later

he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers

on the Xerox Star team. “Everything you’ve ever done in

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your life is shit,” Jobs said, “so why don’t you come work

for me?” Belleville did, and so did Larry Tesler.

In his excitement, Jobs began to take over the

daily management of the Lisa project, which was being

run by John Couch, the former HP engineer. Ignoring

Couch, he dealt directly with Atkinson and Tesler to

insert his own ideas, especially on Lisa’s graphical

interface design. “He would call me at all hours, 2 a.m.

or 5 a.m.,” said Tesler. “I loved it. But it upset my bosses

at the Lisa division.” Jobs was told to stop making out-

of-channel calls. He held himself back for a while, but

not for long.

One important showdown occurred when Atkinson

decided that the screen should have a white

background rather than a dark one. This would allow an

attribute that both Atkinson and Jobs wanted:

WYSIWYG, pronounced “wiz-ee-wig,” an acronym for

“What you see is what you get.” What you saw on the

screen was what you’d get when you printed it out. “The

hardware team screamed bloody murder,” Atkinson

recalled. “They said it would force us to use a phosphor

that was a lot less persistent and would ﬂicker more.”

So Atkinson enlisted Jobs, who came down on his side.

The hardware folks grumbled, but then went off and

ﬁgured it out. “Steve wasn’t much of an engineer

himself, but he was very good at assessing people’s

answers. He could tell whether the engineers were

defensive or unsure of themselves.”

One of Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so

accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it)

was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that

the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson

made it possible to move these windows around, just

like shufﬂing papers on a desk, with those below

becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones.

Of course, on a computer screen there are no layers of

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pixels underneath the pixels that you see, so there are

no windows actually lurking underneath the ones that

appear to be on top. To create the illusion of

overlapping windows requires complex coding that

involves what are called “regions.” Atkinson pushed

himself to make this trick work because he thought he

had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox PARC.

In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it,

and they later told him they were amazed that he had

done so. “I got a feeling for the empowering aspect of

naïveté,” Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it

couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” He was

working so hard that one morning, in a daze, he drove

his Corvette into a parked truck and nearly killed

himself. Jobs immediately drove to the hospital to see

him. “We were pretty worried about you,” he said when

Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a

pained smile and replied, “Don’t worry, I still remember

regions.”

Jobs also had a passion for smooth scrolling.

Documents should not lurch line by line as you scroll

through them, but instead should ﬂow. “He was

adamant that everything on the interface had a good

feeling to the user,” Atkinson said. They also wanted a

mouse that could easily move the cursor in any

direction, not just up-down/left-right. This required using

a ball rather than the usual two wheels. One of the

engineers told Atkinson that there was no way to build

such a mouse commercially. After Atkinson complained

to Jobs over dinner, he arrived at the ofﬁce the next day

to discover that Jobs had ﬁred the engineer. When his

replacement met Atkinson, his ﬁrst words were, “I can

build the mouse.”

Atkinson and Jobs became best friends for a

while, eating together at the Good Earth most nights.

But John Couch and the other professional engineers

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on his Lisa team, many of them buttoned-down HP

types, resented Jobs’s meddling and were infuriated by

his frequent insults. There was also a clash of visions.

Jobs wanted to build a VolksLisa, a simple and

inexpensive product for the masses. “There was a tug-

of-war between people like me, who wanted a lean

machine, and those from HP, like Couch, who were

aiming for the corporate market,” Jobs recalled.

Both Mike Scott and Mike Markkula were intent on

bringing some order to Apple and became increasingly

concerned about Jobs’s disruptive behavior. So in

September 1980, they secretly plotted a reorganization.

Couch was made the undisputed manager of the Lisa

division. Jobs lost control of the computer he had

named after his daughter. He was also stripped of his

role as vice president for research and development.

He was made non-executive chairman of the board.

This position allowed him to remain Apple’s public face,

but it meant that he had no operating control. That hurt.

“I was upset and felt abandoned by Markkula,” he said.

“He and Scotty felt I wasn’t up to running the Lisa

division. I brooded about it a lot.”

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CHAPTER NINE

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GOING PUBLIC

A Man of Wealth and Fame

Options

When Mike Markkula joined Jobs and Wozniak to

turn their ﬂedgling partnership into the Apple Computer

Co. in January 1977, they valued it at $5,309. Less than

four years later they decided it was time to take it public.

It would become the most oversubscribed initial public

offering since that of Ford Motors in 1956. By the end of

December 1980, Apple would be valued at $1.79

billion. Yes,

billion

. In the process it would make three

hundred people millionaires.

Daniel Kottke was not one of them. He had been

Jobs’s soul mate in college, in India, at the All One

Farm, and in the rental house they shared during the

Chrisann Brennan crisis. He joined Apple when it was

headquartered in Jobs’s garage, and he still worked

there as an hourly employee. But he was not at a high

enough level to be cut in on the stock options that were

awarded before the IPO. “I totally trusted Steve, and I

assumed he would take care of me like I’d taken care of

him, so I didn’t push,” said Kottke. The ofﬁcial reason he

wasn’t given stock options was that he was an hourly

technician, not a salaried engineer, which was the

cutoff level for options. Even so, he could have

justiﬁably been given “founder’s stock,” but Jobs

decided not to. “Steve is the opposite of loyal,”

according to Andy Hertz-feld, an early Apple engineer

who has nevertheless remained friends with him. “He’s

anti-loyal. He has to abandon the people he is close to.”

Kottke decided to press his case with Jobs by

hovering outside his ofﬁce and catching him to make a

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plea. But at each encounter, Jobs brushed him off.

“What was really so difﬁcult for me is that Steve never

told me I wasn’t eligible,” recalled Kottke. “He owed me

that as a friend. When I would ask him about stock, he

would tell me I had to talk to my manager.” Finally,

almost six months after the IPO, Kottke worked up the

courage to march into Jobs’s ofﬁce and try to hash out

the issue. But when he got in to see him, Jobs was so

cold that Kottke froze. “I just got choked up and began

to cry and just couldn’t talk to him,” Kottke recalled. “Our

friendship was all gone. It was so sad.”

Rod Holt, the engineer who had built the power

supply, was getting a lot of options, and he tried to turn

Jobs around. “We have to do something for your buddy

Daniel,” he said, and he suggested they each give him

some of their own options. “Whatever you give him, I

will match it,” said Holt. Replied Jobs, “Okay. I will give

him zero.”

Wozniak, not surprisingly, had the opposite

attitude. Before the shares went public, he decided to

sell, at a very low price, two thousand of his options to

forty different midlevel employees. Most of his

beneﬁciaries made enough to buy a home. Wozniak

bought a dream home for himself and his new wife, but

she soon divorced him and kept the house. He also

later gave shares outright to employees he felt had

been shortchanged, including Kottke, Fernandez,

Wigginton, and Espinosa. Everyone loved Wozniak, all

the more so after his generosity, but many also agreed

with Jobs that he was “awfully naïve and childlike.” A

few months later a United Way poster showing a

destitute man went up on a company bulletin board.

Someone scrawled on it “Woz in 1990.”

Jobs was not naïve. He had made sure his deal

with Chrisann Brennan was signed before the IPO

occurred.

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Jobs was the public face of the IPO, and he helped

choose the two investment banks handling it: the

traditional Wall Street ﬁrm Morgan Stanley and the

untraditional boutique ﬁrm Hambrecht & Quist in San

Francisco. “Steve was very irreverent toward the guys

from Morgan Stanley, which was a pretty uptight ﬁrm in

those days,” recalled Bill Hambrecht. Morgan Stanley

planned to price the offering at $18, even though it was

obvious the shares would quickly shoot up. “Tell me

what happens to this stock that we priced at eighteen?”

Jobs asked the bankers. “Don’t you sell it to your good

customers? If so, how can you charge me a 7%

commission?” Hambrecht recognized that there was a

basic unfairness in the system, and he later went on to

formulate the idea of a reverse auction to price shares

before an IPO.

Apple went public the morning of December 12,

1980. By then the bankers had priced the stock at $22 a

share. It went to $29 the ﬁrst day. Jobs had come into

the Hambrecht & Quist ofﬁce just in time to watch the

opening trades. At age twenty-ﬁve, he was now worth

$256 million.

Baby You’re a Rich Man

Before and after he was rich, and indeed

throughout a life that included being both broke and a

billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was

complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who

capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to

give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who

made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his

calling was to create a business. And yet somehow

these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than

conﬂict.

He had a great love for some material objects,

especially those that were ﬁnely designed and crafted,

such as Porsche and Mercedes cars, Henckels knives

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and Braun appliances, BMW motorcycles and Ansel

Adams prints, Bösendorfer pianos and Bang & Olufsen

audio equipment. Yet the houses he lived in, no matter

how rich he became, tended not to be ostentatious and

were furnished so simply they would have put a Shaker

to shame. Neither then nor later would he travel with an

entourage, keep a personal staff, or even have security

protection. He bought a nice car, but always drove

himself. When Markkula asked Jobs to join him in

buying a Lear jet, he declined (though he eventually

would demand of Apple a Gulfstream to use). Like his

father, he could be ﬂinty when bargaining with

suppliers, but he didn’t allow a craving for proﬁts to take

precedence over his passion for building great

products.

Thirty years after Apple went public, he reﬂected

on what it was like to come into money suddenly:

I never worried about money. I grew up in a

middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve.

And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer,

so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor

when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty

simple life even when I was working. So I went from

fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have

to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I

also didn’t have to worry about money.

I watched people at Apple who made a lot of

money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them

bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a

house manager and then someone to manage the

house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and

turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I

wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that

I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

He was not particularly philanthropic. He brieﬂy

set up a foundation, but he discovered that it was

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annoying to have to deal with the person he had hired

to run it, who kept talking about “venture” philanthropy

and how to “leverage” giving. Jobs became

contemptuous of people who made a display of

philanthropy or thinking they could reinvent it. Earlier he

had quietly sent in a $5,000 check to help launch Larry

Brilliant’s Seva Foundation to ﬁght diseases of poverty,

and he even agreed to join the board. But when Brilliant

brought some board members, including Wavy Gravy

and Jerry Garcia, to Apple right after its IPO to solicit a

donation, Jobs was not forthcoming. He instead worked

on ﬁnding ways that a donated Apple II and a VisiCalc

program could make it easier for the foundation to do a

survey it was planning on blindness in Nepal.

His biggest personal gift was to his parents, Paul

and Clara Jobs, to whom he gave about $750,000

worth of stock. They sold some to pay off the mortgage

on their Los Altos home, and their son came over for the

little celebration. “It was the ﬁrst time in their lives they

didn’t have a mortgage,” Jobs recalled. “They had a

handful of their friends over for the party, and it was

really nice.” Still, they didn’t consider buying a nicer

house. “They weren’t interested in that,” Jobs said.

“They had a life they were happy with.” Their only

splurge was to take a Princess cruise each year. The

one through the Panama Canal “was the big one for my

dad,” according to Jobs, because it reminded him of

when his Coast Guard ship went through on its way to

San Francisco to be decommissioned.

With Apple’s success came fame for its poster boy.

Inc.

became the ﬁrst magazine to put him on its cover, in

October 1981. “This man has changed business

forever,” it proclaimed. It showed Jobs with a neatly

trimmed beard and well-styled long hair, wearing blue

jeans and a dress shirt with a blazer that was a little too

satiny. He was leaning on an Apple II and looking

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directly into the camera with the mesmerizing stare he

had picked up from Robert Friedland. “When Steve

Jobs speaks, it is with the gee-whiz enthusiasm of

someone who sees the future and is making sure it

works,” the magazine reported.

Time

followed in February 1982 with a package on

young entrepreneurs. The cover was a painting of Jobs,

again with his hypnotic stare. Jobs, said the main story,

“practically singlehanded created the personal

computer industry.” The accompanying proﬁle, written

by Michael Moritz, noted, “At 26, Jobs heads a company

that six years ago was located in a bedroom and

garage of his parents’ house, but this year it is expected

to have sales of $600 million. . . . As an executive, Jobs

has sometimes been petulant and harsh on

subordinates. Admits he: ‘I’ve got to learn to keep my

feelings private.’”

Despite his new fame and fortune, he still fancied

himself a child of the counterculture. On a visit to a

Stanford class, he took off his Wilkes Bashford blazer

and his shoes, perched on top of a table, and crossed

his legs into a lotus position. The students asked

questions, such as when Apple’s stock price would rise,

which Jobs brushed off. Instead he spoke of his passion

for future products, such as someday making a

computer as small as a book. When the business

questions tapered off, Jobs turned the tables on the

well-groomed students. “How many of you are virgins?”

he asked. There were nervous giggles. “How many of

you have taken LSD?” More nervous laughter, and only

one or two hands went up. Later Jobs would complain

about the new generation of kids, who seemed to him

more materialistic and careerist than his own. “When I

went to school, it was right after the sixties and before

this general wave of practical purposefulness had set

in,” he said. “Now students aren’t even thinking in

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idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much.” His

generation, he said, was different. “The idealistic wind

of the sixties is still at our backs, though, and most of the

people I know who are my age have that ingrained in

them forever.”

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CHAPTER TEN

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THE MAC IS BORN

You Say You Want a Revolution

Jef Raskin’s Baby

Jef Raskin was the type of character who could

enthrall Steve Jobs—or annoy him. As it turned out, he

did both. A philosophical guy who could be both playful

and ponderous, Raskin had studied computer science,

taught music and visual arts, conducted a chamber

opera company, and organized guerrilla theater. His

1967 doctoral thesis at U.C. San Diego argued that

computers should have graphical rather than text-

based interfaces. When he got fed up with teaching, he

rented a hot air balloon, ﬂew over the chancellor’s

house, and shouted down his decision to quit.

When Jobs was looking for someone to write a

manual for the Apple II in 1976, he called Raskin, who

had his own little consulting ﬁrm. Raskin went to the

garage, saw Wozniak beavering away at a workbench,

and was convinced by Jobs to write the manual for $50.

Eventually he became the manager of Apple’s

publications department. One of Raskin’s dreams was

to build an inexpensive computer for the masses, and in

1979 he convinced Mike Markkula to put him in charge

of a small development project code-named “Annie” to

do just that. Since Raskin thought it was sexist to name

computers after women, he redubbed the project in

honor of his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh. But he

changed the spelling in order not to conﬂict with the

name of the audio equipment maker McIntosh

Laboratory. The proposed computer became known as

the Macintosh.

Raskin envisioned a machine that would sell for

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$1,000 and be a simple appliance, with screen and

keyboard and computer all in one unit. To keep the cost

down, he proposed a tiny ﬁve-inch screen and a very

cheap (and underpowered) microprocessor, the

Motorola 6809. Raskin fancied himself a philosopher,

and he wrote his thoughts in an ever-expanding

notebook that he called “The Book of Macintosh.” He

also issued occasional manifestos. One of these was

called “Computers by the Millions,” and it began with an

aspiration: “If personal computers are to be truly

personal, it will have to be as likely as not that a family,

picked at random, will own one.”

Throughout 1979 and early 1980 the Macintosh

project led a tenuous existence. Every few months it

would almost get killed off, but each time Raskin

managed to cajole Markkula into granting clemency. It

had a research team of only four engineers located in

the original Apple ofﬁce space next to the Good Earth

restaurant, a few blocks from the company’s new main

building. The work space was ﬁlled with enough toys

and radio-controlled model airplanes (Raskin’s

passion) to make it look like a day care center for

geeks. Every now and then work would cease for a

loosely organized game of Nerf ball tag. Andy Hertzfeld

recalled, “This inspired everyone to surround their work

area with barricades made out of cardboard, to provide

cover during the game, making part of the ofﬁce look

like a cardboard maze.”

The star of the team was a blond, cherubic, and

psychologically intense self-taught young engineer

named Burrell Smith, who worshipped the code work of

Wozniak and tried to pull off similar dazzling feats.

Atkinson discovered Smith working in Apple’s service

department and, amazed at his ability to improvise

ﬁxes, recommended him to Raskin. Smith would later

succumb to schizophrenia, but in the early 1980s he

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was able to channel his manic intensity into weeklong

binges of engineering brilliance.

Jobs was enthralled by Raskin’s vision, but not by

his willingness to make compromises to keep down the

cost. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told him

instead to focus on building what he repeatedly called

an “insanely great” product. “Don’t worry about price,

just specify the computer’s abilities,” Jobs told him.

Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo. It spelled out

everything you would want in the proposed computer: a

high-resolution color display, a printer that worked

without a ribbon and could produce graphics in color at

a page per second, unlimited access to the ARPA net,

and the capability to recognize speech and synthesize

music, “even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon

tabernacle choir, with variable reverberation.” The

memo concluded, “Starting with the abilities desired is

nonsense. We must start both with a price goal, and a

set of abilities, and keep an eye on today’s and the

immediate future’s technology.” In other words, Raskin

had little patience for Jobs’s belief that you could distort

reality if you had enough passion for your product.

Thus they were destined to clash, especially after

Jobs was ejected from the Lisa project in September

1980 and began casting around for someplace else to

make his mark. It was inevitable that his gaze would fall

on the Macintosh project. Raskin’s manifestos about an

inexpensive machine for the masses, with a simple

graphic interface and clean design, stirred his soul. And

it was also inevitable that once Jobs set his sights on

the Macintosh project, Raskin’s days were numbered.

“Steve started acting on what he thought we should do,

Jef started brooding, and it instantly was clear what the

outcome would be,” recalled Joanna Hoffman, a

member of the Mac team.

The ﬁrst conﬂict was over Raskin’s devotion to the

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underpowered Motorola 6809 microprocessor. Once

again it was a clash between Raskin’s desire to keep

the Mac’s price under $1,000 and Jobs’s determination

to build an insanely great machine. So Jobs began

pushing for the Mac to switch to the more powerful

Motorola 68000, which is what the Lisa was using. Just

before Christmas 1980, he challenged Burrell Smith,

without telling Raskin, to make a redesigned prototype

that used the more powerful chip. As his hero Wozniak

would have done, Smith threw himself into the task

around the clock, working nonstop for three weeks and

employing all sorts of breathtaking programming leaps.

When he succeeded, Jobs was able to force the switch

to the Motorola 68000, and Raskin had to brood and

recalculate the cost of the Mac.

There was something larger at stake. The cheaper

microprocessor that Raskin wanted would not have

been able to accommodate all of the gee-whiz graphics

—windows, menus, mouse, and so on—that the team

had seen on the Xerox PARC visits. Raskin had

convinced everyone to go to Xerox PARC, and he liked

the idea of a bitmapped display and windows, but he

was not as charmed by all the cute graphics and icons,

and he absolutely detested the idea of using a point-

and-click mouse rather than the keyboard. “Some of the

people on the project became enamored of the quest to

do everything with the mouse,” he later groused.

“Another example is the absurd application of icons. An

icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human

languages. There’s a reason why humans invented

phonetic languages.”

Raskin’s former student Bill Atkinson sided with

Jobs. They both wanted a powerful processor that could

support whizzier graphics and the use of a mouse.

“Steve had to take the project away from Jef,” Atkinson

said. “Jef was pretty ﬁrm and stubborn, and Steve was

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right to take it over. The world got a better result.”

The disagreements were more than just

philosophical; they became clashes of personality. “I

think that he likes people to jump when he says jump,”

Raskin once said. “I felt that he was untrustworthy, and

that he does not take kindly to being found wanting. He

doesn’t seem to like people who see him without a

halo.” Jobs was equally dismissive of Raskin. “Jef was

really pompous,” he said. “He didn’t know much about

interfaces. So I decided to nab some of his people who

were really good, like Atkinson, bring in some of my

own, take the thing over and build a less expensive

Lisa, not some piece of junk.”

Some on the team found Jobs impossible to work

with. “Jobs seems to introduce tension, politics, and

hassles rather than enjoying a buffer from those

distractions,” one engineer wrote in a memo to Raskin

in December 1980. “I thoroughly enjoy talking with him,

and I admire his ideas, practical perspective, and

energy. But I just don’t feel that he provides the trusting,

supportive, relaxed environment that I need.”

But many others realized that despite his

temperamental failings, Jobs had the charisma and

corporate clout that would lead them to “make a dent in

the universe.” Jobs told the staff that Raskin was just a

dreamer, whereas he was a doer and would get the

Mac done in a year. It was clear he wanted vindication

for having been ousted from the Lisa group, and he was

energized by competition. He publicly bet John Couch

$5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. “We

can make a computer that’s cheaper and better than the

Lisa, and get it out ﬁrst,” he told the team.

Jobs asserted his control of the group by

canceling a brown-bag lunch seminar that Raskin was

scheduled to give to the whole company in February

1981. Raskin happened to go by the room anyway and

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discovered that there were a hundred people there

waiting to hear him; Jobs had not bothered to notify

anyone else about his cancellation order. So Raskin

went ahead and gave a talk.

That incident led Raskin to write a blistering memo

to Mike Scott, who once again found himself in the

difﬁcult position of being a president trying to manage a

company’s temperamental cofounder and major

stockholder. It was titled “Working for/with Steve Jobs,”

and in it Raskin asserted:

He is a dreadful manager. . . . I have always liked

Steve, but I have found it impossible to work for him. . . .

Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well-

known as to be almost a running joke. . . . He acts

without thinking and with bad judgment. . . . He does not

give credit where due. . . . Very often, when told of a

new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is

worthless or even stupid, and tell you that it was a

waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad

management, but if the idea is a good one he will soon

be telling people about it as though it was his own.

That afternoon Scott called in Jobs and Raskin for

a showdown in front of Markkula. Jobs started crying.

He and Raskin agreed on only one thing: Neither could

work for the other one. On the Lisa project, Scott had

sided with Couch. This time he decided it was best to let

Jobs win. After all, the Mac was a minor development

project housed in a distant building that could keep

Jobs occupied away from the main campus. Raskin

was told to take a leave of absence. “They wanted to

humor me and give me something to do, which was

ﬁne,” Jobs recalled. “It was like going back to the

garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was in

control.”

Raskin’s ouster may not have seemed fair, but it

ended up being good for the Macintosh. Raskin wanted

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an appliance with little memory, an anemic processor, a

cassette tape, no mouse, and minimal graphics. Unlike

Jobs, he might have been able to keep the price down

to close to $1,000, and that may have helped Apple win

market share. But he could not have pulled off what

Jobs did, which was to create and market a machine

that would transform personal computing. In fact we can

see where the road not taken led. Raskin was hired by

Canon to build the machine he wanted. “It was the

Canon Cat, and it was a total ﬂop,” Atkinson said.

“Nobody wanted it. When Steve turned the Mac into a

compact version of the Lisa, it made it into a computing

platform instead of a consumer electronic device.”

Texaco Towers

A few days after Raskin left, Jobs appeared at the

cubicle of Andy Hertzfeld, a young engineer on the

Apple II team, who had a cherubic face and impish

demeanor similar to his pal Burrell Smith’s. Hertzfeld

recalled that most of his colleagues were afraid of Jobs

“because of his spontaneous temper tantrums and his

proclivity to tell everyone exactly what he thought,

which often wasn’t very favorable.” But Hertzfeld was

excited by him. “Are you any good?” Jobs asked the

moment he walked in. “We only want really good

people working on the Mac, and I’m not sure you’re

good enough.” Hertzfeld knew how to answer. “I told

him that yes, I thought that I was pretty good.”

Jobs left, and Hertzfeld went back to his work.

Later that afternoon he looked up to see Jobs peering

over the wall of his cubicle. “I’ve got good news for you,”

he said. “You’re working on the Mac team now. Come

with me.”

Hertzfeld replied that he needed a couple more

days to ﬁnish the Apple II product he was in the middle

of. “What’s more important than working on the

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Macintosh?” Jobs demanded. Hertzfeld explained that

he needed to get his Apple II DOS program in good

enough shape to hand it over to someone. “You’re just

wasting your time with that!” Jobs replied. “Who cares

about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few

years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you’re

going to start on it now!” With that, Jobs yanked out the

power cord to Hertzfeld’s Apple II, causing the code he

was working on to vanish. “Come with me,” Jobs said.

“I’m going to take you to your new desk.” Jobs drove

Hertzfeld, computer and all, in his silver Mercedes to

the Macintosh ofﬁces. “Here’s your new desk,” he said,

plopping him in a space next to Burrell Smith.

“Welcome to the Mac team!” The desk had been

Raskin’s. In fact Raskin had left so hastily that some of

the drawers were still ﬁlled with his ﬂotsam and jetsam,

including model airplanes.

Jobs’s primary test for recruiting people in the

spring of 1981 to be part of his merry band of pirates

was making sure they had a passion for the product. He

would sometimes bring candidates into a room where a

prototype of the Mac was covered by a cloth,

dramatically unveil it, and watch. “If their eyes lit up, if

they went right for the mouse and started pointing and

clicking, Steve would smile and hire them,” recalled

Andrea Cunningham. “He wanted them to say ‘Wow!’”

Bruce Horn was one of the programmers at Xerox

PARC. When some of his friends, such as Larry Tesler,

decided to join the Macintosh group, Horn considered

going there as well. But he got a good offer, and a

$15,000 signing bonus, to join another company. Jobs

called him on a Friday night. “You have to come into

Apple tomorrow morning,” he said. “I have a lot of stuff

to show you.” Horn did, and Jobs hooked him. “Steve

was so passionate about building this amazing device

that would change the world,” Horn recalled. “By sheer

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force of his personality, he changed my mind.” Jobs

showed Horn exactly how the plastic would be molded

and would ﬁt together at perfect angles, and how good

the board was going to look inside. “He wanted me to

see that this whole thing was going to happen and it

was thought out from end to end. Wow, I said, I don’t

see that kind of passion every day. So I signed up.”

Jobs even tried to reengage Wozniak. “I resented

the fact that he had not been doing much, but then I

thought, hell, I wouldn’t be here without his brilliance,”

Jobs later told me. But as soon as Jobs was starting to

get him interested in the Mac, Wozniak crashed his new

single-engine Beechcraft while attempting a takeoff

near Santa Cruz. He barely survived and ended up with

partial amnesia. Jobs spent time at the hospital, but

when Wozniak recovered he decided it was time to take

a break from Apple. Ten years after dropping out of

Berkeley, he decided to return there to ﬁnally get his

degree, enrolling under the name of Rocky Raccoon

Clark.

In order to make the project his own, Jobs decided

it should no longer be code-named after Raskin’s

favorite apple. In various interviews, Jobs had been

referring to computers as a bicycle for the mind; the

ability of humans to create a bicycle allowed them to

move more efﬁciently than even a condor, and likewise

the ability to create computers would multiply the

efﬁciency of their minds. So one day Jobs decreed that

henceforth the Macintosh should be known instead as

the Bicycle. This did not go over well. “Burrell and I

thought this was the silliest thing we ever heard, and we

simply refused to use the new name,” recalled

Hertzfeld. Within a month the idea was dropped.

By early 1981 the Mac team had grown to about

twenty, and Jobs decided that they should have bigger

quarters. So he moved everyone to the second ﬂoor of

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a brown-shingled, two-story building about three blocks

from Apple’s main ofﬁces. It was next to a Texaco

station and thus became known as Texaco Towers. In

order to make the ofﬁce more lively, he told the team to

buy a stereo system. “Burrell and I ran out and bought a

silver, cassette-based boom box right away, before he

could change his mind,” recalled Hertzfeld.

Jobs’s triumph was soon complete. A few weeks

after winning his power struggle with Raskin to run the

Mac division, he helped push out Mike Scott as Apple’s

president. Scotty had become more and more erratic,

alternately bullying and nurturing. He ﬁnally lost most of

his support among the employees when he surprised

them by imposing a round of layoffs that he handled

with atypical ruthlessness. In addition, he had begun to

suffer a variety of afﬂictions, ranging from eye infections

to narcolepsy. When Scott was on vacation in Hawaii,

Markkula called together the top managers to ask if he

should be replaced. Most of them, including Jobs and

John Couch, said yes. So Markkula took over as an

interim and rather passive president, and Jobs found

that he now had full rein to do what he wanted with the

Mac division.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

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THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD

Playing by His Own Set of Rules

When Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team,

he got a brieﬁng from Bud Tribble, the other software

designer, about the huge amount of work that still

needed to be done. Jobs wanted it ﬁnished by January

1982, less than a year away. “That’s crazy,” Hertzfeld

said. “There’s no way.” Tribble said that Jobs would not

accept any contrary facts. “The best way to describe the

situation is a term from

Star Trek

,” Tribble explained.

“Steve has a reality distortion ﬁeld.” When Hertzfeld

looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence,

reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of

practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around,

but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from

the “Menagerie” episodes of

Star Trek

, “in which the

aliens create their own new world through sheer mental

force.” He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well

as a caution: “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s

distortion ﬁeld, but it was what led him to actually be

able to change reality.”

At ﬁrst Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was

exaggerating, but after two weeks of working with Jobs,

he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The

reality distortion ﬁeld was a confounding mélange of a

charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and

eagerness to bend any fact to ﬁt the purpose at hand,”

he said.

There was little that could shield you from the

force, Hertzfeld discovered. “Amazingly, the reality

distortion ﬁeld seemed to be effective even if you were

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acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential

techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us

gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.” After Jobs

decreed that the sodas in the ofﬁce refrigerator be

replaced by Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices,

someone on the team had T-shirts made. “Reality

Distortion Field,” they said on the front, and on the back,

“It’s in the juice!”

To some people, calling it a reality distortion ﬁeld

was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But

it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling. He

would assert something—be it a fact about world history

or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting

—without even considering the truth. It came from

willfully defying reality, not only to others but to himself.

“He can deceive himself,” said Bill Atkinson. “It allowed

him to con people into believing his vision, because he

has personally embraced and internalized it.”

A lot of people distort reality, of course. When Jobs

did so, it was often a tactic for accomplishing

something. Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest

as Jobs was tactical, marveled at how effective it could

be. “His reality distortion is when he has an illogical

vision of the future, such as telling me that I could

design the Breakout game in just a few days. You

realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it

true.”

When members of the Mac team got ensnared in

his reality distortion ﬁeld, they were almost hypnotized.

“He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He

laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter

if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like

Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion ﬁeld

was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to

change the course of computer history with a fraction of

the resources of Xerox or IBM. “It was a self-fulﬁlling

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distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible,

because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief

that the rules didn’t apply to him. He had some

evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been

able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and

willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the

sense that he was special, a chosen one, an

enlightened one. “He thinks there are a few people who

are special—people like Einstein and Gandhi and the

gurus he met in India—and he’s one of them,” said

Hertzfeld. “He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted

to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost like

Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the

philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the

special nature of the

Über

man came naturally to him.

As Nietzsche wrote in

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

, “The

spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost

to the world now conquers the world.” If reality did not

comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had

done with the birth of his daughter and would do years

later, when ﬁrst diagnosed with cancer. Even in small

everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate

on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he

acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around

him.

Another key aspect of Jobs’s worldview was his

binary way of categorizing things. People were either

“enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either

“the best” or “totally shitty.” Bill Atkinson, the Mac

designer who fell on the good side of these

dichotomies, described what it was like:

It was difﬁcult working under Steve, because there

was a great polarity between gods and shitheads. If you

were a god, you were up on a pedestal and could do no

wrong. Those of us who were considered to be gods, as

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I was, knew that we were actually mortal and made bad

engineering decisions and farted like any person, so

we were always afraid that we would get knocked off

our pedestal. The ones who were shitheads, who were

brilliant engineers working very hard, felt there was no

way they could get appreciated and rise above their

status.

But these categories were not immutable, for Jobs

could rapidly reverse himself. When brieﬁng Hertzfeld

about the reality distortion ﬁeld, Tribble speciﬁcally

warned him about Jobs’s tendency to resemble high-

voltage alternating current. “Just because he tells you

that something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily

mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow,” Tribble explained.

“If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he

thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly

one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose

your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”

The audacity of this pirouette technique would

have dazzled Diaghilev. “If one line of argument failed

to persuade, he would deftly switch to another,”

Hertzfeld said. “Sometimes, he would throw you off

balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own,

without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.”

That happened repeatedly to Bruce Horn, the

programmer who, with Tesler, had been lured from

Xerox PARC. “One week I’d tell him about an idea that I

had, and he would say it was crazy,” recalled Horn.

“The next week, he’d come and say, ‘Hey I have this

great idea’—and it would be my idea! You’d call him on

it and say, ‘Steve, I told you that a week ago,’ and he’d

say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ and just move right along.”

It was as if Jobs’s brain circuits were missing a

device that would modulate the extreme spikes of

impulsive opinions that popped into his mind. So in

dealing with him, the Mac team adopted an audio

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concept called a “low pass ﬁlter.” In processing his

input, they learned to reduce the amplitude of his high-

frequency signals. That served to smooth out the data

set and provide a less jittery moving average of his

evolving attitudes. “After a few cycles of him taking

alternating extreme positions,” said Hertzfeld, “we

would learn to low pass ﬁlter his signals and not react to

the extremes.”

Was Jobs’s unﬁltered behavior caused by a lack of

emotional sensitivity? No. Almost the opposite. He was

very emotionally attuned, able to read people and know

their psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. He

could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional

towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He intuitively knew when

someone was faking it or truly knew something. This

made him masterful at cajoling, stroking, persuading,

ﬂattering, and intimidating people. “He had the uncanny

capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know

what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,”

Joanna Hoffman said. “It’s a common trait in people

who are charismatic and know how to manipulate

people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel

weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can

elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.”

Ann Bowers became an expert at dealing with

Jobs’s perfectionism, petulance, and prickliness. She

had been the human resources director at Intel, but had

stepped aside after she married its cofounder Bob

Noyce. She joined Apple in 1980 and served as a

calming mother ﬁgure who would step in after one of

Jobs’s tantrums. She would go to his ofﬁce, shut the

door, and gently lecture him. “I know, I know,” he would

say. “Well, then, please stop doing it,” she would insist.

Bowers recalled, “He would be good for a while, and

then a week or so later I would get a call again.” She

realized that he could barely contain himself. “He had

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these huge expectations, and if people didn’t deliver,

he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t control himself. I could

understand why Steve would get upset, and he was

usually right, but it had a hurtful effect. It created a fear

factor. He was self-aware, but that didn’t always modify

his behavior.”

Jobs became close to Bowers and her husband,

and he would drop in at their Los Gatos Hills home

unannounced. She would hear his motorcycle in the

distance and say, “I guess we have Steve for dinner

again.” For a while she and Noyce were like a

surrogate family. “He was so bright and also so needy.

He needed a grown-up, a father ﬁgure, which Bob

became, and I became like a mother ﬁgure.”

There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding

and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed

ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of

both fear and an eagerness to please. “His behavior

can be emotionally draining, but if you survive, it works,”

Hoffman said. You could also push back—sometimes—

and not only survive but thrive. That didn’t always work;

Raskin tried it, succeeded for a while, and then was

destroyed. But if you were calmly conﬁdent, if Jobs

sized you up and decided that you knew what you were

doing, he would respect you. In both his personal and

his professional life over the years, his inner circle

tended to include many more strong people than

toadies.

The Mac team knew that. Every year, beginning in

1981, it gave out an award to the person who did the

best job of standing up to him. The award was partly a

joke, but also partly real, and Jobs knew about it and

liked it. Joanna Hoffman won the ﬁrst year. From an

Eastern European refugee family, she had a strong

temper and will. One day, for example, she discovered

that Jobs had changed her marketing projections in a

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way she found totally reality-distorting. Furious, she

marched to his ofﬁce. “As I’m climbing the stairs, I told

his assistant I am going to take a knife and stab it into

his heart,” she recounted. Al Eisenstat, the corporate

counsel, came running out to restrain her. “But Steve

heard me out and backed down.”

Hoffman won the award again in 1982. “I

remember being envious of Joanna, because she

would stand up to Steve and I didn’t have the nerve

yet,” said Debi Coleman, who joined the Mac team that

year. “Then, in 1983, I got the award. I had learned you

had to stand up for what you believe, which Steve

respected. I started getting promoted by him after that.”

Eventually she rose to become head of manufacturing.

One day Jobs barged into the cubicle of one of

Atkinson’s engineers and uttered his usual “This is shit.”

As Atkinson recalled, “The guy said, ‘No it’s not, it’s

actually the best way,’ and he explained to Steve the

engineering trade-offs he’d made.” Jobs backed down.

Atkinson taught his team to put Jobs’s words through a

translator. “We learned to interpret ‘This is shit’ to

actually be a question that means, ‘Tell me why this is

the best way to do it.’” But the story had a coda, which

Atkinson also found instructive. Eventually the engineer

found an even better way to perform the function that

Jobs had criticized. “He did it better because Steve had

challenged him,” said Atkinson, “which shows you can

push back on him but should also listen, for he’s usually

right.”

Jobs’s prickly behavior was partly driven by his

perfectionism and his impatience with those who made

compromises in order to get a product out on time and

on budget. “He could not make trade-offs well,” said

Atkinson. “If someone didn’t care to make their product

perfect, they were a bozo.” At the West Coast Computer

Faire in April 1981, for example, Adam Osborne

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released the ﬁrst truly portable personal computer. It

was not great—it had a ﬁve-inch screen and not much

memory—but it worked well enough. As Osborne

famously declared, “Adequacy is sufﬁcient. All else is

superﬂuous.” Jobs found that approach to be morally

appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne.

“This guy just doesn’t get it,” Jobs repeatedly railed as

he wandered the Apple corridors. “He’s not making art,

he’s making shit.”

One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry

Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the

Macintosh operating system, and complained that it

was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to

explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s

life, would you ﬁnd a way to shave ten seconds off the

boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably

could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if

there were ﬁve million people using the Mac, and it took

ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up

to three hundred million or so hours per year that

people would save, which was the equivalent of at least

one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was

suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came

back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,”

Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by

looking at the bigger picture.”

The result was that the Macintosh team came to

share Jobs’s passion for making a great product, not

just a proﬁtable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an

artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of

ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was

never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money.

It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little

greater.” He once took the team to see an exhibit of

Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan

because he believed they could learn from Louis

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Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be

mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to

ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our

lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

Was all of his stormy and abusive behavior

necessary? Probably not, nor was it justiﬁed. There

were other ways to have motivated his team. Even

though the Macintosh would turn out to be great, it was

way behind schedule and way over budget because of

Jobs’s impetuous interventions. There was also a cost

in brutalized human feelings, which caused much of the

team to burn out. “Steve’s contributions could have

been made without so many stories about him

terrorizing folks,” Wozniak said. “I like being more

patient and not having so many conﬂicts. I think a

company can be a good family. If the Macintosh project

had been run my way, things probably would have

been a mess. But I think if it had been a mix of both our

styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve

did it.”

But even though Jobs’s style could be

demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It infused

Apple employees with an abiding passion to create

groundbreaking products and a belief that they could

accomplish what seemed impossible. They had T-shirts

made that read “90 hours a week and loving it!” Out of a

fear of Jobs mixed with an incredibly strong urge to

impress him, they exceeded their own expectations.

“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really

good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later

explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you

can get them to do great things. The original Mac team

taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and

they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member

of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the

pain.”

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Most of them agree. “He would shout at a meeting,

‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi

Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet

I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the

world to have worked with him.”

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CHAPTER TWELVE

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THE DESIGN

Real Artists Simplify

A Bauhaus Aesthetic

Unlike most kids who grew up in Eichler homes,

Jobs knew what they were and why they were so

wonderful. He liked the notion of simple and clean

modernism produced for the masses. He also loved

listening to his father describe the styling intricacies of

various cars. So from the beginning at Apple, he

believed that great industrial design—a colorfully

simple logo, a sleek case for the Apple II—would set the

company apart and make its products distinctive.

The company’s ﬁrst ofﬁce, after it moved out of his

family garage, was in a small building it shared with a

Sony sales ofﬁce. Sony was famous for its signature

style and memorable product designs, so Jobs would

drop by to study the marketing material. “He would

come in looking scruffy and fondle the product

brochures and point out design features,” said Dan’l

Lewin, who worked there. “Every now and then, he

would ask, ‘Can I take this brochure?’” By 1980, he had

hired Lewin.

His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony

receded around June 1981, when he began attending

the annual International Design Conference in Aspen.

The meeting that year focused on Italian style, and it

featured the architect-designer Mario Bellini, the

ﬁlmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio

Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna

Agnelli. “I had come to revere the Italian designers, just

like the kid in

Breaking Away

reveres the Italian bikers,”

recalled Jobs, “so it was an amazing inspiration.”

In Aspen he was exposed to the spare and

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functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus

movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in

the buildings, living suites, sans serif font typography,

and furniture on the Aspen Institute campus. Like his

mentors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der

Rohe, Bayer believed that there should be no

distinction between ﬁne art and applied industrial

design. The modernist International Style championed

by the Bauhaus taught that design should be simple,

yet have an expressive spirit. It emphasized rationality

and functionality by employing clean lines and forms.

Among the maxims preached by Mies and Gropius

were “God is in the details” and “Less is more.” As with

Eichler homes, the artistic sensibility was combined

with the capability for mass production.

Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the

Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 design

conference, the theme of which was “The Future Isn’t

What It Used to Be.” He predicted the passing of the

Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. “The current

wave of industrial design is Sony’s high-tech look,

which is gunmetal gray, maybe paint it black, do weird

stuff to it,” he said. “It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.”

He proposed an alternative, born of the Bauhaus, that

was more true to the function and nature of the

products. “What we’re going to do is make the products

high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so

that you know they’re high-tech. We will ﬁt them in a

small package, and then we can make them beautiful

and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.”

He repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products

would be clean and simple. “We will make them bright

and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than

a heavy industrial look of black, black, black, black, like

Sony,” he preached. “So that’s our approach. Very

simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of

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Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the

company, the product design, the advertising, it all

comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really

simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one

featured on its ﬁrst brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate

sophistication.”

Jobs felt that design simplicity should be linked to

making products easy to use. Those goals do not

always go together. Sometimes a design can be so

sleek and simple that a user ﬁnds it intimidating or

unfriendly to navigate. “The main thing in our design is

that we have to make things intuitively obvious,” Jobs

told the crowd of design mavens. For example, he

extolled the desktop metaphor he was creating for the

Macintosh. “People know how to deal with a desktop

intuitively. If you walk into an ofﬁce, there are papers on

the desk. The one on the top is the most important.

People know how to switch priority. Part of the reason

we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop

is that we can leverage this experience people already

have.”

Speaking at the same time as Jobs that

Wednesday afternoon, but in a smaller seminar room,

was Maya Lin, twenty-three, who had been catapulted

into fame the previous November when her Vietnam

Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C.

They struck up a close friendship, and Jobs invited her

to visit Apple. “I came to work with Steve for a week,” Lin

recalled. “I asked him, ‘Why do computers look like

clunky TV sets? Why don’t you make something thin?

Why not a ﬂat laptop?’” Jobs replied that this was

indeed his goal, as soon as the technology was ready.

At that time there was not much exciting

happening in the realm of industrial design, Jobs felt.

He had a Richard Sapper lamp, which he admired, and

he also liked the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames

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and the Braun products of Dieter Rams. But there were

no towering ﬁgures energizing the world of industrial

design the way that Raymond Loewy and Herbert

Bayer had done. “There really wasn’t much going on in

industrial design, particularly in Silicon Valley, and

Steve was very eager to change that,” said Lin. “His

design sensibility is sleek but not slick, and it’s playful.

He embraced minimalism, which came from his Zen

devotion to simplicity, but he avoided allowing that to

make his products cold. They stayed fun. He’s

passionate and super-serious about design, but at the

same time there’s a sense of play.”

As Jobs’s design sensibilities evolved, he became

particularly attracted to the Japanese style and began

hanging out with its stars, such as Issey Miyake and I.

M. Pei. His Buddhist training was a big inﬂuence. “I

have always found Buddhism, Japanese Zen Buddhism

in particular, to be aesthetically sublime,” he said. “The

most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens

around Kyoto. I’m deeply moved by what that culture

has produced, and it’s directly from Zen Buddhism.”

Like a Porsche

Jef Raskin’s vision for the Macintosh was that it

would be like a boxy carry-on suitcase, which would be

closed by ﬂipping up the keyboard over the front

screen. When Jobs took over the project, he decided to

sacriﬁce portability for a distinctive design that wouldn’t

take up much space on a desk. He plopped down a

phone book and declared, to the horror of the

engineers, that it shouldn’t have a footprint larger than

that. So his design team of Jerry Manock and Terry

Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen

above the computer box, with a keyboard that was

detachable.

One day in March 1981, Andy Hertzfeld came

back to the ofﬁce from dinner to ﬁnd Jobs hovering over

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their one Mac prototype in intense discussion with the

creative services director, James Ferris. “We need it to

have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the

Volkswagen Beetle,” Jobs said. From his father he had

developed an appreciation for the contours of classic

cars.

“No, that’s not right,” Ferris replied. “The lines

should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.”

“Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs

countered. “It should be more like a Porsche!” Jobs

owned a Porsche 928 at the time. When Bill Atkinson

was over one weekend, Jobs brought him outside to

admire the car. “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t

follow tastes,” he told Atkinson. He also admired the

design of the Mercedes. “Over the years, they’ve made

the lines softer but the details starker,” he said one day

as he walked around the parking lot. “That’s what we

have to do with the Macintosh.”

Oyama drafted a preliminary design and had a

plaster model made. The Mac team gathered around for

the unveiling and expressed their thoughts. Hertzfeld

called it “cute.” Others also seemed satisﬁed. Then Jobs

let loose a blistering burst of criticism. “It’s way too boxy,

it’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the ﬁrst

chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of

the bevel.” With his new ﬂuency in industrial design

lingo, Jobs was referring to the angular or curved edge

connecting the sides of the computer. But then he gave

a resounding compliment. “It’s a start,” he said.

Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would

present a new iteration based on Jobs’s previous

criticisms. The latest plaster model would be

dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts

would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them

gauge the design’s evolution, but it prevented Jobs

from insisting that one of his suggestions had been

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ignored. “By the fourth model, I could barely distinguish

it from the third one,” said Hertzfeld, “but Steve was

always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a

detail that I could barely perceive.”

One weekend Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto

and again spent time studying appliances, especially

the Cuisinart. He came bounding into the Mac ofﬁce

that Monday, asked the design team to go buy one, and

made a raft of new suggestions based on its lines,

curves, and bevels.

Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look

friendly. As a result, it evolved to resemble a human

face. With the disk drive built in below the screen, the

unit was taller and narrower than most computers,

suggesting a head. The recess near the base evoked a

gentle chin, and Jobs narrowed the strip of plastic at the

top so that it avoided the Neanderthal forehead that

made the Lisa subtly unattractive. The patent for the

design of the Apple case was issued in the name of

Steve Jobs as well as Manock and Oyama. “Even

though Steve didn’t draw any of the lines, his ideas and

inspiration made the design what it is,” Oyama later

said. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a

computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”

Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look

of what would appear on the screen. One day Bill

Atkinson burst into Texaco Towers all excited. He had

just come up with a brilliant algorithm that could draw

circles and ovals onscreen quickly. The math for

making circles usually required calculating square

roots, which the 68000 microprocessor didn’t support.

But Atkinson did a workaround based on the fact that

the sum of a sequence of odd numbers produces a

sequence of perfect squares (for example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 +

3 + 5 = 9, etc.). Hertzfeld recalled that when Atkinson

ﬁred up his demo, everyone was impressed except

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Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good,” he said, “but

how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners?”

“I don’t think we really need it,” said Atkinson, who

explained that it would be almost impossible to do. “I

wanted to keep the graphics routines lean and limit

them to the primitives that truly needed to be done,” he

recalled.

“Rectangles with rounded corners are

everywhere!” Jobs said, jumping up and getting more

intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out

the whiteboard and the tabletop and other objects that

were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look

outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you

look!” He dragged Atkinson out for a walk, pointing out

car windows and billboards and street signs. “Within

three blocks, we found seventeen examples,” said

Jobs. “I started pointing them out everywhere until he

was completely convinced.”

“When he ﬁnally got to a No Parking sign, I said,

‘Okay, you’re right, I give up. We need to have a

rounded-corner rectangle as a primitive!’” Hertzfeld

recalled, “Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following

afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was

now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded

corners blisteringly fast.” The dialogue boxes and

windows on the Lisa and the Mac, and almost every

other subsequent computer, ended up being rendered

with rounded corners.

At the calligraphy class he had audited at Reed,

Jobs learned to love typefaces, with all of their serif and

sans serif variations, proportional spacing, and leading.

“When we were designing the ﬁrst Macintosh computer,

it all came back to me,” he later said of that class.

Because the Mac was bitmapped, it was possible to

devise an endless array of fonts, ranging from the

elegant to the wacky, and render them pixel by pixel on

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the screen.

To design these fonts, Hertzfeld recruited a high

school friend from suburban Philadelphia, Susan Kare.

They named the fonts after the stops on Philadelphia’s

Main Line commuter train: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore,

and Rosemont. Jobs found the process fascinating.

Late one afternoon he stopped by and started brooding

about the font names. They were “little cities that

nobody’s ever heard of,” he complained. “They ought to

world-class

cities!” The fonts were renamed

Chicago, New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco,

Toronto, and Venice.

Markkula and some others could never quite

appreciate Jobs’s obsession with typography. “His

knowledge of fonts was remarkable, and he kept

insisting on having great ones,” Markkula recalled. “I

kept saying, ‘Fonts?!? Don’t we have more important

things to do?’” In fact the delightful assortment of

Macintosh fonts, when combined with laser-writer

printing and great graphics capabilities, would help

launch the desktop publishing industry and be a boon

for Apple’s bottom line. It also introduced all sorts of

regular folks, ranging from high school journalists to

moms who edited PTA newsletters, to the quirky joy of

knowing about fonts, which was once reserved for

printers, grizzled editors, and other ink-stained

wretches.

Kare also developed the icons, such as the trash

can for discarding ﬁles, that helped deﬁne graphical

interfaces. She and Jobs hit it off because they shared

an instinct for simplicity along with a desire to make the

Mac whimsical. “He usually came in at the end of every

day,” she said. “He’d always want to know what was

new, and he’s always had good taste and a good sense

for visual details.” Sometimes he came in on Sunday

morning, so Kare made it a point to be there working.

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Every now and then, she would run into a problem. He

rejected one of her renderings of a rabbit, an icon for

speeding up the mouse-click rate, saying that the furry

creature looked “too gay.”

Jobs lavished similar attention on the title bars

atop windows and documents. He had Atkinson and

Kare do them over and over again as he agonized over

their look. He did not like the ones on the Lisa because

they were too black and harsh. He wanted the ones on

the Mac to be smoother, to have pinstripes. “We must

have gone through twenty different title bar designs

before he was happy,” Atkinson recalled. At one point

Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making

them spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the

title bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs

erupted. “Can you imagine looking at that every day?”

he shouted. “It’s not just a little thing, it’s something we

have to do right.”

Chris Espinosa found one way to satisfy Jobs’s

design demands and control-freak tendencies. One of

Wozniak’s youthful acolytes from the days in the

garage, Espinosa had been convinced to drop out of

Berkeley by Jobs, who argued that he would always

have a chance to study, but only one chance to work on

the Mac. On his own, he decided to design a calculator

for the computer. “We all gathered around as Chris

showed the calculator to Steve and then held his

breath, waiting for Steve’s reaction,” Hertzfeld recalled.

“Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks.

The background color is too dark, some lines are the

wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.” Espinosa

kept reﬁning it in response to Jobs’s critiques, day after

day, but with each iteration came new criticisms. So

ﬁnally one afternoon, when Jobs came by, Espinosa

unveiled his inspired solution: “The Steve Jobs Roll

Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the

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user to tweak and personalize the look of the calculator

by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the

buttons, the shading, the background, and other

attributes. Instead of just laughing, Jobs plunged in and

started to play around with the look to suit his tastes.

After about ten minutes he got it the way he liked. His

design, not surprisingly, was the one that shipped on

the Mac and remained the standard for ﬁfteen years.

Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs

wanted to create a consistent design language for all

Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a

world-class designer who would be for Apple what

Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was code-

named Snow White, not because of his preference for

the color but because the products to be designed were

code-named after the seven dwarfs. The winner was

Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was

responsible for the look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions.

Jobs ﬂew to the Black Forest region of Bavaria to meet

him and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s

passion but also his spirited way of driving his

Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per hour.

Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed

that there should be a “born-in-America gene for

Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global”

look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of

rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” His guiding principle

was “Form follows emotion,” a play on the familiar

maxim that form follows function. He produced forty

models of products to demonstrate the concept, and

when Jobs saw them he proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!”

The Snow White look, which was adopted immediately

for the Apple IIc, featured white cases, tight rounded

curves, and lines of thin grooves for both ventilation and

decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the

condition that he move to California. They shook hands

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and, in Esslinger’s not-so-modest words, “that

handshake launched one of the most decisive

collaborations in the history of industrial design.”

Esslinger’s ﬁrm, frogdesign,

opened in Palo Alto in

mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract to work for

Apple, and from then on every Apple product has

included the proud declaration “Designed in California.”

From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark

of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that even

the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully.

One of the most extreme—and telling—

implementations of that philosophy came when he

scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the

chips and other components deep inside the

Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs

began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s

really pretty,” he said. “But look at the memory chips.

That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.”

One of the new engineers interrupted and asked

why it mattered. “The only thing that’s important is how

well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”

Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful

as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter

isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet,

even though nobody’s going to see it.” In an interview a

few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs

again reiterated that lesson from his father: “When

you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers,

you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back,

even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see

it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a

beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep

well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried

all the way through.”

From Mike Markkula he had learned the

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importance of packaging and presentation. People do

judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the

Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-color design and kept

trying to make it look better. “He got the guys to redo it

ﬁfty times,” recalled Alain Rossmann, a member of the

Mac team who married Joanna Hoffman. “It was going

to be thrown in the trash as soon as the consumer

opened it, but he was obsessed by how it looked.” To

Rossmann, this showed a lack of balance; money was

being spent on expensive packaging while they were

trying to save money on the memory chips. But for Jobs,

each detail was essential to making the Macintosh

amazing.

When the design was ﬁnally locked in, Jobs called

the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real

artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of

drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them

sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside

each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the

members of the team knew that their signatures were

inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid

out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up

by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went ﬁrst. Jobs

waited until last, after all forty-ﬁve of the others. He

found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed

his name in lowercase letters with a grand ﬂair. Then he

toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this,

he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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BUILDING THE MAC

The Journey Is the Reward

Competition

When IBM introduced its personal computer in

August 1981, Jobs had his team buy one and dissect it.

Their consensus was that it sucked. Chris Espinosa

called it “a half-assed, hackneyed attempt,” and there

was some truth to that. It used old-fashioned command-

line prompts and didn’t support bitmapped graphical

displays. Apple became cocky, not realizing that

corporate technology managers might feel more

comfortable buying from an established company like

IBM rather than one named after a piece of fruit. Bill

Gates happened to be visiting Apple headquarters for a

meeting on the day the IBM PC was announced. “They

didn’t seem to care,” he said. “It took them a year to

realize what had happened.”

Reﬂecting its cheeky conﬁdence, Apple took out a

full-page ad in the

Wall Street Journal

with the headline

“Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” It cleverly positioned the

upcoming computer battle as a two-way contest

between the spunky and rebellious Apple and the

establishment Goliath IBM, conveniently relegating to

irrelevance companies such as Commodore, Tandy,

and Osborne that were doing just as well as Apple.

Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself

as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a

Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai ﬁghting the forces of

darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the

upcoming battle not as a mere business competition,

but as a spiritual struggle. “If, for some reason, we make

some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling

is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark

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Ages for about twenty years,” he told an interviewer.

“Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost

always stop innovation.” Even thirty years later,

reﬂecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy

crusade: “IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst.

They were not a force for innovation; they were a force

for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.”

Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs also took aim at

another perceived competitor to his Macintosh: the

company’s own Lisa. Partly it was psychological. He

had been ousted from that group, and now he wanted

to beat it. He also saw healthy rivalry as a way to

motivate his troops. That’s why he bet John Couch

$5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. The

problem was that the rivalry became unhealthy. Jobs

repeatedly portrayed his band of engineers as the cool

kids on the block, in contrast to the plodding HP

engineer types working on the Lisa.

More substantively, when he moved away from Jef

Raskin’s plan for an inexpensive and underpowered

portable appliance and reconceived the Mac as a

desktop machine with a graphical user interface, it

became a scaled-down version of the Lisa that would

likely undercut it in the marketplace.

Larry Tesler, who managed application software

for the Lisa, realized that it would be important to design

both machines to use many of the same software

programs. So to broker peace, he arranged for Smith

and Hertzfeld to come to the Lisa work space and

demonstrate the Mac prototype. Twenty-ﬁve engineers

showed up and were listening politely when, halfway

into the presentation, the door burst open. It was Rich

Page, a volatile engineer who was responsible for

much of the Lisa’s design. “The Macintosh is going to

destroy the Lisa!” he shouted. “The Macintosh is going

to ruin Apple!” Neither Smith nor Hertzfeld responded,

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so Page continued his rant. “Jobs wants to destroy Lisa

because we wouldn’t let him control it,” he said, looking

as if he were about to cry. “Nobody’s going to buy a

Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you

don’t care!” He stormed out of the room and slammed

the door, but a moment later he barged back in brieﬂy. “I

know it’s not your fault,” he said to Smith and Hertzfeld.

“Steve Jobs is the problem. Tell Steve that he’s

destroying Apple!”

Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-

cost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible

software. Making matters worse was that neither

machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one

in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of

keeping Jobs in harness.

End-to-end Control

Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible

with the architecture of the Lisa was motivated by more

than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical

component, one that was related to his penchant for

control. He believed that for a computer to be truly

great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly

linked. When a computer was open to running software

that also worked on other computers, it would end up

sacriﬁcing some functionality. The best products, he

believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed

end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the

hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish

the Macintosh, which had an operating system that

worked only on its own hardware, from the environment

that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating

system could be used on hardware made by many

different companies.

“Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t

want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy

programmers,” explained ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber. “It

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would be as if someone off the street added some

brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the

lyrics to a Dylan song.” In later years Jobs’s whole-

widget approach would distinguish the iPhone, iPod,

and iPad from their competitors. It resulted in awesome

products. But it was not always the best strategy for

dominating a market. “From the ﬁrst Mac to the latest

iPhone, Jobs’s systems have always been sealed shut

to prevent consumers from meddling and modifying

them,” noted Leander Kahney, author of

Cult of the

Mac

Jobs’s desire to control the user experience had

been at the heart of his debate with Wozniak over

whether the Apple II would have slots that allow a user

to plug expansion cards into a computer’s motherboard

and thus add some new functionality. Wozniak won that

argument: The Apple II had eight slots. But this time

around it would be Jobs’s machine, not Wozniak’s, and

the Macintosh would have limited slots. You wouldn’t

even be able to open the case and get to the

motherboard. For a hobbyist or hacker, that was uncool.

But for Jobs, the Macintosh was for the masses. He

wanted to give them a controlled experience.

“It reﬂects his personality, which is to want control,”

said Berry Cash, who was hired by Jobs in 1982 to be a

market strategist at Texaco Towers. “Steve would talk

about the Apple II and complain, ‘We don’t have control,

and look at all these crazy things people are trying to do

to it. That’s a mistake I’ll never make again.’” He went

so far as to design special tools so that the Macintosh

case could not be opened with a regular screwdriver.

“We’re going to design this thing so nobody but Apple

employees can get inside this box,” he told Cash.

Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow

keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way to move

the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing

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old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click

navigation, even if they didn’t want to. Unlike other

product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer

was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse,

they were wrong.

There was one other advantage, he believed, to

eliminating the cursor keys: It forced outside software

developers to write programs specially for the Mac

operating system, rather than merely writing generic

software that could be ported to a variety of computers.

That made for the type of tight vertical integration

between application software, operating systems, and

hardware devices that Jobs liked.

Jobs’s desire for end-to-end control also made

him allergic to proposals that Apple license the

Macintosh operating system to other ofﬁce equipment

manufacturers and allow them to make Macintosh

clones. The new and energetic Macintosh marketing

director Mike Murray proposed a licensing program in a

conﬁdential memo to Jobs in May 1982. “We would like

the Macintosh user environment to become an industry

standard,” he wrote. “The hitch, of course, is that now

one must buy Mac hardware in order to get this user

environment. Rarely (if ever) has one company been

able to create and maintain an industry-wide standard

that cannot be shared with other manufacturers.” His

proposal was to license the Macintosh operating

system to Tandy. Because Tandy’s Radio Shack stores

went after a different type of customer, Murray argued, it

would not severely cannibalize Apple sales. But Jobs

was congenitally averse to such a plan. His approach

meant that the Macintosh remained a controlled

environment that met his standards, but it also meant

that, as Murray feared, it would have trouble securing its

place as an industry standard in a world of IBM clones.

Machines of the Year

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As 1982 drew to a close, Jobs came to believe that

he was going to be

Time

’s Man of the Year. He arrived

at Texaco Towers one day with the magazine’s San

Francisco bureau chief, Michael Moritz, and

encouraged colleagues to give Moritz interviews. But

Jobs did not end up on the cover. Instead the magazine

chose “the Computer” as the topic for the year-end

issue and called it “the Machine of the Year.”

Accompanying the main story was a proﬁle of

Jobs, which was based on the reporting done by Moritz

and written by Jay Cocks, an editor who usually

handled rock music for the magazine. “With his smooth

sales pitch and a blind faith that would have been the

envy of the early Christian martyrs, it is Steven Jobs,

more than anyone, who kicked open the door and let

the personal computer move in,” the story proclaimed. It

was a richly reported piece, but also harsh at times—so

harsh that Moritz (after he wrote a book about Apple

and went on to be a partner in the venture ﬁrm Sequoia

Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated it by

complaining that his reporting had been “siphoned,

ﬁltered, and poisoned with gossipy benzene by an

editor in New York whose regular task was to chronicle

the wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article

quoted Bud Tribble on Jobs’s “reality distortion ﬁeld”

and noted that he “would occasionally burst into tears at

meetings.” Perhaps the best quote came from Jef

Raskin. Jobs, he declared, “would have made an

excellent King of France.”

To Jobs’s dismay, the magazine made public the

existence of the daughter he had forsaken, Lisa

Brennan. He knew that Kottke had been the one to tell

the magazine about Lisa, and he berated him in the

Mac group work space in front of a half dozen people.

“When the

Time

reporter asked me if Steve had a

daughter named Lisa, I said ‘Of course,’” Kottke

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recalled. “Friends don’t let friends deny that they’re the

father of a child. I’m not going to let my friend be a jerk

and deny paternity. He was really angry and felt

violated and told me in front of everyone that I had

betrayed him.”

But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was

not, after all, chosen as the Man of the Year. As he later

told me:

Time

decided they were going to make me Man of

the Year, and I was twenty-seven, so I actually cared

about stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool. They

sent out Mike Moritz to write a story. We’re the same

age, and I had been very successful, and I could tell he

was jealous and there was an edge to him. He wrote

this terrible hatchet job. So the editors in New York get

this story and say, “We can’t make this guy Man of the

Year.” That really hurt. But it was a good lesson. It

taught me to never get too excited about things like that,

since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me

the magazine, and I remember opening the package,

thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it

was this computer sculpture thing. I thought, “Huh?”

And then I read the article, and it was so awful that I

actually cried.

In fact there’s no reason to believe that Moritz was

jealous or that he intended his reporting to be unfair.

Nor was Jobs ever slated to be Man of the Year, despite

what he thought. That year the top editors (I was then a

junior editor there) decided early on to go with the

computer rather than a person, and they commissioned,

months in advance, a piece of art from the famous

sculptor George Segal to be a gatefold cover image.

Ray Cave was then the magazine’s editor. “We never

considered Jobs,” he said. “You couldn’t personify the

computer, so that was the ﬁrst time we decided to go

with an inanimate object. We never searched around

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for a face to be put on the cover.”

Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983—a full

year before the Mac was ready—and Jobs paid his

$5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of

the Lisa team, Jobs went to New York to do publicity for

it in his role as Apple’s chairman and poster boy.

He had learned from his public relations

consultant Regis McKenna how to dole out exclusive

interviews in a dramatic manner. Reporters from

anointed publications were ushered in sequentially for

their hour with him in his Carlyle Hotel suite, where a

Lisa computer was set on a table and surrounded by

cut ﬂowers. The publicity plan called for Jobs to focus

on the Lisa and not mention the Macintosh, because

speculation about it could undermine the Lisa. But Jobs

couldn’t help himself. In most of the stories based on his

interviews that day—in

Time, Business Week

, the

Wall

Street Journal

, and

Fortune

—the Macintosh was

mentioned. “Later this year Apple will introduce a less

powerful, less expensive version of Lisa, the

Macintosh,”

Fortune

reported. “Jobs himself has

directed that project.”

Business Week

quoted him as

saying, “When it comes out, Mac is going to be the most

incredible computer in the world.” He also admitted that

the Mac and the Lisa would not be compatible. It was

like launching the Lisa with the kiss of death.

The Lisa did indeed die a slow death. Within two

years it would be discontinued. “It was too expensive,

and we were trying to sell it to big companies when our

expertise was selling to consumers,” Jobs later said.

But there was a silver lining for Jobs: Within months of

Lisa’s launch, it became clear that Apple had to pin its

hopes on the Macintosh instead.

Let’s Be Pirates!

As the Macintosh team grew, it moved from

Texaco Towers to the main Apple buildings on Bandley

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Drive, ﬁnally settling in mid-1983 into Bandley 3. It had

a modern atrium lobby with video games, which Burrell

Smith and Andy Hertzfeld chose, and a Toshiba

compact disc stereo system with MartinLogan speakers

and a hundred CDs. The software team was visible

from the lobby in a ﬁshbowl-like glass enclosure, and

the kitchen was stocked daily with Odwalla juices. Over

time the atrium attracted even more toys, most notably a

Bösendorfer piano and a BMW motorcycle that Jobs felt

would inspire an obsession with lapidary

craftsmanship.

Jobs kept a tight rein on the hiring process. The

goal was to get people who were creative, wickedly

smart, and slightly rebellious. The software team would

make applicants play Defender, Smith’s favorite video

game. Jobs would ask his usual offbeat questions to

see how well the applicant could think in unexpected

situations. One day he, Hertzfeld, and Smith

interviewed a candidate for software manager who, it

became clear as soon as he walked in the room, was

too uptight and conventional to manage the wizards in

the ﬁshbowl. Jobs began to toy with him mercilessly.

“How old were you when you lost your virginity?” he

asked.

The candidate looked bafﬂed. “What did you say?”

“Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat

there ﬂustered, so Jobs changed the subject. “How

many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled,

“The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I

tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward

technical question.” But when the candidate droned on

in his response, Jobs broke in. “Gobble, gobble,

gobble, gobble,” he said, cracking up Smith and

Hertzfeld.

“I guess I’m not the right guy,” the poor man said

as he got up to leave.

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For all of his obnoxious behavior, Jobs also had

the ability to instill in his team an esprit de corps. After

tearing people down, he would ﬁnd ways to lift them up

and make them feel that being part of the Macintosh

project was an amazing mission. Every six months he

would take most of his team on a two-day retreat at a

nearby resort.

The retreat in September 1982 was at the Pajaro

Dunes near Monterey. Fifty or so members of the Mac

division sat in the lodge facing a ﬁreplace. Jobs sat on

top of a table in front of them. He spoke quietly for a

while, then walked to an easel and began posting his

thoughts.

The ﬁrst was “Don’t compromise.” It was an

injunction that would, over time, be both helpful and

harmful. Most technology teams made trade-offs. The

Mac, on the other hand, would end up being as

“insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly

make it—but it would not ship for another sixteen

months, way behind schedule. After mentioning a

scheduled completion date, he told them, “It would be

better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.” A

different type of project manager, willing to make some

trade-offs, might try to lock in dates after which no

changes could be made. Not Jobs. He displayed

another maxim: “It’s not done until it ships.”

Another chart contained a koōan-like phrase that

he later told me was his favorite maxim: “The journey is

the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was

a special corps with an exalted mission. Someday they

would all look back on their journey together and,

forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would

regard it as a magical high point in their lives.

At the end of the presentation someone asked

whether he thought they should do some market

research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he

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replied, “because customers don’t know what they want

until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device

that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to

see something neat?” When he ﬂipped it open, it turned

out to be a mock-up of a computer that could ﬁt on your

lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a

notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making

in the mid-to late eighties,” he said. They were building

a company that would invent the future.

For the next two days there were presentations by

various team leaders and the inﬂuential computer

industry analyst Ben Rosen, with a lot of time in the

evenings for pool parties and dancing. At the end, Jobs

stood in front of the assemblage and gave a soliloquy.

“As every day passes, the work ﬁfty people are doing

here is going to send a giant ripple through the

universe,” he said. “I know I might be a little hard to get

along with, but this is the most fun thing I’ve done in my

life.” Years later most of those in the audience would be

able to laugh about the “little hard to get along with”

episodes and agree with him that creating that giant

ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.

The next retreat was at the end of January 1983,

the same month the Lisa launched, and there was a

shift in tone. Four months earlier Jobs had written on his

ﬂip chart: “Don’t compromise.” This time one of the

maxims was “Real artists ship.” Nerves were frayed.

Atkinson had been left out of the publicity interviews for

the Lisa launch, and he marched into Jobs’s hotel room

and threatened to quit. Jobs tried to minimize the slight,

but Atkinson refused to be molliﬁed. Jobs got annoyed.

“I don’t have time to deal with this now,” he said. “I have

sixty other people out there who are pouring their

hearts into the Macintosh, and they’re waiting for me to

start the meeting.” With that he brushed past Atkinson to

go address the faithful.

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Jobs proceeded to give a rousing speech in which

he claimed that he had resolved the dispute with

McIntosh audio labs to use the Macintosh name. (In fact

the issue was still being negotiated, but the moment

called for a bit of the old reality distortion ﬁeld.) He

pulled out a bottle of mineral water and symbolically

christened the prototype onstage. Down the hall,

Atkinson heard the loud cheer, and with a sigh joined

the group. The ensuing party featured skinny-dipping in

the pool, a bonﬁre on the beach, and loud music that

lasted all night, which caused the hotel, La Playa in

Carmel, to ask them never to come back.

Another of Jobs’s maxims at the retreat was “It’s

better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He wanted to

instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them behave like

swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing

to commandeer from others. As Susan Kare put it, “He

meant, ‘Let’s have a renegade feeling to our group. We

can move fast. We can get things done.’” To celebrate

Jobs’s birthday a few weeks later, the team paid for a

billboard on the road to Apple headquarters. It read:

“Happy 28th Steve. The Journey is the Reward.—The

Pirates.”

One of the Mac team’s programmers, Steve

Capps, decided this new spirit warranted hoisting a

Jolly Roger. He cut a patch of black cloth and had Kare

paint a skull and crossbones on it. The eye patch she

put on the skull was an Apple logo. Late one Sunday

night Capps climbed to the roof of their newly built

Bandley 3 building and hoisted the ﬂag on a scaffolding

pole that the construction workers had left behind. It

waved proudly for a few weeks, until members of the

Lisa team, in a late-night foray, stole the ﬂag and sent

their Mac rivals a ransom note. Capps led a raid to

recover it and was able to wrestle it from a secretary

who was guarding it for the Lisa team. Some of the

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grown-ups overseeing Apple worried that Jobs’s

buccaneer spirit was getting out of hand. “Flying that

ﬂag was really stupid,” said Arthur Rock. “It was telling

the rest of the company they were no good.” But Jobs

loved it, and he made sure it waved proudly all the way

through to the completion of the Mac project. “We were

the renegades, and we wanted people to know it,” he

recalled.

Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they

could stand up to Jobs. If they knew what they were

talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even

admire it. By 1983 those most familiar with his reality

distortion ﬁeld had discovered something further: They

could, if necessary, just quietly disregard what he

decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would

appreciate their renegade attitude and willingness to

ignore authority. After all, that’s what he did.

By far the most important example of this involved

the choice of a disk drive for the Macintosh. Apple had a

corporate division that built mass-storage devices, and

it had developed a disk-drive system, code-named

Twiggy, that could read and write onto those thin,

delicate 5¼-inch ﬂoppy disks that older readers (who

also remember Twiggy the model) will recall. But by the

time the Lisa was ready to ship in the spring of 1983, it

was clear that the Twiggy was buggy. Because the Lisa

also came with a hard-disk drive, this was not a

complete disaster. But the Mac had no hard disk, so it

faced a crisis. “The Mac team was beginning to panic,”

said Hertzfeld. “We were using a single Twiggy drive,

and we didn’t have a hard disk to fall back on.”

The team discussed the problem at the January

1983 retreat, and Debi Coleman gave Jobs data about

the Twiggy failure rate. A few days later he drove to

Apple’s factory in San Jose to see the Twiggy being

made. More than half were rejected. Jobs erupted. With

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his face ﬂushed, he began shouting and sputtering

about ﬁring everyone who worked there. Bob Belleville,

the head of the Mac engineering team, gently guided

him to the parking lot, where they could take a walk and

talk about alternatives.

One possibility that Belleville had been exploring

was to use a new 3½-inch disk drive that Sony had

developed. The disk was cased in sturdier plastic and

could ﬁt into a shirt pocket. Another option was to have

a clone of Sony’s 3½-inch disk drive manufactured by a

smaller Japanese supplier, the Alps Electronics Co.,

which had been supplying disk drives for the Apple II.

Alps had already licensed the technology from Sony,

and if they could build their own version in time it would

be much cheaper.

Jobs and Belleville, along with Apple veteran Rod

Holt (the guy Jobs enlisted to design the ﬁrst power

supply for the Apple II), ﬂew to Japan to ﬁgure out what

to do. They took the bullet train from Tokyo to visit the

Alps facility. The engineers there didn’t even have a

working prototype, just a crude model. Jobs thought it

was great, but Belleville was appalled. There was no

way, he thought, that Alps could have it ready for the

Mac within a year.

As they proceeded to visit other Japanese

companies, Jobs was on his worst behavior. He wore

jeans and sneakers to meetings with Japanese

managers in dark suits. When they formally handed him

little gifts, as was the custom, he often left them behind,

and he never reciprocated with gifts of his own. He

would sneer when rows of engineers lined up to greet

him, bow, and politely offer their products for inspection.

Jobs hated both the devices and the obsequiousness.

“What are you showing me

this

for?” he snapped at one

stop. “This is a piece of crap!

Anybody

could build a

better drive than this.” Although most of his hosts were

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appalled, some seemed amused. They had heard tales

of his obnoxious style and brash behavior, and now

they were getting to see it in full display.

The ﬁnal stop was the Sony factory, located in a

drab suburb of Tokyo. To Jobs, it looked messy and

inelegant. A lot of the work was done by hand. He hated

it. Back at the hotel, Belleville argued for going with the

Sony disk drive. It was ready to use. Jobs disagreed. He

decided that they would work with Alps to produce their

own drive, and he ordered Belleville to cease all work

with Sony.

Belleville decided it was best to partially ignore

Jobs, and he asked a Sony executive to get its disk

drive ready for use in the Macintosh. If and when it

became clear that Alps could not deliver on time, Apple

would switch to Sony. So Sony sent over the engineer

who had developed the drive, Hidetoshi Komoto, a

Purdue graduate who fortunately possessed a good

sense of humor about his clandestine task.

Whenever Jobs would come from his corporate

ofﬁce to visit the Mac team’s engineers—which was

almost every afternoon—they would hurriedly ﬁnd

somewhere for Komoto to hide. At one point Jobs ran

into him at a newsstand in Cupertino and recognized

him from the meeting in Japan, but he didn’t suspect

anything. The closest call was when Jobs came

bustling onto the Mac work space unexpectedly one

day while Komoto was sitting in one of the cubicles. A

Mac engineer grabbed him and pointed him to a

janitorial closet. “Quick, hide in this closet. Please!

Now!” Komoto looked confused, Hertzfeld recalled, but

he jumped up and did as told. He had to stay in the

closet for ﬁve minutes, until Jobs left. The Mac

engineers apologized. “No problem,” he replied. “But

American business practices, they are very strange.

Very strange.”

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Belleville’s prediction came true. In May 1983 the

folks at Alps admitted it would take them at least

eighteen more months to get their clone of the Sony

drive into production. At a retreat in Pajaro Dunes,

Markkula grilled Jobs on what he was going to do.

Finally, Belleville interrupted and said that he might

have an alternative to the Alps drive ready soon. Jobs

looked bafﬂed for just a moment, and then it became

clear to him why he’d glimpsed Sony’s top disk

designer in Cupertino. “You son of a bitch!” Jobs said.

But it was not in anger. There was a big grin on his face.

As soon as he realized what Belleville and the other

engineers had done behind his back, said Hertzfeld,

“Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for

disobeying him and doing the right thing.” It was, after

all, what he would have done in their situation.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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ENTER SCULLEY

The Pepsi Challenge

The Courtship

Mike Markkula had never wanted to be Apple’s

president. He liked designing his new houses, ﬂying his

private plane, and living high off his stock options; he

did not relish adjudicating conﬂict or curating high-

maintenance egos. He had stepped into the role

reluctantly, after he felt compelled to ease out Mike

Scott, and he promised his wife the gig would be

temporary. By the end of 1982, after almost two years,

she gave him an order: Find a replacement right away.

Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the

company himself, even though there was a part of him

that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be

self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told Jobs that he was

still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s

president. So they launched a search for someone from

the outside.

The person they most wanted was Don Estridge,

who had built IBM’s personal computer division from

scratch and launched a PC that, even though Jobs and

his team disparaged it, was now outselling Apple’s.

Estridge had sheltered his division in Boca Raton,

Florida, safely removed from the corporate mentality of

Armonk, New York. Like Jobs, he was driven and

inspiring, but unlike Jobs, he had the ability to allow

others to think that his brilliant ideas were their own.

Jobs ﬂew to Boca Raton with the offer of a $1 million

salary and a $1 million signing bonus, but Estridge

turned him down. He was not the type who would jump

ship to join the enemy. He also enjoyed being part of

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the establishment, a member of the Navy rather than a

pirate. He was discomforted by Jobs’s tales of ripping

off the phone company. When asked where he worked,

he loved to be able to answer “IBM.”

So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a

gregarious corporate headhunter, to ﬁnd someone else.

They decided not to focus on technology executives;

what they needed was a consumer marketer who knew

advertising and had the corporate polish that would

play well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the

hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John

Sculley, president of the Pepsi-Cola division of

PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had been

an advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a

talk to Stanford business students, he heard good

things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class

earlier. So he told Roche he would be happy to meet

him.

Sculley’s background was very different from

Jobs’s. His mother was an Upper East Side Manhattan

matron who wore white gloves when she went out, and

his father was a proper Wall Street lawyer. Sculley was

sent off to St. Mark’s School, then got his undergraduate

degree from Brown and a business degree from

Wharton. He had risen through the ranks at PepsiCo as

an innovative marketer and advertiser, with little

passion for product development or information

technology.

Sculley ﬂew to Los Angeles to spend Christmas

with his two teenage children from a previous marriage.

He took them to visit a computer store, where he was

struck by how poorly the products were marketed.

When his kids asked why he was so interested, he said

he was planning to go up to Cupertino to meet Steve

Jobs. They were totally blown away. They had grown

up among movie stars, but to them Jobs was a true

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celebrity. It made Sculley take more seriously the

prospect of being hired as his boss.

When he arrived at Apple headquarters, Sculley

was startled by the unassuming ofﬁces and casual

atmosphere. “Most people were less formally dressed

than PepsiCo’s maintenance staff,” he noted. Over

lunch Jobs picked quietly at his salad, but when Sculley

declared that most executives found computers more

trouble than they were worth, Jobs clicked into

evangelical mode. “We want to change the way people

use computers,” he said.

On the ﬂight home Sculley outlined his thoughts.

The result was an eight-page memo on marketing

computers to consumers and business executives. It

was a bit sophomoric in parts, ﬁlled with underlined

phrases, diagrams, and boxes, but it revealed his

newfound enthusiasm for ﬁguring out ways to sell

something more interesting than soda. Among his

recommendations: “Invest in in-store merchandizing

that romances the consumer with Apple’s potential to

enrich their life!” He was still reluctant to leave Pepsi,

but Jobs intrigued him. “I was taken by this young,

impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to

know him a little better,” he recalled.

So Sculley agreed to meet again when Jobs next

came to New York, which happened to be for the

January 1983 Lisa introduction at the Carlyle Hotel.

After the full day of press sessions, the Apple team was

surprised to see an unscheduled visitor come into the

suite. Jobs loosened his tie and introduced Sculley as

the president of Pepsi and a potential big corporate

customer. As John Couch demonstrated the Lisa, Jobs

chimed in with bursts of commentary, sprinkled with his

favorite words, “revolutionary” and “incredible,” claiming

it would change the nature of human interaction with

computers.

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They then headed off to the Four Seasons

restaurant, a shimmering haven of elegance and

power. As Jobs ate a special vegan meal, Sculley

described Pepsi’s marketing successes. The Pepsi

Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product but a

lifestyle and an optimistic outlook. “I think Apple’s got a

chance to create an Apple Generation.” Jobs

enthusiastically agreed. The Pepsi Challenge

campaign, in contrast, focused on the product; it

combined ads, events, and public relations to stir up

buzz. The ability to turn the introduction of a new

product into a moment of national excitement was, Jobs

noted, what he and Regis McKenna wanted to do at

Apple.

When they ﬁnished talking, it was close to

midnight. “This has been one of the most exciting

evenings in my whole life,” Jobs said as Sculley walked

him back to the Carlyle. “I can’t tell you how much fun

I’ve had.” When he ﬁnally got home to Greenwich,

Connecticut, that night, Sculley had trouble sleeping.

Engaging with Jobs was a lot more fun than negotiating

with bottlers. “It stimulated me, roused my long-held

desire to be an architect of ideas,” he later noted. The

next morning Roche called Sculley. “I don’t know what

you guys did last night, but let me tell you, Steve Jobs is

ecstatic,” he said.

And so the courtship continued, with Sculley

playing hard but not impossible to get. Jobs ﬂew east

for a visit one Saturday in February and took a limo up

to Greenwich. He found Sculley’s newly built mansion

ostentatious, with its ﬂoor-to-ceiling windows, but he

admired the three hundred-pound custom-made oak

doors that were so carefully hung and balanced that

they swung open with the touch of a ﬁnger. “Steve was

fascinated by that because he is, as I am, a

perfectionist,” Sculley recalled. Thus began the

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somewhat unhealthy process of a star-struck Sculley

perceiving in Jobs qualities that he fancied in himself.

Sculley usually drove a Cadillac, but, sensing his

guest’s taste, he borrowed his wife’s Mercedes 450SL

convertible to take Jobs to see Pepsi’s 144-acre

corporate headquarters, which was as lavish as Apple’s

was austere. To Jobs, it epitomized the difference

between the feisty new digital economy and the Fortune

500 corporate establishment. A winding drive led

through manicured ﬁelds and a sculpture garden

(including pieces by Rodin, Moore, Calder, and

Giacometti) to a concrete-and-glass building designed

by Edward Durell Stone. Sculley’s huge ofﬁce had a

Persian rug, nine windows, a small private garden, a

hideaway study, and its own bathroom. When Jobs saw

the corporate ﬁtness center, he was astonished that

executives had an area, with its own whirlpool,

separate from that of the regular employees. “That’s

weird,” he said. Sculley hastened to agree. “As a matter

of fact, I was against it, and I go over and work out

sometimes in the employees’ area,” he said.

Their next meeting was a few weeks later in

Cupertino, when Sculley stopped on his way back from

a Pepsi bottlers’ convention in Hawaii. Mike Murray, the

Macintosh marketing manager, took charge of

preparing the team for the visit, but he was not clued in

on the real agenda. “PepsiCo could end up purchasing

literally thousands of Macs over the next few years,” he

exulted in a memo to the Macintosh staff. “During the

past year, Mr. Sculley and a certain Mr. Jobs have

become friends. Mr. Sculley is considered to be one of

the best marketing heads in the big leagues; as such,

let’s give him a good time here.”

Jobs wanted Sculley to share his excitement about

the Macintosh. “This product means more to me than

anything I’ve done,” he said. “I want you to be the ﬁrst

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person outside of Apple to see it.” He dramatically

pulled the prototype out of a vinyl bag and gave a

demonstration. Sculley found Jobs as memorable as

his machine. “He seemed more a showman than a

businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it

was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.”

Jobs had asked Hertzfeld and the gang to prepare

a special screen display for Sculley’s amusement. “He’s

really smart,” Jobs said. “You wouldn’t believe how

smart he is.” The explanation that Sculley might buy a

lot of Macintoshes for Pepsi “sounded a little bit ﬁshy to

me,” Hertzfeld recalled, but he and Susan Kare created

a screen of Pepsi caps and cans that danced around

with the Apple logo. Hertzfeld was so excited he began

waving his arms around during the demo, but Sculley

seemed underwhelmed. “He asked a few questions, but

he didn’t seem all that interested,” Hertzfeld recalled.

He never ended up warming to Sculley. “He was

incredibly phony, a complete poseur,” he later said. “He

pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn’t.

He was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing

guys are: paid poseurs.”

Matters came to a head when Jobs visited New

York in March 1983 and was able to convert the

courtship into a blind and blinding romance. “I really

think you’re the guy,” Jobs said as they walked through

Central Park. “I want you to come and work with me. I

can learn so much from you.” Jobs, who had cultivated

father ﬁgures in the past, knew just how to play to

Sculley’s ego and insecurities. It worked. “I was smitten

by him,” Sculley later admitted. “Steve was one of the

brightest people I’d ever met. I shared with him a

passion for ideas.”

Sculley, who was interested in art history, steered

them toward the Metropolitan Museum for a little test of

whether Jobs was really willing to learn from others. “I

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wanted to see how well he could take coaching in a

subject where he had no background,” he recalled. As

they strolled through the Greek and Roman antiquities,

Sculley expounded on the difference between the

Archaic sculpture of the sixth century B.C. and the

Periclean sculptures a century later. Jobs, who loved to

pick up historical nuggets he never learned in college,

seemed to soak it in. “I gained a sense that I could be a

teacher to a brilliant student,” Sculley recalled. Once

again he indulged the conceit that they were alike: “I

saw in him a mirror image of my younger self. I, too, was

impatient, stubborn, arrogant, impetuous. My mind

exploded with ideas, often to the exclusion of

everything else. I, too, was intolerant of those who

couldn’t live up to my demands.”

As they continued their long walk, Sculley

conﬁded that on vacations he went to the Left Bank in

Paris to draw in his sketchbook; if he hadn’t become a

businessman, he would be an artist. Jobs replied that if

he weren’t working with computers, he could see

himself as a poet in Paris. They continued down

Broadway to Colony Records on Forty-ninth Street,

where Jobs showed Sculley the music he liked,

including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and

the Windham Hill jazz artists. Then they walked all the

way back up to the San Remo on Central Park West

and Seventy-fourth, where Jobs was planning to buy a

two-story tower penthouse apartment.

The consummation occurred outside the

penthouse on one of the terraces, with Sculley sticking

close to the wall because he was afraid of heights. First

they discussed money. “I told him I needed $1 million in

salary, $1 million for a sign-up bonus,” said Sculley.

Jobs claimed that would be doable. “Even if I have to

pay for it out of my own pocket,” he said. “We’ll have to

solve those problems, because you’re the best person

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I’ve ever met. I know you’re perfect for Apple, and Apple

deserves the best.” He added that never before had he

worked for someone he really respected, but he knew

that Sculley was the person who could teach him the

most. Jobs gave him his unblinking stare.

Sculley uttered one last demurral, a token

suggestion that maybe they should just be friends and

he could offer Jobs advice from the sidelines. “Any time

you’re in New York, I’d love to spend time with you.” He

later recounted the climactic moment: “Steve’s head

dropped as he stared at his feet. After a weighty,

uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would

haunt me for days. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of

your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance

to change the world?’”

Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the

stomach. There was no response possible other than to

acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get

what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly

what to say to reach a person,” Sculley recalled. “I

realized for the ﬁrst time in four months that I couldn’t

say no.” The winter sun was beginning to set. They left

the apartment and walked back across the park to the

Carlyle.

The Honeymoon

Sculley arrived in California just in time for the May

1983 Apple management retreat at Pajaro Dunes. Even

though he had left all but one of his dark suits back in

Greenwich, he was still having trouble adjusting to the

casual atmosphere. In the front of the meeting room,

Jobs sat on the ﬂoor in the lotus position

absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet.

Sculley tried to impose an agenda; he wanted to

discuss how to differentiate their products—the Apple II,

Apple III, Lisa, and Mac—and whether it made sense to

organize the company around product lines or markets

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or functions. But the discussion descended into a free-

for-all of random ideas, complaints, and debates.

At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for

producing an unsuccessful product. “Well,” someone

shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why

don’t you wait until you get a product out before you

start being critical?” Sculley was astonished. At Pepsi

no one would have challenged the chairman like that.

“Yet here, everyone began pig-piling on Steve.” It

reminded him of an old joke he had heard from one of

the Apple ad salesmen: “What’s the difference between

Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult

supervision.”

In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake

began to rumble the room. “Head for the beach,”

someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to

the water. Then someone else shouted that the

previous earthquake had produced a tidal wave, so

they all turned and ran the other way. “The indecision,

the contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster,

only foreshadowed what was to come,” Sculley later

wrote.

One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and

his wife, Leezy, over for breakfast. He was then living in

a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in Los Gatos

with his girlfriend, Barbara Jasinski, a smart and

reserved beauty who worked for Regis McKenna.

Leezy had brought a pan and made vegetarian

omelets. (Jobs had edged away from his strict vegan

diet for the time being.) “I’m sorry I don’t have much

furniture,” Jobs apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around

to it.” It was one of his enduring quirks: His exacting

standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan

streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he

wasn’t passionate about. He had a Tiffany lamp, an

antique dining table, and a laser disc video attached to

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a Sony Trinitron, but foam cushions on the ﬂoor rather

than sofas and chairs. Sculley smiled and mistakenly

thought that it was similar to his own “frantic and

Spartan life in a cluttered New York City apartment”

early in his own career.

Jobs conﬁded in Sculley that he believed he

would die young, and therefore he needed to

accomplish things quickly so that he would make his

mark on Silicon Valley history. “We all have a short

period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculleys as they

sat around the table that morning. “We probably only

have the opportunity to do a few things really great and

do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re

going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to

accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”

Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day

in the early months of their relationship. “Steve and I

became soul mates, near constant companions,”

Sculley said. “We tended to speak in half sentences

and phrases.” Jobs ﬂattered Sculley. When he dropped

by to hash something out, he would say something like

“You’re the only one who will understand.” They would

tell each other repeatedly, indeed so often that it should

have been worrying, how happy they were to be with

each other and working in tandem. And at every

opportunity Sculley would ﬁnd similarities with Jobs and

point them out:

We could complete each other’s sentences

because we were on the same wavelength. Steve

would rouse me from sleep at 2 a.m. with a phone call

to chat about an idea that suddenly crossed his mind.

“Hi! It’s me,” he’d harmlessly say to the dazed listener,

totally unaware of the time. I curiously had done the

same in my Pepsi days. Steve would rip apart a

presentation he had to give the next morning, throwing

out slides and text. So had I as I struggled to turn public

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speaking into an important management tool during my

early days at Pepsi. As a young executive, I was always

impatient to get things done and often felt I could do

them better myself. So did Steve. Sometimes I felt as if I

was watching Steve playing me in a movie. The

similarities were uncanny, and they were behind the

amazing symbiosis we developed.

This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for

disaster. Jobs began to sense it early on. “We had

different ways of looking at the world, different views on

people, different values,” Jobs recalled. “I began to

realize this a few months after he arrived. He didn’t

learn things very quickly, and the people he wanted to

promote were usually bozos.”

Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley

by encouraging his belief that they were so alike. And

the more he manipulated Sculley, the more

contemptuous of him he became. Canny observers in

the Mac group, such as Joanna Hoffman, soon realized

what was happening and knew that it would make the

inevitable breakup more explosive. “Steve made

Sculley feel like he was exceptional,” she said. “Sculley

had never felt that. Sculley became infatuated, because

Steve projected on him a whole bunch of attributes that

he didn’t really have. When it became clear that Sculley

didn’t match all of these projections, Steve’s distortion

of reality had created an explosive situation.”

The ardor eventually began to cool on Sculley’s

side as well. Part of his weakness in trying to manage a

dysfunctional company was his desire to please other

people, one of many traits that he did not share with

Jobs. He was a polite person; this caused him to recoil

at Jobs’s rudeness to their fellow workers. “We would

go to the Mac building at eleven at night,” he recalled,

“and they would bring him code to show. In some cases

he wouldn’t even look at it. He would just take it and

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throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can you turn it

down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they can do better.’”

Sculley tried to coach him. “You’ve got to learn to hold

things back,” he told him at one point. Jobs would

agree, but it was not in his nature to ﬁlter his feelings

through a gauze.

Sculley began to believe that Jobs’s mercurial

personality and erratic treatment of people were rooted

deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the

reﬂection of a mild bipolarity. There were big mood

swings; sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times

he was depressed. At times he would launch into brutal

tirades without warning, and Sculley would have to

calm him down. “Twenty minutes later, I would get

another call and be told to come over because Steve is

losing it again,” he said.

Their ﬁrst substantive disagreement was over how

to price the Macintosh. It had been conceived as a

$1,000 machine, but Jobs’s design changes had

pushed up the cost so that the plan was to sell it at

$1,995. However, when Jobs and Sculley began

making plans for a huge launch and marketing push,

Sculley decided that they needed to charge $500 more.

To him, the marketing costs were like any other

production cost and needed to be factored into the

price. Jobs resisted, furiously. “It will destroy everything

we stand for,” he said. “I want to make this a revolution,

not an effort to squeeze out proﬁts.” Sculley said it was

a simple choice: He could have the $1,995 price or he

could have the marketing budget for a big launch, but

not both.

“You’re not going to like this,” Jobs told Hertzfeld

and the other engineers, “but Sculley is insisting that we

charge $2,495 for the Mac instead of $1,995.” Indeed

the engineers were horriﬁed. Hertzfeld pointed out that

they were designing the Mac for people like

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themselves, and overpricing it would be a “betrayal” of

what they stood for. So Jobs promised them, “Don’t

worry, I’m not going to let him get away with it!” But in

the end, Sculley prevailed. Even twenty-ﬁve years later

Jobs seethed when recalling the decision: “It’s the main

reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to

dominate the market.” The decision made him feel that

he was losing control of his product and company, and

this was as dangerous as making a tiger feel cornered.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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THE LAUNCH

A Dent in the Universe

Real Artists Ship

The high point of the October 1983 Apple sales

conference in Hawaii was a skit based on a TV show

called

The Dating Game.

Jobs played emcee, and his

three contestants, whom he had convinced to ﬂy to

Hawaii, were Bill Gates and two other software

executives, Mitch Kapor and Fred Gibbons. As the

show’s jingly theme song played, the three took their

stools. Gates, looking like a high school sophomore, got

wild applause from the 750 Apple salesmen when he

said, “During 1984, Microsoft expects to get half of its

revenues from software for the Macintosh.” Jobs, clean-

shaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked if

he thought that the Macintosh’s new operating system

would become one of the industry’s new standards.

Gates answered, “To create a new standard takes not

just making something that’s a little bit different, it takes

something that’s really new and captures people’s

imagination. And the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve

ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”

But even as Gates was speaking, Microsoft was

edging away from being primarily a collaborator with

Apple to being more of a competitor. It would continue

to make application software, like Microsoft Word, for

Apple, but a rapidly increasing share of its revenue

would come from the operating system it had written for

the IBM personal computer. The year before, 279,000

Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs and

its clones. But the ﬁgures for 1983 were coming in

starkly different: 420,000 Apple IIs versus 1.3 million

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IBMs and its clones. And both the Apple III and the Lisa

were dead in the water.

Just when the Apple sales force was arriving in

Hawaii, this shift was hammered home on the cover of

Business Week

. Its headline: “Personal Computers:

And the Winner Is . . . IBM.” The story inside detailed the

rise of the IBM PC. “The battle for market supremacy is

already over,” the magazine declared. “In a stunning

blitz, IBM has taken more than 26% of the market in two

years, and is expected to account for half the world

market by 1985. An additional 25% of the market will be

turning out IBM-compatible machines.”

That put all the more pressure on the Macintosh,

due out in January 1984, three months away, to save

the day against IBM. At the sales conference Jobs

decided to play the showdown to the hilt. He took the

stage and chronicled all the missteps made by IBM

since 1958, and then in ominous tones described how it

was now trying to take over the market for personal

computers: “Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer

industry? The entire information age? Was George

Orwell right about 1984?” At that moment a screen

came down from the ceiling and showed a preview of

an upcoming sixty-second television ad for the

Macintosh. In a few months it was destined to make

advertising history, but in the meantime it served its

purpose of rallying Apple’s demoralized sales force.

Jobs had always been able to draw energy by

imagining himself as a rebel pitted against the forces of

darkness. Now he was able to energize his troops with

the same vision.

There was one more hurdle: Hertzfeld and the

other wizards had to ﬁnish writing the code for the

Macintosh. It was due to start shipping on Monday,

January 16. One week before that, the engineers

concluded they could not make that deadline.

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Jobs was at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan,

preparing for the press previews, so a Sunday morning

conference call was scheduled. The software manager

calmly explained the situation to Jobs, while Hertzfeld

and the others huddled around the speakerphone

holding their breath. All they needed was an extra two

weeks. The initial shipments to the dealers could have

a version of the software labeled “demo,” and these

could be replaced as soon as the new code was

ﬁnished at the end of the month. There was a pause.

Jobs did not get angry; instead he spoke in cold,

somber tones. He told them they were really great. So

great, in fact, that he knew they could get this done.

“There’s no way we’re slipping!” he declared. There

was a collective gasp in the Bandley building work

space. “You guys have been working on this stuff for

months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make

that much of a difference. You may as well get it over

with. I’m going to ship the code a week from Monday,

with your names on it.”

“Well, we’ve got to ﬁnish it,” Steve Capps said. And

so they did. Once again, Jobs’s reality distortion ﬁeld

pushed them to do what they had thought impossible.

On Friday Randy Wigginton brought in a huge bag of

chocolate-covered espresso beans for the ﬁnal three

all-nighters. When Jobs arrived at work at 8:30 a.m. that

Monday, he found Hertzfeld sprawled nearly comatose

on the couch. They talked for a few minutes about a

remaining tiny glitch, and Jobs decreed that it wasn’t a

problem. Hertzfeld dragged himself to his blue

Volkswagen Rabbit (license plate: MACWIZ) and drove

home to bed. A short while later Apple’s Fremont factory

began to roll out boxes emblazoned with the colorful

line drawings of the Macintosh. Real artists ship, Jobs

had declared, and now the Macintosh team had.

The “1984” Ad

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In the spring of 1983, when Jobs had begun to

plan for the Macintosh launch, he asked for a

commercial that was as revolutionary and astonishing

as the product they had created. “I want something that

will stop people in their tracks,” he said. “I want a

thunderclap.” The task fell to the Chiat/Day advertising

agency, which had acquired the Apple account when it

bought the advertising side of Regis McKenna’s

business. The person put in charge was a lanky beach

bum with a bushy beard, wild hair, goofy grin, and

twinkling eyes named Lee Clow, who was the creative

director of the agency’s ofﬁce in the Venice Beach

section of Los Angeles. Clow was savvy and fun, in a

laid-back yet focused way, and he forged a bond with

Jobs that would last three decades.

Clow and two of his team, the copywriter Steve

Hayden and the art director Brent Thomas, had been

toying with a tagline that played off the George Orwell

novel: “Why 1984 won’t be like

1984.

” Jobs loved it, and

asked them to develop it for the Macintosh launch. So

they put together a storyboard for a sixty-second ad that

would look like a scene from a sci-ﬁ movie. It featured a

rebellious young woman outrunning the Orwellian

thought police and throwing a sledgehammer into a

screen showing a mind-controlling speech by Big

Brother.

The concept captured the zeitgeist of the personal

computer revolution. Many young people, especially

those in the counterculture, had viewed computers as

instruments that could be used by Orwellian

governments and giant corporations to sap

individuality. But by the end of the 1970s, they were

also being seen as potential tools for personal

empowerment. The ad cast Macintosh as a warrior for

the latter cause—a cool, rebellious, and heroic

company that was the only thing standing in the way of

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the big evil corporation’s plan for world domination and

total mind control.

Jobs liked that. Indeed the concept for the ad had

a special resonance for him. He fancied himself a rebel,

and he liked to associate himself with the values of the

ragtag band of hackers and pirates he recruited to the

Macintosh group. Even though he had left the apple

commune in Oregon to start the Apple corporation, he

still wanted to be viewed as a denizen of the

counterculture rather than the corporate culture.

But he also realized, deep inside, that he had

increasingly abandoned the hacker spirit. Some might

even accuse him of selling out. When Wozniak held

true to the Homebrew ethic by sharing his design for the

Apple I for free, it was Jobs who insisted that they sell

the boards instead. He was also the one who, despite

Wozniak’s reluctance, wanted to turn Apple into a

corporation and not freely distribute stock options to the

friends who had been in the garage with them. Now he

was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that

violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It

was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant

that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion

cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new

functions; and it took special tools just to open the

plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like

something designed by Big Brother rather than by a

hacker.

So the “1984” ad was a way of reafﬁrming, to

himself and to the world, his desired self-image. The

heroine, with a drawing of a Macintosh emblazoned on

her pure white tank top, was a renegade out to foil the

establishment. By hiring Ridley Scott, fresh off the

success of

Blade Runner

, as the director, Jobs could

attach himself and Apple to the cyberpunk ethos of the

time. With the ad, Apple could identify itself with the

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rebels and hackers who thought differently, and Jobs

could reclaim his right to identify with them as well.

Sculley was initially skeptical when he saw the

storyboards, but Jobs insisted that they needed

something revolutionary. He was able to get an

unprecedented budget of $750,000 just to ﬁlm the ad,

which they planned to premiere during the Super Bowl.

Ridley Scott made it in London using dozens of real

skinheads among the enthralled masses listening to

Big Brother on the screen. A female discus thrower was

chosen to play the heroine. Using a cold industrial

setting dominated by metallic gray hues, Scott evoked

the dystopian aura of

Blade Runner

. Just at the moment

when Big Brother announces “We shall prevail!” the

heroine’s hammer smashes the screen and it vaporizes

in a ﬂash of light and smoke.

When Jobs previewed the ad for the Apple sales

force at the meeting in Hawaii, they were thrilled. So he

screened it for the board at its December 1983 meeting.

When the lights came back on in the boardroom,

everyone was mute. Philip Schlein, the CEO of Macy’s

California, had his head on the table. Mike Markkula

stared silently; at ﬁrst it seemed he was overwhelmed

by the power of the ad. Then he spoke: “Who wants to

move to ﬁnd a new agency?” Sculley recalled, “Most of

them thought it was the worst commercial they had ever

seen.” Sculley himself got cold feet. He asked Chiat/

Day to sell off the two commercial spots—one sixty

seconds, the other thirty—that they had purchased.

Jobs was beside himself. One evening Wozniak,

who had been ﬂoating into and out of Apple for the

previous two years, wandered into the Macintosh

building. Jobs grabbed him and said, “Come over here

and look at this.” He pulled out a VCR and played the

ad. “I was astounded,” Woz recalled. “I thought it was

the most incredible thing.” When Jobs said the board

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had decided not to run it during the Super Bowl,

Wozniak asked what the cost of the time slot was. Jobs

told him $800,000. With his usual impulsive goodness,

Wozniak immediately offered, “Well, I’ll pay half if you

will.”

He ended up not needing to. The agency was able

to sell off the thirty-second time slot, but in an act of

passive deﬁance it didn’t sell the longer one. “We told

them that we couldn’t sell the sixty-second slot, though

in truth we didn’t try,” recalled Lee Clow. Sculley,

perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or

Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of

marketing, ﬁgure out what to do. Campbell, a former

football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. “I think

we ought to go for it,” he told his team.

Early in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, the

dominant Raiders scored a touchdown against the

Redskins and, instead of an instant replay, television

screens across the nation went black for an ominous

two full seconds. Then an eerie black-and-white image

of drones marching to spooky music began to ﬁll the

screen. More than ninety-six million people watched an

ad that was unlike any they’d seen before. At its end, as

the drones watched in horror the vaporizing of Big

Brother, an announcer calmly intoned, “On January

24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And

you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”

It was a sensation. That evening all three networks

and ﬁfty local stations aired news stories about the ad,

giving it a viral life unprecedented in the pre–YouTube

era. It would eventually be selected by both

TV Guide

and

Advertising Age

as the greatest commercial of all

time.

Publicity Blast

Over the years Steve Jobs would become the

grand master of product launches. In the case of the

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Macintosh, the astonishing Ridley Scott ad was just one

of the ingredients. Another part of the recipe was media

coverage. Jobs found ways to ignite blasts of publicity

that were so powerful the frenzy would feed on itself,

like a chain reaction. It was a phenomenon that he

would be able to replicate whenever there was a big

product launch, from the Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad

in 2010. Like a conjurer, he could pull the trick off over

and over again, even after journalists had seen it

happen a dozen times and knew how it was done.

Some of the moves he had learned from Regis

McKenna, who was a pro at cultivating and stroking

prideful reporters. But Jobs had his own intuitive sense

of how to stoke the excitement, manipulate the

competitive instincts of journalists, and trade exclusive

access for lavish treatment.

In December 1983 he took his elﬁn engineering

wizards, Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith, to New York

to visit

Newsweek

to pitch a story on “the kids who

created the Mac.” After giving a demo of the Macintosh,

they were taken upstairs to meet Katharine Graham, the

legendary proprietor, who had an insatiable interest in

whatever was new. Afterward the magazine sent its

technology columnist and a photographer to spend time

in Palo Alto with Hertzfeld and Smith. The result was a

ﬂattering and smart four-page proﬁle of the two of them,

with pictures that made them look like cherubim of a

new age. The article quoted Smith saying what he

wanted to do next: “I want to build the computer of the

90’s. Only I want to do it tomorrow.” The article also

described the mix of volatility and charisma displayed

by his boss: “Jobs sometimes defends his ideas with

highly vocal displays of temper that aren’t always

bluster; rumor has it that he has threatened to ﬁre

employees for insisting that his computers should have

cursor keys, a feature that Jobs considers obsolete. But

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when he is on his best behavior, Jobs is a curious

blend of charm and impatience, oscillating between

shrewd reserve and his favorite expression of

enthusiasm: ‘Insanely great.’”

The technology writer Steven Levy, who was then

working for

Rolling Stone

, came to interview Jobs, who

urged him to convince the magazine’s publisher to put

the Macintosh team on the cover of the magazine. “The

chances of Jann Wenner agreeing to displace Sting in

favor of a bunch of computer nerds were approximately

one in a googolplex,” Levy thought, correctly. Jobs took

Levy to a pizza joint and pressed the case:

Rolling

Stone

was “on the ropes, running crummy articles,

looking desperately for new topics and new audiences.

The Mac could be its salvation!” Levy pushed back.

Rolling Stone

was actually good, he said, and he asked

Jobs if he had read it recently. Jobs said that he had, an

article about MTV that was “a piece of shit.” Levy replied

that he had written that article. Jobs, to his credit, didn’t

back away from the assessment. Instead he turned

philosophical as he talked about the Macintosh. We are

constantly beneﬁting from advances that went before us

and taking things that people before us developed, he

said. “It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create

something that puts it back in the pool of human

experience and knowledge.”

Levy’s story didn’t make it to the cover. But in the

future, every major product launch that Jobs was

involved in—at NeXT, at Pixar, and years later when he

returned to Apple—would end up on the cover of either

Time

Newsweek

, or

Business Week

January 24, 1984

On the morning that he and his teammates

completed the software for the Macintosh, Andy

Hertzfeld had gone home exhausted and expected to

stay in bed for at least a day. But that afternoon, after

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 244

only six hours of sleep, he drove back to the ofﬁce. He

wanted to check in to see if there had been any

problems, and most of his colleagues had done the

same. They were lounging around, dazed but excited,

when Jobs walked in. “Hey, pick yourselves up off the

ﬂoor, you’re not done yet!” he announced. “We need a

demo for the intro!” His plan was to dramatically unveil

the Macintosh in front of a large audience and have it

show off some of its features to the inspirational theme

from

Chariots of Fire

. “It needs to be done by the

weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals,” he added.

They all groaned, Hertzfeld recalled, “but as we talked

we realized that it would be fun to cook up something

impressive.”

The launch event was scheduled for the Apple

annual stockholders’ meeting on January 24—eight

days away—at the Flint Auditorium of De Anza

Community College. The television ad and the frenzy of

press preview stories were the ﬁrst two components in

what would become the Steve Jobs playbook for

making the introduction of a new product seem like an

epochal moment in world history. The third component

was the public unveiling of the product itself, amid

fanfare and ﬂourishes, in front of an audience of

adoring faithful mixed with journalists who were primed

to be swept up in the excitement.

Hertzfeld pulled off the remarkable feat of writing a

music player in two days so that the computer could

play the

Chariots of Fire

theme. But when Jobs heard it,

he judged it lousy, so they decided to use a recording

instead. At the same time, Jobs was thrilled with a

speech generator that turned text into spoken words

with a charming electronic accent, and he decided to

make it part of the demo. “I want the Macintosh to be the

ﬁrst computer to introduce itself!” he insisted.

At the rehearsal the night before the launch,

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nothing was working well. Jobs hated the way the

animation scrolled across the Macintosh screen, and he

kept ordering tweaks. He also was dissatisﬁed with the

stage lighting, and he directed Sculley to move from

seat to seat to give his opinion as various adjustments

were made. Sculley had never thought much about

variations of stage lighting and gave the type of

tentative answers a patient might give an eye doctor

when asked which lens made the letters clearer. The

rehearsals and changes went on for ﬁve hours, well into

the night. “He was driving people insane, getting mad at

the stagehands for every glitch in the presentation,”

Sculley recalled. “I thought there was no way we were

going to get it done for the show the next morning.”

Most of all, Jobs fretted about his presentation.

Sculley fancied himself a good writer, so he suggested

changes in Jobs’s script. Jobs recalled being slightly

annoyed, but their relationship was still in the phase

when he was lathering on ﬂattery and stroking Sculley’s

ego. “I think of you just like Woz and Markkula,” he told

Sculley. “You’re like one of the founders of the

company. They founded the company, but you and I are

founding the future.” Sculley lapped it up.

The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was

mobbed. Jobs arrived in a double-breasted blue blazer,

a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie. “This is

the most important moment in my entire life,” he told

Sculley as they waited backstage for the program to

begin. “I’m really nervous. You’re probably the only

person who knows how I feel about this.” Sculley

grasped his hand, held it for a moment, and whispered

“Good luck.”

As chairman of the company, Jobs went onstage

ﬁrst to start the shareholders’ meeting. He did so with

his own form of an invocation. “I’d like to open the

meeting,” he said, “with a twenty-year-old poem by

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Dylan—that’s Bob Dylan.” He broke into a little smile,

then looked down to read from the second verse of “The

Times They Are a-Changin’.” His voice was high-

pitched as he raced through the ten lines, ending with

“For the loser now / Will be later to win / For the times

they are a-changin’.” That song was the anthem that

kept the multimillionaire board chairman in touch with

his counterculture self-image. He had a bootleg copy of

his favorite version, which was from the live concert

Dylan performed, with Joan Baez, on Halloween 1964

at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall.

Sculley came onstage to report on the company’s

earnings, and the audience started to become restless

as he droned on. Finally, he ended with a personal

note. “The most important thing that has happened to

me in the last nine months at Apple has been a chance

to develop a friendship with Steve Jobs,” he said. “For

me, the rapport we have developed means an awful

lot.”

The lights dimmed as Jobs reappeared onstage

and launched into a dramatic version of the battle cry

he had delivered at the Hawaii sales conference. “It is

1958,” he began. “IBM passes up a chance to buy a

young ﬂedgling company that has invented a new

technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox

was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever

since.” The crowd laughed. Hertzfeld had heard

versions of the speech both in Hawaii and elsewhere,

but he was struck by how this time it was pulsing with

more passion. After recounting other IBM missteps,

Jobs picked up the pace and the emotion as he built

toward the present:

It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all.

Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a

run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM

with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated and-

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 247

controlled future and are turning back to Apple as the

only force who can ensure their future freedom. IBM

wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to

industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the

entire computer industry? The entire information age?

Was George Orwell right?

As he built to the climax, the audience went from

murmuring to applauding to a frenzy of cheering and

chanting. But before they could answer the Orwell

question, the auditorium went black and the “1984”

commercial appeared on the screen. When it was over,

the entire audience was on its feet cheering.

With a ﬂair for the dramatic, Jobs walked across

the dark stage to a small table with a cloth bag on it.

“Now I’d like to show you Macintosh in person,” he said.

He took out the computer, keyboard, and mouse,

hooked them together deftly, then pulled one of the new

3½-inch ﬂoppies from his shirt pocket. The theme from

Chariots of Fire

began to play. Jobs held his breath for

a moment, because the demo had not worked well the

night before. But this time it ran ﬂawlessly. The word

“MACINTOSH” scrolled horizontally onscreen, then

underneath it the words “Insanely great” appeared in

script, as if being slowly written by hand. Not used to

such beautiful graphic displays, the audience quieted

for a moment. A few gasps could be heard. And then, in

rapid succession, came a series of screen shots: Bill

Atkinson’s QuickDraw graphics package followed by

displays of different fonts, documents, charts, drawings,

a chess game, a spreadsheet, and a rendering of Steve

Jobs with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh.

When it was over, Jobs smiled and offered a treat.

“We’ve done a lot of talking about Macintosh recently,”

he said. “But today, for the ﬁrst time ever, I’d like to let

Macintosh speak for itself.” With that, he strolled back

over to the computer, pressed the button on the mouse,

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and in a vibrato but endearing electronic deep voice,

Macintosh became the ﬁrst computer to introduce itself.

“Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that

bag,” it began. The only thing it didn’t seem to know

how to do was to wait for the wild cheering and shrieks

that erupted. Instead of basking for a moment, it

barreled ahead. “Unaccustomed as I am to public

speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of

the ﬁrst time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a

computer you can’t lift.” Once again the roar almost

drowned out its ﬁnal lines. “Obviously, I can talk. But

right now I’d like to sit back and listen. So it is with

considerable pride that I introduce a man who’s been

like a father to me, Steve Jobs.”

Pandemonium erupted, with people in the crowd

jumping up and down and pumping their ﬁsts in a

frenzy. Jobs nodded slowly, a tight-lipped but broad

smile on his face, then looked down and started to

choke up. The ovation continued for ﬁve minutes.

After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3

that afternoon, a truck pulled into the parking lot and

Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a

hundred new Macintosh computers, each personalized

with a plaque. “Steve presented them one at a time to

each team member, with a handshake and a smile, as

the rest of us stood around cheering,” Hertzfeld

recalled. It had been a grueling ride, and many egos

had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough

management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor

Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have

pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it

likely have emerged from focus groups and committees.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from

Popular Science

asked Jobs what type of market

research he had done. Jobs responded by scofﬁng,

“Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research

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before he invented the telephone?”

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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GATES AND JOBS

When Orbits Intersect

The Macintosh Partnership

In astronomy, a binary system occurs when the

orbits of two stars are linked because of their

gravitational interaction. There have been analogous

situations in history, when an era is shaped by the

relationship and rivalry of two orbiting superstars: Albert

Einstein and Niels Bohr in twentieth-century physics, for

example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton

in early American governance. For the ﬁrst thirty years

of the personal computer age, beginning in the late

1970s, the deﬁning binary star system was composed

of two high-energy college dropouts both born in 1955.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, despite their similar

ambitions at the conﬂuence of technology and

business, had very different personalities and

backgrounds. Gates’s father was a prominent Seattle

lawyer, his mother a civic leader on a variety of

prestigious boards. He became a tech geek at the

area’s ﬁnest private school, Lakeside High, but he was

never a rebel, hippie, spiritual seeker, or member of the

counterculture. Instead of a Blue Box to rip off the

phone company, Gates created for his school a

program for scheduling classes, which helped him get

into ones with the right girls, and a car-counting

program for local trafﬁc engineers. He went to Harvard,

and when he decided to drop out it was not to ﬁnd

enlightenment with an Indian guru but to start a

computer software company.

Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs,

and his mind was more practical, disciplined, and

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abundant in analytic processing power. Jobs was more

intuitive and romantic and had a greater instinct for

making technology usable, design delightful, and

interfaces friendly. He had a passion for perfection,

which made him ﬁercely demanding, and he managed

by charisma and scattershot intensity. Gates was more

methodical; he held tightly scheduled product review

meetings where he would cut to the heart of issues with

lapidary skill. Both could be rude, but with Gates—who

early in his career seemed to have a typical geek’s

ﬂirtation with the fringes of the Asperger’s scale—the

cutting behavior tended to be less personal, based

more on intellectual incisiveness than emotional

callousness. Jobs would stare at people with a burning,

wounding intensity; Gates sometimes had trouble

making eye contact, but he was fundamentally humane.

“Each one thought he was smarter than the other

one, but Steve generally treated Bill as someone who

was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and

style,” said Andy Hertzfeld. “Bill looked down on Steve

because he couldn’t actually program.” From the

beginning of their relationship, Gates was fascinated by

Jobs and slightly envious of his mesmerizing effect on

people. But he also found him “fundamentally odd” and

“weirdly ﬂawed as a human being,” and he was put off

by Jobs’s rudeness and his tendency to be “either in the

mode of saying you were shit or trying to seduce you.”

For his part, Jobs found Gates unnervingly narrow.

“He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or

gone off to an ashram when he was younger,” Jobs

once declared.

Their differences in personality and character

would lead them to opposite sides of what would

become the fundamental divide in the digital age. Jobs

was a perfectionist who craved control and indulged in

the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and

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Apple became the exemplars of a digital strategy that

tightly integrated hardware, software, and content into a

seamless package. Gates was a smart, calculating, and

pragmatic analyst of business and technology; he was

open to licensing Microsoft’s operating system and

software to a variety of manufacturers.

After thirty years Gates would develop a grudging

respect for Jobs. “He really never knew much about

technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what

works,” he said. But Jobs never reciprocated by fully

appreciating Gates’s real strengths. “Bill is basically

unimaginative and has never invented anything, which

is why I think he’s more comfortable now in

philanthropy than technology,” Jobs said, unfairly. “He

just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

When the Macintosh was ﬁrst being developed,

Jobs went up to visit Gates at his ofﬁce near Seattle.

Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple II,

including a spreadsheet program called Multiplan, and

Jobs wanted to excite Gates and Co. about doing even

more for the forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in Gates’s

conference room, Jobs spun an enticing vision of a

computer for the masses, with a friendly interface, which

would be churned out by the millions in an automated

California factory. His description of the dream factory

sucking in the California silicon components and

turning out ﬁnished Macintoshes caused the Microsoft

team to code-name the project “Sand.” They even

reverse-engineered it into an acronym, for “Steve’s

amazing new device.”

Gates had launched Microsoft by writing a version

of BASIC, a programming language, for the Altair. Jobs

wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for the

Macintosh, because Wozniak—despite much prodding

by Jobs—had never enhanced his version of the Apple

II’s BASIC to handle ﬂoating-point numbers. In addition,

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Jobs wanted Microsoft to write application software—

such as word processing and spreadsheet programs—

for the Macintosh. At the time, Jobs was a king and

Gates still a courtier: In 1982 Apple’s annual sales were

$1 billion, while Microsoft’s were a mere $32 million.

Gates signed on to do graphical versions of a new

spreadsheet called Excel, a word-processing program

called Word, and BASIC.

Gates frequently went to Cupertino for

demonstrations of the Macintosh operating system, and

he was not very impressed. “I remember the ﬁrst time

we went down, Steve had this app where it was just

things bouncing around on the screen,” he said. “That

was the only app that ran.” Gates was also put off by

Jobs’s attitude. “It was kind of a weird seduction visit,

where Steve was saying, ‘We don’t really need you and

we’re doing this great thing, and it’s under the cover.’

He’s in his Steve Jobs sales mode, but kind of the sales

mode that also says, ‘I don’t need you, but I might let

you be involved.’”

The Macintosh pirates found Gates hard to take.

“You could tell that Bill Gates was not a very good

listener. He couldn’t bear to have anyone explain how

something worked to him—he had to leap ahead

instead and guess about how he thought it would work,”

Hertzfeld recalled. They showed him how the

Macintosh’s cursor moved smoothly across the screen

without ﬂickering. “What kind of hardware do you use to

draw the cursor?” Gates asked. Hertzfeld, who took

great pride that they could achieve their functionality

solely using software, replied, “We don’t have any

special hardware for it!” Gates insisted that it was

necessary to have special hardware to move the cursor

that way. “So what do you say to somebody like that?”

Bruce Horn, one of the Macintosh engineers, later said.

“It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of

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person that would understand or appreciate the

elegance of a Macintosh.”

Despite their mutual wariness, both teams were

excited by the prospect that Microsoft would create

graphical software for the Macintosh that would take

personal computing into a new realm, and they went to

dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate. Microsoft soon

dedicated a large team to the task. “We had more

people working on the Mac than he did,” Gates said.

“He had about fourteen or ﬁfteen people. We had like

twenty people. We really bet our life on it.” And even

though Jobs thought that they didn’t exhibit much taste,

the Microsoft programmers were persistent. “They came

out with applications that were terrible,” Jobs recalled,

“but they kept at it and they made them better.”

Eventually Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he

made a secret bargain with Gates: If Microsoft would

make Excel exclusively for the Macintosh for two years,

and not make a version for IBM PCs, then Jobs would

shut down his team working on a version of BASIC for

the Macintosh and instead indeﬁnitely license

Microsoft’s BASIC. Gates smartly took the deal, which

infuriated the Apple team whose project got canceled

and gave Microsoft a lever in future negotiations.

For the time being, Gates and Jobs forged a bond.

That summer they went to a conference hosted by the

industry analyst Ben Rosen at a Playboy Club retreat in

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where nobody knew about

the graphical interfaces that Apple was developing.

“Everybody was acting like the IBM PC was everything,

which was nice, but Steve and I were kind of smiling

that, hey, we’ve got something,” Gates recalled. “And

he’s kind of leaking, but nobody actually caught on.”

Gates became a regular at Apple retreats. “I went to

every luau,” said Gates. “I was part of the crew.”

Gates enjoyed his frequent visits to Cupertino,

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where he got to watch Jobs interact erratically with his

employees and display his obsessions. “Steve was in

his ultimate pied piper mode, proclaiming how the Mac

will change the world and overworking people like mad,

with incredible tensions and complex personal

relationships.” Sometimes Jobs would begin on a high,

then lapse into sharing his fears with Gates. “We’d go

down Friday night, have dinner, and Steve would just

be promoting that everything is great. Then the second

day, without fail, he’d be kind of, ‘Oh shit, is this thing

going to sell, oh God, I have to raise the price, I’m sorry I

did that to you, and my team is a bunch of idiots.’”

Gates saw Jobs’s reality distortion ﬁeld at play

when the Xerox Star was launched. At a joint team

dinner one Friday night, Jobs asked Gates how many

Stars had been sold thus far. Gates said six hundred.

The next day, in front of Gates and the whole team,

Jobs said that three hundred Stars had been sold,

forgetting that Gates had just told everyone it was

actually six hundred. “So his whole team starts looking

at me like, ‘Are you going to tell him that he’s full of

shit?’” Gates recalled. “And in that case I didn’t take the

bait.” On another occasion Jobs and his team were

visiting Microsoft and having dinner at the Seattle

Tennis Club. Jobs launched into a sermon about how

the Macintosh and its software would be so easy to use

that there would be no manuals. “It was like anybody

who ever thought that there would be a manual for any

Mac application was the greatest idiot,” said Gates.

“And we were like, ‘Does he really mean it? Should we

not tell him that we have people who are actually

working on manuals?’”

After a while the relationship became bumpier.

The original plan was to have some of the Microsoft

applications—such as Excel, Chart, and File—carry the

Apple logo and come bundled with the purchase of a

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Macintosh. “We were going to get $10 per app, per

machine,” said Gates. But this arrangement upset

competing software makers. In addition, it seemed that

some of Microsoft’s programs might be late. So Jobs

invoked a provision in his deal with Microsoft and

decided not to bundle its software; Microsoft would

have to scramble to distribute its software as products

sold directly to consumers.

Gates went along without much complaint. He was

already getting used to the fact that, as he put it, Jobs

could “play fast and loose,” and he suspected that the

unbundling would actually help Microsoft. “We could

make more money selling our software separately,”

Gates said. “It works better that way if you’re willing to

think you’re going to have reasonable market share.”

Microsoft ended up making its software for various other

platforms, and it began to give priority to the IBM PC

version of Microsoft Word rather than the Macintosh

version. In the end, Jobs’s decision to back out of the

bundling deal hurt Apple more than it did Microsoft.

When Excel for the Macintosh was released, Jobs

and Gates unveiled it together at a press dinner at New

York’s Tavern on the Green. Asked if Microsoft would

make a version of it for IBM PCs, Gates did not reveal

the bargain he had made with Jobs but merely

answered that “in time” that might happen. Jobs took

the microphone. “I’m sure ‘in time’ we’ll all be dead,” he

joked.

The Battle of the GUI

At that time, Microsoft was producing an operating

system, known as DOS, which it licensed to IBM and

compatible computers. It was based on an old-

fashioned command line interface that confronted users

with surly little prompts such as C:. As Jobs and his

team began to work closely with Microsoft, they grew

worried that it would copy Macintosh’s graphical user

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interface. Andy Hertzfeld noticed that his contact at

Microsoft was asking detailed questions about how the

Macintosh operating system worked. “I told Steve that I

suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac,”

he recalled.

They were right to worry. Gates believed that

graphical interfaces were the future, and that Microsoft

had just as much right as Apple did to copy what had

been developed at Xerox PARC. As he freely admitted

later, “We sort of say, ‘Hey, we believe in graphics

interfaces, we saw the Xerox Alto too.’”

In their original deal, Jobs had convinced Gates to

agree that Microsoft would not create graphical

software for anyone other than Apple until a year after

the Macintosh shipped in January 1983. Unfortunately

for Apple, it did not provide for the possibility that the

Macintosh launch would be delayed for a year. So

Gates was within his rights when, in November 1983,

he revealed that Microsoft planned to develop a new

operating system for IBM PCs featuring a graphical

interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for point-

and-click navigation. It would be called Windows. Gates

hosted a Jobs-like product announcement, the most

lavish thus far in Microsoft’s history, at the Helmsley

Palace Hotel in New York.

Jobs was furious. He knew there was little he

could do about it—Microsoft’s deal with Apple not to do

competing graphical software was running out—but he

lashed out nonetheless. “Get Gates down here

immediately,” he ordered Mike Boich, who was Apple’s

evangelist to other software companies. Gates arrived,

alone and willing to discuss things with Jobs. “He called

me down to get pissed off at me,” Gates recalled. “I went

down to Cupertino, like a command performance. I told

him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said to him, ‘We’re

betting our company on graphical interfaces.’”

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They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates

found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who

were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t

disappoint his troops. “You’re ripping us off!” he

shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from

us!” Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly,

looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his

squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. “Well,

Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it.

I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor

named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV

set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Gates’s two-day visit provoked the full range of

Jobs’s emotional responses and manipulation

techniques. It also made clear that the Apple-Microsoft

symbiosis had become a scorpion dance, with both

sides circling warily, knowing that a sting by either

could cause problems for both. After the confrontation in

the conference room, Gates quietly gave Jobs a private

demo of what was being planned for Windows. “Steve

didn’t know what to say,” Gates recalled. “He could

either say, ‘Oh, this is a violation of something,’ but he

didn’t. He chose to say, ‘Oh, it’s actually really a piece

of shit.’” Gates was thrilled, because it gave him a

chance to calm Jobs down for a moment. “I said, ‘Yes,

it’s a nice little piece of shit.’” So Jobs went through a

gamut of other emotions. “During the course of this

meeting, he’s just ruder than shit,” Gates said. “And

then there’s a part where he’s almost crying, like, ‘Oh,

just give me a chance to get this thing off.’” Gates

responded by becoming very calm. “I’m good at when

people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.”

As he often did when he wanted to have a serious

conversation, Jobs suggested they go on a long walk.

They trekked the streets of Cupertino, back and forth to

De Anza college, stopping at a diner and then walking

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some more. “We had to take a walk, which is not one of

my management techniques,” Gates said. “That was

when he began saying things like, ‘Okay, okay, but

don’t make it too much like what we’re doing.’”

As it turned out, Microsoft wasn’t able to get

Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the fall of 1985.

Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the

elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled

windows rather than the magical clipping of

overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised.

Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it.

Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft

products, persistence eventually made Windows better

and then dominant.

Jobs never got over his anger. “They just ripped us

off completely, because Gates has no shame,” Jobs told

me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this, Gates

responded, “If he believes that, he really has entered

into one of his own reality distortion ﬁelds.” In a legal

sense, Gates was right, as courts over the years have

subsequently ruled. And on a practical level, he had a

strong case as well. Even though Apple made a deal for

the right to use what it saw at Xerox PARC, it was

inevitable that other companies would develop similar

graphical interfaces. As Apple found out, the “look and

feel” of a computer interface design is a hard thing to

protect.

And yet Jobs’s dismay was understandable. Apple

had been more innovative, imaginative, elegant in

execution, and brilliant in design. But even though

Microsoft created a crudely copied series of products, it

would end up winning the war of operating systems.

This exposed an aesthetic ﬂaw in how the universe

worked: The best and most innovative products don’t

always win. A decade later, this truism caused Jobs to

let loose a rant that was somewhat arrogant and over-

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the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. “The only

problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they

have absolutely no taste,” he said. “I don’t mean that in

a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that

they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring

much culture into their product.”

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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ICARUS

What Goes Up . . .

Flying High

The launch of the Macintosh in January 1984

propelled Jobs into an even higher orbit of celebrity, as

was evident during a trip to Manhattan he took at the

time. He went to a party that Yoko Ono threw for her

son, Sean Lennon, and gave the nine-year-old a

Macintosh. The boy loved it. The artists Andy Warhol

and Keith Haring were there, and they were so

enthralled by what they could create with the machine

that the contemporary art world almost took an ominous

turn. “I drew a circle,” Warhol exclaimed proudly after

using QuickDraw. Warhol insisted that Jobs take a

computer to Mick Jagger. When Jobs arrived at the rock

star’s townhouse, Jagger seemed bafﬂed. He didn’t

quite know who Jobs was. Later Jobs told his team, “I

think he was on drugs. Either that or he’s brain-

damaged.” Jagger’s daughter Jade, however, took to

the computer immediately and started drawing with

MacPaint, so Jobs gave it to her instead.

He bought the top-ﬂoor duplex apartment that he’d

shown Sculley in the San Remo on Manhattan’s

Central Park West and hired James Freed of I. M. Pei’s

ﬁrm to renovate it, but he never moved in. (He would

later sell it to Bono for $15 million.) He also bought an

old Spanish colonial–style fourteen-bedroom mansion

in Woodside, in the hills above Palo Alto, that had been

built by a copper baron, which he moved into but never

got around to furnishing.

At Apple his status revived. Instead of seeking

ways to curtail Jobs’s authority, Sculley gave him more:

The Lisa and Macintosh divisions were folded together,

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with Jobs in charge. He was ﬂying high, but this did not

serve to make him more mellow. Indeed there was a

memorable display of his brutal honesty when he stood

in front of the combined Lisa and Macintosh teams to

describe how they would be merged. His Macintosh

group leaders would get all of the top positions, he said,

and a quarter of the Lisa staff would be laid off. “You

guys failed,” he said, looking directly at those who had

worked on the Lisa. “You’re a B team. B players. Too

many people here are B or C players, so today we are

releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at

our sister companies here in the valley.”

Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams,

thought it was not only callous, but unfair. “These

people had worked really hard and were brilliant

engineers,” he said. But Jobs had latched onto what he

believed was a key management lesson from his

Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you

want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a

team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they

then attract a few more B players, and soon you will

even have some C players,” he recalled. “The

Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to

work only with other A players, which means you can’t

indulge B players.”

For the time being, Jobs and Sculley were able to

convince themselves that their friendship was still

strong. They professed their fondness so effusively and

often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at

a Hallmark card display. The ﬁrst anniversary of

Sculley’s arrival came in May 1984, and to celebrate

Jobs lured him to a dinner party at Le Mouton Noir, an

elegant restaurant in the hills southwest of Cupertino.

To Sculley’s surprise, Jobs had gathered the Apple

board, its top managers, and even some East Coast

investors. As they all congratulated him during

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cocktails, Sculley recalled, “a beaming Steve stood in

the background, nodding his head up and down and

wearing a Cheshire Cat smile on his face.” Jobs began

the dinner with a fulsome toast. “The happiest two days

for me were when Macintosh shipped and when John

Sculley agreed to join Apple,” he said. “This has been

the greatest year I’ve ever had in my whole life,

because I’ve learned so much from John.” He then

presented Sculley with a montage of memorabilia from

the year.

In response, Sculley effused about the joys of

being Jobs’s partner for the past year, and he

concluded with a line that, for different reasons,

everyone at the table found memorable. “Apple has one

leader,” he said, “Steve and me.” He looked across the

room, caught Jobs’s eye, and watched him smile. “It

was as if we were communicating with each other,”

Sculley recalled. But he also noticed that Arthur Rock

and some of the others were looking quizzical, perhaps

even skeptical. They were worried that Jobs was

completely rolling him. They had hired Sculley to

control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the

one in control. “Sculley was so eager for Steve’s

approval that he was unable to stand up to him,” Rock

recalled.

Keeping Jobs happy and deferring to his expertise

may have seemed like a smart strategy to Sculley. But

he failed to realize that it was not in Jobs’s nature to

share control. Deference did not come naturally to him.

He began to become more vocal about how he thought

the company should be run. At the 1984 business

strategy meeting, for example, he pushed to make the

company’s centralized sales and marketing staffs bid

on the right to provide their services to the various

product divisions. (This would have meant, for example,

that the Macintosh group could decide not to use

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Apple’s marketing team and instead create one of its

own.) No one else was in favor, but Jobs kept trying to

ram it through. “People were looking to me to take

control, to get him to sit down and shut up, but I didn’t,”

Sculley recalled. As the meeting broke up, he heard

someone whisper, “Why doesn’t Sculley shut him up?”

When Jobs decided to build a state-of-the-art

factory in Fremont to manufacture the Macintosh, his

aesthetic passions and controlling nature kicked into

high gear. He wanted the machinery to be painted in

bright hues, like the Apple logo, but he spent so much

time going over paint chips that Apple’s manufacturing

director, Matt Carter, ﬁnally just installed them in their

usual beige and gray. When Jobs took a tour, he

ordered that the machines be repainted in the bright

colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision

equipment, and repainting the machines could cause

problems. He turned out to be right. One of the most

expensive machines, which got painted bright blue,

ended up not working properly and was dubbed

“Steve’s folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much

energy to ﬁght him, and it was usually over something

so pointless that ﬁnally I had enough,” he recalled.

Jobs tapped as a replacement Debi Coleman, the

spunky but good-natured Macintosh ﬁnancial ofﬁcer

who had once won the team’s annual award for the

person who best stood up to Jobs. But she knew how to

cater to his whims when necessary. When Apple’s art

director, Clement Mok, informed her that Jobs wanted

the walls to be pure white, she protested, “You can’t

paint a factory pure white. There’s going to be dust and

stuff all over.” Mok replied, “There’s no white that’s too

white for Steve.” She ended up going along. With its

pure white walls and its bright blue, yellow, and red

machines, the factory ﬂoor “looked like an Alexander

Calder showcase,” said Coleman.

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When asked about his obsessive concern over the

look of the factory, Jobs said it was a way to ensure a

passion for perfection:

I’d go out to the factory, and I’d put on a white

glove to check for dust. I’d ﬁnd it everywhere—on

machines, on the tops of the racks, on the ﬂoor. And I’d

ask Debi to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should

be able to eat off the ﬂoor of the factory. Well, this drove

Debi up the wall. She didn’t understand why. And I

couldn’t articulate it back then. See, I’d been very

inﬂuenced by what I’d seen in Japan. Part of what I

greatly admired there—and part of what we were

lacking in our factory—was a sense of teamwork and

discipline. If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that

place spotless, then we weren’t going to have the

discipline to keep all these machines running.

One Sunday morning Jobs brought his father to

see the factory. Paul Jobs had always been fastidious

about making sure that his craftsmanship was exacting

and his tools in order, and his son was proud to show

that he could do the same. Coleman came along to give

the tour. “Steve was, like, beaming,” she recalled. “He

was so proud to show his father this creation.” Jobs

explained how everything worked, and his father

seemed truly admiring. “He kept looking at his father,

who touched everything and loved how clean and

perfect everything looked.”

Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle

Mitterrand toured the factory. The Cuba-admiring wife of

France’s socialist president François Mitterrand asked a

lot of questions, through her translator, about the

working conditions, while Jobs, who had grabbed Alain

Rossmann to serve as his translator, kept trying to

explain the advanced robotics and technology. After

Jobs talked about the just-in-time production schedules,

she asked about overtime pay. He was annoyed, so he

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described how automation helped him keep down labor

costs, a subject he knew would not delight her. “Is it

hard work?” she asked. “How much vacation time do

they get?” Jobs couldn’t contain himself. “If she’s so

interested in their welfare,” he said to her translator, “tell

her she can come work here any time.” The translator

turned pale and said nothing. After a moment

Rossmann stepped in to say, in French, “M. Jobs says

he thanks you for your visit and your interest in the

factory.” Neither Jobs nor Madame Mitterrand knew

what happened, Rossmann recalled, but her translator

looked very relieved.

Afterward, as he sped his Mercedes down the

freeway toward Cupertino, Jobs fumed to Rossmann

about Madame Mitterrand’s attitude. At one point he

was going just over 100 miles per hour when a

policeman stopped him and began writing a ticket. After

a few minutes, as the ofﬁcer scribbled away, Jobs

honked. “Excuse me?” the policeman said. Jobs

replied, “I’m in a hurry.” Amazingly, the ofﬁcer didn’t get

mad. He simply ﬁnished writing the ticket and warned

that if Jobs was caught going over 55 again he would

be sent to jail. As soon as the policeman left, Jobs got

back on the road and accelerated to 100. “He

absolutely believed that the normal rules didn’t apply to

him,” Rossmann marveled.

His wife, Joanna Hoffman, saw the same thing

when she accompanied Jobs to Europe a few months

after the Macintosh was launched. “He was just

completely obnoxious and thinking he could get away

with anything,” she recalled. In Paris she had arranged

a formal dinner with French software developers, but

Jobs suddenly decided he didn’t want to go. Instead he

shut the car door on Hoffman and told her he was going

to see the poster artist Folon instead. “The developers

were so pissed off they wouldn’t shake our hands,” she

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said.

In Italy, he took an instant dislike to Apple’s

general manager, a soft rotund guy who had come from

a conventional business. Jobs told him bluntly that he

was not impressed with his team or his sales strategy.

“You don’t deserve to be able to sell the Mac,” Jobs

said coldly. But that was mild compared to his reaction

to the restaurant the hapless manager had chosen.

Jobs demanded a vegan meal, but the waiter very

elaborately proceeded to dish out a sauce ﬁlled with

sour cream. Jobs got so nasty that Hoffman had to

threaten him. She whispered that if he didn’t calm

down, she was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap.

The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on

the European trip concerned sales forecasts. Using his

reality distortion ﬁeld, Jobs was always pushing his

team to come up with higher projections. He kept

threatening the European managers that he wouldn’t

give them any allocations unless they projected bigger

forecasts. They insisted on being realistic, and

Hoffmann had to referee. “By the end of the trip, my

whole body was shaking uncontrollably,” Hoffman

recalled.

It was on this trip that Jobs ﬁrst got to know Jean-

Louis Gassée, Apple’s manager in France. Gassée was

among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the

trip. “He has his own way with the truth,” Gassée later

remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to out-

bully him.” When Jobs made his usual threat about

cutting down on France’s allocations if Gassée didn’t

jack up sales projections, Gassée got angry. “I

remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop,

and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man

myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could

recognize that in Steve.”

Gassée was impressed, however, at how Jobs

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could turn on the charm when he wanted to. François

Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of

informatique pour tous

—computing for all—and various

academic experts in technology, such as Marvin Minsky

and Nicholas Negroponte, came over to sing in the

choir. Jobs gave a talk to the group at the Hotel Bristol

and painted a picture of how France could move ahead

if it put computers in all of its schools. Paris also brought

out the romantic in him. Both Gassée and Negroponte

tell tales of him pining over women while there.

Falling

After the burst of excitement that accompanied the

release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper off in the

second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental

one: It was a dazzling but woefully slow and

underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla

could mask that. Its beauty was that its user interface

looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark

screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly

command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A

character on a text-based display took less than a byte

of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by

pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty

or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by

shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the

Macintosh made do with 128K.

Another problem was the lack of an internal hard

disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a “Xerox

bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He

insisted that the Macintosh have just one ﬂoppy disk

drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up with

a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap ﬂoppy

disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the

Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs’s

dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from

the calm of a computer. This caused many component

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failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname “the

beige toaster,” which did not enhance its popularity. It

was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the

ﬁrst few months, but when people became more aware

of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented,

“The reality distortion ﬁeld can serve as a spur, but then

reality itself hits.”

At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually

nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten

thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical,

decision out of desperation. He decided to take the

inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-

emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the

“Macintosh XL.” Since the Lisa had been discontinued

and would not be restarted, it was an unusual instance

of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in.

“I was furious because the Mac XL wasn’t real,” said

Hoffman. “It was just to blow the excess Lisas out the

door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the

horrible hoax, so I resigned.”

The dark mood was evident in the ad that was

developed in January 1985, which was supposed to

reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant “1984”

ad. Unfortunately there was a fundamental difference:

The ﬁrst ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but

the storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat

for the new ad, titled “Lemmings,” showed dark-suited,

blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to

their death. From the beginning both Jobs and Sculley

were uneasy. It didn’t seem as if it would convey a

positive or glorious image of Apple, but instead would

merely insult every manager who had bought an IBM.

Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the

agency folks pushed back. “You guys didn’t want to run

‘1984’ last year,” one of them said. According to

Sculley, Lee Clow added, “I will put my whole

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reputation, everything, on this commercial.” When the

ﬁlmed version, done by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony,

came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless

managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-

paced version of the

Snow White

song “Heigh-ho,

Heigh-ho,” and the dreary ﬁlmmaking made it even

more depressing than the storyboards portended. “I

can’t believe you’re going to insult businesspeople

across America by running that,” Debi Coleman yelled

at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing

meetings, she stood up to make her point about how

much she hated it. “I literally put a resignation letter on

his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront

to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a

toehold with desktop publishing.”

Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the

agency’s entreaties and ran the commercial during the

Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford

Stadium with Sculley’s wife, Leezy (who couldn’t stand

Jobs), and Jobs’s new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the

commercial was shown near the end of the fourth

quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the

overhead screen and had little reaction. Across the

country, most of the response was negative. “It insulted

the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the

president of a market research ﬁrm told

Fortune

Apple’s marketing manager suggested afterward that

the company might want to buy an ad in the

Wall Street

Journal

apologizing. Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple

did that his agency would buy the facing page and

apologize for the apology.

Jobs’s discomfort, with both the ad and the

situation at Apple in general, was on display when he

traveled to New York in January to do another round of

one-on-one press interviews. Andy Cunningham, from

Regis McKenna’s ﬁrm, was in charge of hand-holding

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and logistics at the Carlyle. When Jobs arrived, he told

her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even

though it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin

the next day. The piano was not in the right place; the

strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest

objection was that he didn’t like the ﬂowers. He wanted

calla lilies. “We got into a big ﬁght on what a calla lily

is,” Cunningham recalled. “I know what they are,

because I had them at my wedding, but he insisted on

having a different type of lily and said I was ‘stupid’

because I didn’t know what a real calla lily was.” So

Cunningham went out and, this being New York, was

able to ﬁnd a place open at midnight where she could

get the lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room

rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was

wearing. “That suit’s disgusting,” he told her.

Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with

undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. “Look,

I know you’re angry, and I know how you feel,” she said.

“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot

back, “no fucking idea what it’s like to be me.”

Thirty Years Old

Turning thirty is a milestone for most people,

especially those of the generation that proclaimed it

would never trust anyone over that age. To celebrate

his own thirtieth, in February 1985, Jobs threw a

lavishly formal but also playful—black tie and tennis

shoes—party for one thousand in the ballroom of the St.

Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read,

“There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the ﬁrst 30

years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30

years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me

celebrate mine.”

One table featured software moguls, including Bill

Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had old friends such as

Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman

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dressed in a tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith

had rented tuxes and wore ﬂoppy tennis shoes, which

made it all the more memorable when they danced to

the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco

Symphony Orchestra.

Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob

Dylan had declined. She sang mainly from her standard

repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like

“The Girl from Ipanema” to be about the boy from

Cupertino. When she asked for some requests, Jobs

called out a few. She concluded with a slow rendition of

“Happy Birthday.”

Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to

“technology’s foremost visionary.” Wozniak also came

up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the Zaltair

hoax from the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where

the Apple II had been introduced. The venture capitalist

Don Valentine marveled at the change in the decade

since that time. “He went from being a Ho Chi Minh

look-alike, who said never trust anyone over thirty, to a

person who gives himself a fabulous thirtieth birthday

with Ella Fitzgerald,” he said.

Many people had picked out special gifts for a

person who was not easy to shop for. Debi Coleman,

for example, found a ﬁrst edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

The Last Tycoon

. But Jobs, in an act that was odd yet

not out of character, left all of the gifts in a hotel room.

Wozniak and some of the Apple veterans, who did not

take to the goat cheese and salmon mousse that was

served, met after the party and went out to eat at a

Denny’s.

“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s

able to really contribute something amazing,” Jobs said

wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long

and intimate interview in

Playboy

the month he turned

thirty. “Of course, there are some people who are

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innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but

they’re rare.” The interview touched on many subjects,

but Jobs’s most poignant ruminations were about

growing old and facing the future:

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in

your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In

most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like

grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that

throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life

and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other,

like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not

there, but I’ll always come back. . . .

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an

artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to

be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever

you were and throw them away.

The more the outside world tries to reinforce an

image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist,

which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I

have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.”

And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later

they re-emerge a little differently.

With each of those statements, Jobs seemed to

have a premonition that his life would soon be

changing. Perhaps the thread of his life would indeed

weave in and out of the thread of Apple’s. Perhaps it

was time to throw away some of what he had been.

Perhaps it was time to say “Bye, I have to go,” and then

reemerge later, thinking differently.

Exodus

Andy Hertzfeld had taken a leave of absence after

the Macintosh came out in 1984. He needed to

recharge his batteries and get away from his

supervisor, Bob Belleville, whom he didn’t like. One day

he learned that Jobs had given out bonuses of up to

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$50,000 to engineers on the Macintosh team. So he

went to Jobs to ask for one. Jobs responded that

Belleville had decided not to give the bonuses to

people who were on leave. Hertzfeld later heard that

the decision had actually been made by Jobs, so he

confronted him. At ﬁrst Jobs equivocated, then he said,

“Well, let’s assume what you are saying is true. How

does that change things?” Hertzfeld said that if Jobs

was withholding the bonus as a reason for him to come

back, then he wouldn’t come back as a matter of

principle. Jobs relented, but it left Hertzfeld with a bad

taste.

When his leave was coming to an end, Hertzfeld

made an appointment to have dinner with Jobs, and

they walked from his ofﬁce to an Italian restaurant a few

blocks away. “I really want to return,” he told Jobs. “But

things seem really messed up right now.” Jobs was

vaguely annoyed and distracted, but Hertzfeld plunged

ahead. “The software team is completely demoralized

and has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is

so frustrated that he won’t last to the end of the year.”

At that point Jobs cut him off. “You don’t know what

you’re talking about!” he said. “The Macintosh team is

doing great, and I’m having the best time of my life right

now. You’re just completely out of touch.” His stare was

withering, but he also tried to look amused at

Hertzfeld’s assessment.

“If you really believe that, I don’t think there’s any

way that I can come back,” Hertzfeld replied glumly.

“The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn’t even

exist anymore.”

“The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you,”

Jobs replied. “I want you to come back, but if you don’t

want to, that’s up to you. You don’t matter as much as

you think you do, anyway.”

Hertzfeld didn’t come back.

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By early 1985 Burrell Smith was also ready to

leave. He had worried that it would be hard to quit if

Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality distortion ﬁeld

was usually too strong for him to resist. So he plotted

with Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. “I’ve got it!”

he told Hertzfeld one day. “I know the perfect way to quit

that will nullify the reality distortion ﬁeld. I’ll just walk into

Steve’s ofﬁce, pull down my pants, and urinate on his

desk. What could he say to that? It’s guaranteed to

work.” The betting on the Mac team was that even brave

Burrell Smith would not have the gumption to do that.

When he ﬁnally decided he had to make his break,

around the time of Jobs’s birthday bash, he made an

appointment to see Jobs. He was surprised to ﬁnd Jobs

smiling broadly when he walked in. “Are you gonna do

it? Are you really gonna do it?” Jobs asked. He had

heard about the plan.

Smith looked at him. “Do I have to? I’ll do it if I

have to.” Jobs gave him a look, and Smith decided it

wasn’t necessary. So he resigned less dramatically and

walked out on good terms.

He was quickly followed by another of the great

Macintosh engineers, Bruce Horn. When Horn went in

to say good-bye, Jobs told him, “Everything that’s wrong

with the Mac is your fault.”

Horn responded, “Well, actually, Steve, a lot of

things that are right with the Mac are my fault, and I had

to ﬁght like crazy to get those things in.”

“You’re right,” admitted Jobs. “I’ll give you 15,000

shares to stay.” When Horn declined the offer, Jobs

showed his warmer side. “Well, give me a hug,” he said.

And so they hugged.

But the biggest news that month was the departure

from Apple, yet again, of its cofounder, Steve Wozniak.

Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel

engineer in the Apple II division, serving as a humble

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mascot of the roots of the company and staying as far

away from management and corporate politics as he

could. He felt, with justiﬁcation, that Jobs was not

appreciative of the Apple II, which remained the cash

cow of the company and accounted for 70% of its sales

at Christmas 1984. “People in the Apple II group were

being treated as very unimportant by the rest of the

company,” he later said. “This was despite the fact that

the Apple II was by far the largest-selling product in our

company for ages, and would be for years to come.” He

even roused himself to do something out of character;

he picked up the phone one day and called Sculley,

berating him for lavishing so much attention on Jobs

and the Macintosh division.

Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to

start a new company that would make a universal

remote control device he had invented. It would control

your television, stereo, and other electronic devices

with a simple set of buttons that you could easily

program. He informed the head of engineering at the

Apple II division, but he didn’t feel he was important

enough to go out of channels and tell Jobs or Markkula.

So Jobs ﬁrst heard about it when the news leaked in the

Wall Street Journal

. In his earnest way, Wozniak had

openly answered the reporter’s questions when he

called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving

short shrift to the Apple II division. “Apple’s direction has

been horrendously wrong for ﬁve years,” he said.

Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs

traveled together to the White House, where Ronald

Reagan presented them with the ﬁrst National Medal of

Technology. The president quoted what President

Rutherford Hayes had said when ﬁrst shown a

telephone—“An amazing invention, but who would ever

want to use one?”—and then quipped, “I thought at the

time that he might be mistaken.” Because of the

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awkward situation surrounding Wozniak’s departure,

Apple did not throw a celebratory dinner. So Jobs and

Wozniak went for a walk afterward and ate at a

sandwich shop. They chatted amiably, Wozniak

recalled, and avoided any discussion of their

disagreements.

Wozniak wanted to make the parting amicable. It

was his style. So he agreed to stay on as a part-time

Apple employee at a $20,000 salary and represent the

company at events and trade shows. That could have

been a graceful way to drift apart. But Jobs could not

leave well enough alone. One Saturday, a few weeks

after they had visited Washington together, Jobs went to

the new Palo Alto studios of Hartmut Esslinger, whose

company frogdesign had moved there to handle its

design work for Apple. There he happened to see

sketches that the ﬁrm had made for Wozniak’s new

remote control device, and he ﬂew into a rage. Apple

had a clause in its contract that gave it the right to bar

frogdesign from working on other computer-related

projects, and Jobs invoked it. “I informed them,” he

recalled, “that working with Woz wouldn’t be acceptable

to us.”

When the

Wall Street Journal

heard what

happened, it got in touch with Wozniak, who, as usual,

was open and honest. He said that Jobs was punishing

him. “Steve Jobs has a hate for me, probably because

of the things I said about Apple,” he told the reporter.

Jobs’s action was remarkably petty, but it was also

partly caused by the fact that he understood, in ways

that others did not, that the look and style of a product

served to brand it. A device that had Wozniak’s name

on it and used the same design language as Apple’s

products might be mistaken for something that Apple

had produced. “It’s not personal,” Jobs told the

newspaper, explaining that he wanted to make sure

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that Wozniak’s remote wouldn’t look like something

made by Apple. “We don’t want to see our design

language used on other products. Woz has to ﬁnd his

own resources. He can’t leverage off Apple’s resources;

we can’t treat him specially.”

Jobs volunteered to pay for the work that

frogdesign had already done for Wozniak, but even so

the executives at the ﬁrm were taken aback. When Jobs

demanded that they send him the drawings done for

Wozniak or destroy them, they refused. Jobs had to

send them a letter invoking Apple’s contractual right.

Herbert Pfeifer, the design director of the ﬁrm, risked

Jobs’s wrath by publicly dismissing his claim that the

dispute with Wozniak was not personal. “It’s a power

play,” Pfeifer told the

Journal

. “They have personal

problems between them.”

Hertzfeld was outraged when he heard what Jobs

had done. He lived about twelve blocks from Jobs, who

sometimes would drop by on his walks. “I got so furious

about the Wozniak remote episode that when Steve

next came over, I wouldn’t let him in the house,”

Hertzfeld recalled. “He knew he was wrong, but he tried

to rationalize, and maybe in his distorted reality he was

able to.” Wozniak, always a teddy bear even when

annoyed, hired another design ﬁrm and even agreed to

stay on Apple’s retainer as a spokesman.

Showdown, Spring 1985

There were many reasons for the rift between Jobs

and Sculley in the spring of 1985. Some were merely

business disagreements, such as Sculley’s attempt to

maximize proﬁts by keeping the Macintosh price high

when Jobs wanted to make it more affordable. Others

were weirdly psychological and stemmed from the torrid

and unlikely infatuation they initially had with each

other. Sculley had painfully craved Jobs’s affection,

Jobs had eagerly sought a father ﬁgure and mentor,

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and when the ardor began to cool there was an

emotional backwash. But at its core, the growing breach

had two fundamental causes, one on each side.

For Jobs, the problem was that Sculley never

became a product person. He didn’t make the effort, or

show the capacity, to understand the ﬁne points of what

they were making. On the contrary, he found Jobs’s

passion for tiny technical tweaks and design details to

be obsessive and counterproductive. He had spent his

career selling sodas and snacks whose recipes were

largely irrelevant to him. He wasn’t naturally passionate

about products, which was among the most damning

sins that Jobs could imagine. “I tried to educate him

about the details of engineering,” Jobs recalled, “but he

had no idea how products are created, and after a while

it just turned into arguments. But I learned that my

perspective was right. Products are everything.” He

came to see Sculley as clueless, and his contempt was

exacerbated by Sculley’s hunger for his affection and

delusions that they were very similar.

For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he

was no longer in courtship or manipulative mode, was

frequently obnoxious, rude, selﬁsh, and nasty to other

people. He found Jobs’s boorish behavior as

despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s lack of passion for

product details. Sculley was kind, caring, and polite to a

fault. At one point they were planning to meet with

Xerox’s vice chair Bill Glavin, and Sculley begged Jobs

to behave. But as soon as they sat down, Jobs told

Glavin, “You guys don’t have any clue what you’re

doing,” and the meeting broke up. “I’m sorry, but I

couldn’t help myself,” Jobs told Sculley. It was one of

many such cases. As Atari’s Al Alcorn later observed,

“Sculley believed in keeping people happy and

worrying about relationships. Steve didn’t give a shit

about that. But he did care about the product in a way

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that Sculley never could, and he was able to avoid

having too many bozos working at Apple by insulting

anyone who wasn’t an A player.”

The board became increasingly alarmed at the

turmoil, and in early 1985 Arthur Rock and some other

disgruntled directors delivered a stern lecture to both.

They told Sculley that he was supposed to be running

the company, and he should start doing so with more

authority and less eagerness to be pals with Jobs. They

told Jobs that he was supposed to be ﬁxing the mess at

the Macintosh division and not telling other divisions

how to do their job. Afterward Jobs retreated to his

ofﬁce and typed on his Macintosh, “I will not criticize the

rest of the organization, I will not criticize the rest of the

organization . . .”

As the Macintosh continued to disappoint—sales

in March 1985 were only 10% of the budget forecast—

Jobs holed up in his ofﬁce fuming or wandered the halls

berating everyone else for the problems. His mood

swings became worse, and so did his abuse of those

around him. Middle-level managers began to rise up

against him. The marketing chief Mike Murray sought a

private meeting with Sculley at an industry conference.

As they were going up to Sculley’s hotel room, Jobs

spotted them and asked to come along. Murray asked

him not to. He told Sculley that Jobs was wreaking

havoc and had to be removed from managing the

Macintosh division. Sculley replied that he was not yet

resigned to having a showdown with Jobs. Murray later

sent a memo directly to Jobs criticizing the way he

treated colleagues and denouncing “management by

character assassination.”

For a few weeks it seemed as if there might be a

solution to the turmoil. Jobs became fascinated by a

ﬂat-screen technology developed by a ﬁrm near Palo

Alto called Woodside Design, run by an eccentric

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engineer named Steve Kitchen. He also was impressed

by another startup that made a touchscreen display that

could be controlled by your ﬁnger, so you didn’t need a

mouse. Together these might help fulﬁll Jobs’s vision of

creating a “Mac in a book.” On a walk with Kitchen, Jobs

spotted a building in nearby Menlo Park and declared

that they should open a skunkworks facility to work on

these ideas. It could be called AppleLabs and Jobs

could run it, going back to the joy of having a small

team and developing a great new product.

Sculley was thrilled by the possibility. It would

solve most of his management issues, moving Jobs

back to what he did best and getting rid of his disruptive

presence in Cupertino. Sculley also had a candidate to

replace Jobs as manager of the Macintosh division:

Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s chief in France, who had

suffered through Jobs’s visit there. Gassée ﬂew to

Cupertino and said he would take the job if he got a

guarantee that he would run the division rather than

work under Jobs. One of the board members, Phil

Schlein of Macy’s, tried to convince Jobs that he would

be better off thinking up new products and inspiring a

passionate little team.

But after some reﬂection, Jobs decided that was

not the path he wanted. He declined to cede control to

Gassée, who wisely went back to Paris to avoid the

power clash that was becoming inevitable. For the rest

of the spring, Jobs vacillated. There were times when

he wanted to assert himself as a corporate manager,

even writing a memo urging cost savings by eliminating

free beverages and ﬁrst-class air travel, and other times

when he agreed with those who were encouraging him

to go off and run a new AppleLabs R&D group.

In March Murray let loose with another memo that

he marked “Do not circulate” but gave to multiple

colleagues. “In my three years at Apple, I’ve never

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observed so much confusion, fear, and dysfunction as

in the past 90 days,” he began. “We are perceived by

the rank and ﬁle as a boat without a rudder, drifting

away into foggy oblivion.” Murray had been on both

sides of the fence; at times he conspired with Jobs to

undermine Sculley, but in this memo he laid the blame

on Jobs. “Whether the

cause of

because of

the

dysfunction, Steve Jobs now controls a seemingly

impenetrable power base.”

At the end of that month, Sculley ﬁnally worked up

the nerve to tell Jobs that he should give up running the

Macintosh division. He walked over to Jobs’s ofﬁce one

evening and brought the human resources manager,

Jay Elliot, to make the confrontation more formal. “There

is no one who admires your brilliance and vision more

than I do,” Sculley began. He had uttered such ﬂatteries

before, but this time it was clear that there would be a

brutal “but” punctuating the thought. And there was. “But

this is really not going to work,” he declared. The

ﬂatteries punctured by “buts” continued. “We have

developed a great friendship with each other,” he said,

“but I have lost conﬁdence in your ability to run the

Macintosh division.” He also berated Jobs for

badmouthing him as a bozo behind his back.

Jobs looked stunned and countered with an odd

challenge, that Sculley should help and coach him

more: “You’ve got to spend more time with me.” Then

he lashed back. He told Sculley he knew nothing about

computers, was doing a terrible job running the

company, and had disappointed Jobs ever since

coming to Apple. Then he began to cry. Sculley sat

there biting his ﬁngernails.

“I’m going to bring this up with the board,” Sculley

declared. “I’m going to recommend that you step down

from your operating position of running the Macintosh

division. I want you to know that.” He urged Jobs not to

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resist and to agree instead to work on developing new

technologies and products.

Jobs jumped from his seat and turned his intense

stare on Sculley. “I don’t believe you’re going to do

that,” he said. “If you do that, you’re going to destroy the

company.”

Over the next few weeks Jobs’s behavior

ﬂuctuated wildly. At one moment he would be talking

about going off to run AppleLabs, but in the next

moment he would be enlisting support to have Sculley

ousted. He would reach out to Sculley, then lash out at

him behind his back, sometimes on the same night.

One night at 9 he called Apple’s general counsel Al

Eisenstat to say he was losing conﬁdence in Sculley

and needed his help convincing the board to ﬁre him; at

11 the same night, he phoned Sculley to say, “You’re

terriﬁc, and I just want you to know I love working with

you.”

At the board meeting on April 11, Sculley ofﬁcially

reported that he wanted to ask Jobs to step down as the

head of the Macintosh division and focus instead on

new product development. Arthur Rock, the most crusty

and independent of the board members, then spoke.

He was fed up with both of them: with Sculley for not

having the guts to take command over the past year,

and with Jobs for “acting like a petulant brat.” The board

needed to get this dispute behind them, and to do so it

should meet privately with each of them.

Sculley left the room so that Jobs could present

ﬁrst. Jobs insisted that Sculley was the problem

because he had no understanding of computers. Rock

responded by berating Jobs. In his growling voice, he

said that Jobs had been behaving foolishly for a year

and had no right to be managing a division. Even

Jobs’s strongest supporter, Phil Schlein, tried to talk him

into stepping aside gracefully to run a research lab for

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the company.

When it was Sculley’s turn to meet privately with

the board, he gave an ultimatum: “You can back me,

and then I take responsibility for running the company,

or we can do nothing, and you’re going to have to ﬁnd

yourselves a new CEO.” If given the authority, he said,

he would not move abruptly, but would ease Jobs into

the new role over the next few months. The board

unanimously sided with Sculley. He was given the

authority to remove Jobs whenever he felt the timing

was right. As Jobs waited outside the boardroom,

knowing full well that he was losing, he saw Del Yocam,

a longtime colleague, and hugged him.

After the board made its decision, Sculley tried to

be conciliatory. Jobs asked that the transition occur

slowly, over the next few months, and Sculley agreed.

Later that evening Sculley’s executive assistant,

Nanette Buckhout, called Jobs to see how he was

doing. He was still in his ofﬁce, shell-shocked. Sculley

had already left, and Jobs came over to talk to her.

Once again he began oscillating wildly in his attitude

toward Sculley. “Why did John do this to me?” he said.

“He betrayed me.” Then he swung the other way.

Perhaps he should take some time away to work on

restoring his relationship with Sculley, he said. “John’s

friendship is more important than anything else, and I

think maybe that’s what I should do, concentrate on our

friendship.”

Plotting a Coup

Jobs was not good at taking no for an answer. He

went to Sculley’s ofﬁce in early May 1985 and asked for

more time to show that he could manage the Macintosh

division. He would prove himself as an operations guy,

he promised. Sculley didn’t back down. Jobs next tried

a direct challenge: He asked Sculley to resign. “I think

you really lost your stride,” Jobs told him. “You were

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really great the ﬁrst year, and everything went

wonderful. But something happened.” Sculley, who

generally was even-tempered, lashed back, pointing

out that Jobs had been unable to get Macintosh

software developed, come up with new models, or win

customers. The meeting degenerated into a shouting

match about who was the worse manager. After Jobs

stalked out, Sculley turned away from the glass wall of

his ofﬁce, where others had been looking in on the

meeting, and wept.

Matters began to come to a head on Tuesday, May

14, when the Macintosh team made its quarterly review

presentation to Sculley and other Apple corporate

leaders. Jobs still had not relinquished control of the

division, and he was deﬁant when he arrived in the

corporate boardroom with his team. He and Sculley

began by clashing over what the division’s mission

was. Jobs said it was to sell more Macintosh machines.

Sculley said it was to serve the interests of the Apple

company as a whole. As usual there was little

cooperation among the divisions; for one thing, the

Macintosh team was planning new disk drives that were

different from those being developed by the Apple II

division. The debate, according to the minutes, took a

full hour.

Jobs then described the projects under way: a

more powerful Mac, which would take the place of the

discontinued Lisa; and software called FileServer,

which would allow Macintosh users to share ﬁles on a

network. Sculley learned for the ﬁrst time that these

projects were going to be late. He gave a cold critique

of Murray’s marketing record, Belleville’s missed

engineering deadlines, and Jobs’s overall

management. Despite all this, Jobs ended the meeting

with a plea to Sculley, in front of all the others there, to

be given one more chance to prove he could run a

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division. Sculley refused.

That night Jobs took his Macintosh team out to

dinner at Nina’s Café in Woodside. Jean-Louis Gassée

was in town because Sculley wanted him to prepare to

take over the Macintosh division, and Jobs invited him

to join them. Belleville proposed a toast “to those of us

who really understand what the world according to

Steve Jobs is all about.” That phrase—“the world

according to Steve”—had been used dismissively by

others at Apple who belittled the reality warp he

created. After the others left, Belleville sat with Jobs in

his Mercedes and urged him to organize a battle to the

death with Sculley.

Months earlier, Apple had gotten the right to export

computers to China, and Jobs had been invited to sign

a deal in the Great Hall of the People over the 1985

Memorial Day weekend. He had told Sculley, who

decided he wanted to go himself, which was just ﬁne

with Jobs. Jobs decided to use Sculley’s absence to

execute his coup. Throughout the week leading up to

Memorial Day, he took a lot of people on walks to share

his plans. “I’m going to launch a coup while John is in

China,” he told Mike Murray.

Seven Days in May

Thursday, May 23:

At his regular Thursday

meeting with his top lieutenants in the Macintosh

division, Jobs told his inner circle about his plan to oust

Sculley. He also conﬁded in the corporate human

resources director, Jay Elliot, who told him bluntly that

the proposed rebellion wouldn’t work. Elliot had talked

to some board members and urged them to stand up for

Jobs, but he discovered that most of the board was with

Sculley, as were most members of Apple’s senior staff.

Yet Jobs barreled ahead. He even revealed his plans to

Gassée on a walk around the parking lot, despite the

fact that Gassée had come from Paris to take his job. “I

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made the mistake of telling Gassée,” Jobs wryly

conceded years later.

That evening Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat

had a small barbecue at his home for Sculley, Gassée,

and their wives. When Gassée told Eisenstat what Jobs

was plotting, he recommended that Gassée inform

Sculley. “Steve was trying to raise a cabal and have a

coup to get rid of John,” Gassée recalled. “In the den of

Al Eisenstat’s house, I put my index ﬁnger lightly on

John’s breastbone and said, ‘If you leave tomorrow for

China, you could be ousted. Steve’s plotting to get rid of

you.’”

Friday, May 24:

Sculley canceled his trip and

decided to confront Jobs at the executive staff meeting

on Friday morning. Jobs arrived late, and he saw that

his usual seat next to Sculley, who sat at the head of the

table, was taken. He sat instead at the far end. He was

dressed in a well-tailored suit and looked energized.

Sculley looked pale. He announced that he was

dispensing with the agenda to confront the issue on

everyone’s mind. “It’s come to my attention that you’d

like to throw me out of the company,” he said, looking

directly at Jobs. “I’d like to ask you if that’s true.”

Jobs was not expecting this. But he was never shy

about indulging in brutal honesty. His eyes narrowed,

and he ﬁxed Sculley with his unblinking stare. “I think

you’re bad for Apple, and I think you’re the wrong

person to run the company,” he replied, coldly and

slowly. “You really should leave this company. You

don’t know how to operate and never have.” He

accused Sculley of not understanding the product

development process, and then he added a self-

centered swipe: “I wanted you here to help me grow,

and you’ve been ineffective in helping me.”

As the rest of the room sat frozen, Sculley ﬁnally

lost his temper. A childhood stutter that had not afﬂicted

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him for twenty years started to return. “I don’t trust you,

and I won’t tolerate a lack of trust,” he stammered.

When Jobs claimed that he would be better than

Sculley at running the company, Sculley took a gamble.

He decided to poll the room on that question. “He

pulled off this clever maneuver,” Jobs recalled, still

smarting thirty-ﬁve years later. “It was at the executive

committee meeting, and he said, ‘It’s me or Steve, who

do you vote for?’ He set the whole thing up so that

you’d kind of have to be an idiot to vote for me.”

Suddenly the frozen onlookers began to squirm.

Del Yocam had to go ﬁrst. He said he loved Jobs,

wanted him to continue to play some role in the

company, but he worked up the nerve to conclude, with

Jobs staring at him, that he “respected” Sculley and

would support him to run the company. Eisenstat faced

Jobs directly and said much the same thing: He liked

Jobs but was supporting Sculley. Regis McKenna, who

sat in on senior staff meetings as an outside consultant,

was more direct. He looked at Jobs and told him he was

not yet ready to run the company, something he had

told him before. Others sided with Sculley as well. For

Bill Campbell, it was particularly tough. He was fond of

Jobs and didn’t particularly like Sculley. His voice

quavered a bit as he told Jobs he had decided to

support Sculley, and he urged the two of them to work it

out and ﬁnd some role for Jobs to play in the company.

“You can’t let Steve leave this company,” he told

Sculley.

Jobs looked shattered. “I guess I know where

things stand,” he said, and bolted out of the room. No

one followed.

He went back to his ofﬁce, gathered his longtime

loyalists on the Macintosh staff, and started to cry. He

would have to leave Apple, he said. As he started to

walk out the door, Debi Coleman restrained him. She

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and the others urged him to settle down and not do

anything hasty. He should take the weekend to regroup.

Perhaps there was a way to prevent the company from

being torn apart.

Sculley was devastated by his victory. Like a

wounded warrior, he retreated to Eisenstat’s ofﬁce and

asked the corporate counsel to go for a ride. When they

got into Eisenstat’s Porsche, Sculley lamented, “I don’t

know whether I can go through with this.” When

Eisenstat asked what he meant, Sculley responded, “I

think I’m going to resign.”

“You can’t,” Eisenstat protested. “Apple will fall

apart.”

“I’m going to resign,” Sculley declared. “I don’t

think I’m right for the company.”

“I think you’re copping out,” Eisenstat replied.

“You’ve got to stand up to him.” Then he drove Sculley

home.

Sculley’s wife was surprised to see him back in the

middle of the day. “I’ve failed,” he said to her forlornly.

She was a volatile woman who had never liked Jobs or

appreciated her husband’s infatuation with him. So

when she heard what had happened, she jumped into

her car and sped over to Jobs’s ofﬁce. Informed that he

had gone to the Good Earth restaurant, she marched

over there and confronted him in the parking lot as he

was coming out with loyalists on his Macintosh team.

“Steve, can I talk to you?” she said. His jaw

dropped. “Do you have any idea what a privilege it has

been even to know someone as ﬁne as John Sculley?”

she demanded. He averted his gaze. “Can’t you look

me in the eyes when I’m talking to you?” she asked. But

when Jobs did so—giving her his practiced, unblinking

stare—she recoiled. “Never mind, don’t look at me,” she

said. “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul.

When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an

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empty hole, a dead zone.” Then she walked away.

Saturday, May 25:

Mike Murray drove to Jobs’s

house in Woodside to offer some advice: He should

consider accepting the role of being a new product

visionary, starting AppleLabs, and getting away from

headquarters. Jobs seemed willing to consider it. But

ﬁrst he would have to restore peace with Sculley. So he

picked up the telephone and surprised Sculley with an

olive branch. Could they meet the following afternoon,

Jobs asked, and take a walk together in the hills above

Stanford University. They had walked there in the past,

in happier times, and maybe on such a walk they could

work things out.

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat

he wanted to quit, but by then it didn’t matter. Overnight,

he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite

the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to

like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

If Jobs was prepping for conciliation, it didn’t show

in the choice of movie he wanted to see with Murray

that night. He picked

Patton

, the epic of the never-

surrender general. But he had lent his copy of the tape

to his father, who had once ferried troops for the

general, so he drove to his childhood home with Murray

to retrieve it. His parents weren’t there, and he didn’t

have a key. They walked around the back, checked for

unlocked doors or windows, and ﬁnally gave up. The

video store didn’t have a copy of

Patton

in stock, so in

the end he had to settle for watching the 1983 ﬁlm

adaptation of Harold Pinter’s

Betrayal

Sunday, May 26:

As planned, Jobs and Sculley

met in back of the Stanford campus on Sunday

afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling

hills and horse pastures. Jobs reiterated his plea that

he should have an operational role at Apple. This time

Sculley stood ﬁrm. It won’t work, he kept saying. Sculley

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urged him to take the role of being a product visionary

with a lab of his own, but Jobs rejected this as making

him into a mere “ﬁgurehead.” Defying all connection to

reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley give

up control of the entire company to him. “Why don’t you

become chairman and I’ll become president and chief

executive ofﬁcer?” he suggested. Sculley was struck by

how earnest he seemed.

“Steve, that doesn’t make any sense,” Sculley

replied. Jobs then proposed that they split the duties of

running the company, with him handling the product

side and Sculley handling marketing and business. But

the board had not only emboldened Sculley, it had

ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. “One person has got

to run the company,” he replied. “I’ve got the support

and you don’t.”

On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike

Markkula’s house. He wasn’t there, so Jobs left a

message asking him to come to dinner the following

evening. He would also invite the core of loyalists from

his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could persuade

Markkula of the folly of siding with Sculley.

Monday, May 27:

Memorial Day was sunny and

warm. The Macintosh team loyalists—Debi Coleman,

Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Belleville—got to

Jobs’s Woodside home an hour before the scheduled

dinner so they could plot strategy. Sitting on the patio as

the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should accept

Sculley’s offer to be a product visionary and help start

up AppleLabs. Of all the inner circle, Coleman was the

most willing to be realistic. In the new organization plan,

Sculley had tapped her to run the manufacturing

division because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple

and not just to Jobs. Some of the others were more

hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a

reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.

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When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen

with one proviso: Jobs had to keep quiet. “I seriously

wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not

watch Jobs enlist them in a rebellion,” he recalled. As it

turned cooler, they went inside the sparsely furnished

mansion and sat by a ﬁreplace. Instead of letting it turn

into a gripe session, Markkula made them focus on very

speciﬁc management issues, such as what had caused

the problem in producing the FileServer software and

why the Macintosh distribution system had not

responded well to the change in demand. When they

were ﬁnished, Markkula bluntly declined to back Jobs. “I

said I wouldn’t support his plan, and that was the end of

that,” Markkula recalled. “Sculley was the boss. They

were mad and emotional and putting together a revolt,

but that’s not how you do things.”

Tuesday, May 28:

His ire stoked by hearing from

Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous evening

trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs’s

ofﬁce on Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board,

he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out.

Then he drove to Markkula’s house, where he gave a

presentation of his reorganization plans. Markkula

asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave

Sculley his blessing. When he got back to his ofﬁce,

Sculley called the other members of the board, just to

make sure he still had their backing. He did.

At that point he called Jobs to make sure he

understood. The board had given ﬁnal approval of his

reorganization plan, which would proceed that week.

Gassée would take over control of Jobs’s beloved

Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no

other division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still

somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay

on with the title of board chairman and be a product

visionary with no operational duties. But by this point,

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even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as

AppleLabs was no longer on the table.

It ﬁnally sank in. Jobs realized there was no

appeal, no way to warp the reality. He broke down in

tears and started making phone calls—to Bill Campbell,

Jay Elliot, Mike Murray, and others. Murray’s wife,

Joyce, was on an overseas call when Jobs phoned,

and the operator broke in saying it was an emergency.

It better be important, she told the operator. “It is,” she

heard Jobs say. When her husband got on the phone,

Jobs was crying. “It’s over,” he said. Then he hung up.

Murray was worried that Jobs was so despondent

he might do something rash, so he called back. There

was no answer, so he drove to Woodside. No one came

to the door when he knocked, so he went around back

and climbed up some exterior steps and looked in the

bedroom. Jobs was lying there on a mattress in his

unfurnished room. He let Murray in and they talked until

almost dawn.

Wednesday, May 29:

Jobs ﬁnally got hold of a

tape of

Patton

, which he watched Wednesday evening,

but Murray prevented him from getting stoked up for

another battle. Instead he urged Jobs to come in on

Friday for Sculley’s announcement of the

reorganization plan. There was no option left other than

to play the good soldier rather than the renegade

commander.

Like a Rolling Stone

Jobs slipped quietly into the back row of the

auditorium to listen to Sculley explain to the troops the

new order of battle. There were a lot of sideways

glances, but few people acknowledged him and none

came over to provide public displays of affection. He

stared without blinking at Sculley, who would remember

“Steve’s look of contempt” years later. “It’s unyielding,”

Sculley recalled, “like an X-ray boring inside your

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bones, down to where you’re soft and destructibly

mortal.” For a moment, standing onstage while

pretending not to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a

friendly trip they had taken a year earlier to Cambridge,

Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land. He

had been dethroned from the company he created,

Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in disgust, “All

he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his

company away from him.” Now, Sculley reﬂected, he

was taking Jobs’s company away from him.

As Sculley went over the organizational chart, he

introduced Gassée as the new head of a combined

Macintosh and Apple II product group. On the chart was

a small box labeled “chairman” with no lines connecting

to it, not to Sculley or to anyone else. Sculley brieﬂy

noted that in that role, Jobs would play the part of

“global visionary.” But he didn’t acknowledge Jobs’s

presence. There was a smattering of awkward

applause.

Jobs stayed home for the next few days, blinds

drawn, his answering machine on, seeing only his

girlfriend, Tina Redse. For hours on end he sat there

playing his Bob Dylan tapes, especially “The Times

They Are a-Changin.’” He had recited the second verse

the day he unveiled the Macintosh to the Apple

shareholders sixteen months earlier. That verse ended

nicely: “For the loser now / Will be later to win. . . .”

A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse

arrived to dispel the gloom on Sunday night, led by

Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to

answer their knock, and then he led them to a room

next to the kitchen that was one of the few places with

any furniture. With Redse’s help, he served some

vegetarian food he had ordered. “So what really

happened?” Hertzfeld asked. “Is it really as bad as it

looks?”

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“No, it’s worse.” Jobs grimaced. “It’s much worse

than you can imagine.” He blamed Sculley for betraying

him, and said that Apple would not be able to manage

without him. His role as chairman, he complained, was

completely ceremonial. He was being ejected from his

Bandley 3 ofﬁce to a small and almost empty building

he nicknamed “Siberia.” Hertzfeld turned the topic to

happier days, and they began to reminisce about the

past.

Earlier that week, Dylan had released a new

album,

Empire Burlesque

, and Hertzfeld brought a copy

that they played on Jobs’s high-tech turntable. The most

notable track, “When the Night Comes Falling from the

Sky,” with its apocalyptic message, seemed appropriate

for the evening, but Jobs didn’t like it. It sounded almost

disco, and he gloomily argued that Dylan had been

going downhill since

Blood on the Tracks

. So Hertzfeld

moved the needle to the last song on the album, “Dark

Eyes,” which was a simple acoustic number featuring

Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica. It was slow and

mournful and, Hertzfeld hoped, would remind Jobs of

the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved. But Jobs didn’t like

that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of

the album.

Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable.

Sculley had once been a father ﬁgure to him. So had

Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three

had abandoned him. “It gets back to the deep feeling of

being rejected at an early age,” his friend and lawyer

George Riley later said. “It’s a deep part of his own

mythology, and it deﬁnes to himself who he is.” Jobs

recalled years later, “I felt like I’d been punched, the air

knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe.”

Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially

painful. “Arthur had been like a father to me,” Jobs said.

“He took me under his wing.” Rock had taught him

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about opera, and he and his wife, Toni, had been his

hosts in San Francisco and Aspen. “I remember driving

into San Francisco one time, and I said to him, ‘God,

that Bank of America building is ugly,’ and he said, ‘No,

it’s the best,’ and he proceeded to lecture me, and he

was right of course.” Years later Jobs’s eyes welled with

tears as he recounted the story: “He chose Sculley over

me. That really threw me for a loop. I never thought he

would abandon me.”

Making matters worse was that his beloved

company was now in the hands of a man he considered

a bozo. “The board felt that I couldn’t run a company,

and that was their decision to make,” he said. “But they

made one mistake. They should have separated the

decision of what to do with me and what to do with

Sculley. They should have ﬁred Sculley, even if they

didn’t think I was ready to run Apple.” Even as his

personal gloom slowly lifted, his anger at Sculley, his

feeling of betrayal, deepened.

The situation worsened when Sculley told a group

of analysts that he considered Jobs irrelevant to the

company, despite his title as chairman. “From an

operations standpoint, there is no role either today or in

the future for Steve Jobs,” he said. “I don’t know what

he’ll do.” The blunt comment shocked the group, and a

gasp went through the auditorium.

Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs

thought. So in June he went to Paris, where he spoke at

an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice

President George H. W. Bush. From there he went to

Italy, where he drove the hills of Tuscany with Redse

and bought a bike so he could spend time riding by

himself. In Florence he soaked in the architecture of the

city and the texture of the building materials. Particularly

memorable were the paving stones, which came from Il

Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola.

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They were a calming bluish gray. Twenty years later he

would decide that the ﬂoors of most major Apple stores

would be made of this sandstone.

The Apple II was just going on sale in Russia, so

Jobs headed off to Moscow, where he met up with Al

Eisenstat. Because there was a problem getting

Washington’s approval for some of the required export

licenses, they visited the commercial attaché at the

American embassy in Moscow, Mike Merwin. He

warned them that there were strict laws against sharing

technology with the Soviets. Jobs was annoyed. At the

Paris trade show, Vice President Bush had encouraged

him to get computers into Russia in order to “foment

revolution from below.” Over dinner at a Georgian

restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs

continued his rant. “How could you suggest this violates

American law when it so obviously beneﬁts our

interests?” he asked Merwin. “By putting Macs in the

hands of Russians, they could print all their

newspapers.”

Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by

insisting on talking about Trotsky, the charismatic

revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered

assassinated by Stalin. At one point the KGB agent

assigned to him suggested he tone down his fervor.

“You don’t want to talk about Trotsky,” he said. “Our

historians have studied the situation, and we don’t

believe he’s a great man anymore.” That didn’t help.

When they got to the state university in Moscow to

speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by

praising Trotsky. He was a revolutionary Jobs could

identify with.

Jobs and Eisenstat attended the July Fourth party

at the American embassy, and in his thank-you letter to

Ambassador Arthur Hartman, Eisenstat noted that Jobs

planned to pursue Apple’s ventures in Russia more

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vigorously in the coming year. “We are tentatively

planning on returning to Moscow in September.” For a

moment it looked as if Sculley’s hope that Jobs would

turn into a “global visionary” for the company might

come to pass. But it was not to be. Something much

different was in store for September.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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Prometheus Unbound

The Pirates Abandon Ship

Upon his return from Europe in August 1985, while

he was casting about for what to do next, Jobs called

the Stanford biochemist Paul Berg to discuss the

advances that were being made in gene splicing and

recombinant DNA. Berg described how difﬁcult it was to

do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take

weeks to nurture an experiment and get a result. “Why

don’t you simulate them on a computer?” Jobs asked.

Berg replied that computers with such capacities were

too expensive for university labs. “Suddenly, he was

excited about the possibilities,” Berg recalled. “He had it

in his mind to start a new company. He was young and

rich, and had to ﬁnd something to do with the rest of his

life.”

Jobs had already been canvassing academics to

ask what their workstation needs were. It was

something he had been interested in since 1983, when

he had visited the computer science department at

Brown to show off the Macintosh, only to be told that it

would take a far more powerful machine to do anything

useful in a university lab. The dream of academic

researchers was to have a workstation that was both

powerful and personal. As head of the Macintosh

division, Jobs had launched a project to build such a

machine, which was dubbed the Big Mac. It would have

a UNIX operating system but with the friendly Macintosh

interface. But after Jobs was ousted from the Macintosh

division, his replacement, Jean-Louis Gassée,

canceled the Big Mac.

When that happened, Jobs got a distressed call

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from Rich Page, who had been engineering the Big

Mac’s chip set. It was the latest in a series of

conversations that Jobs was having with disgruntled

Apple employees urging him to start a new company

and rescue them. Plans to do so began to jell over

Labor Day weekend, when Jobs spoke to Bud Tribble,

the original Macintosh software chief, and ﬂoated the

idea of starting a company to build a powerful but

personal workstation. He also enlisted two other

Macintosh division employees who had been talking

about leaving, the engineer George Crow and the

controller Susan Barnes.

That left one key vacancy on the team: a person

who could market the new product to universities. The

obvious candidate was Dan’l Lewin, who at Apple had

organized a consortium of universities to buy Macintosh

computers in bulk. Besides missing two letters in his

ﬁrst name, Lewin had the chiseled good looks of Clark

Kent and a Princetonian’s polish. He and Jobs shared a

bond: Lewin had written a Princeton thesis on Bob

Dylan and charismatic leadership, and Jobs knew

something about both of those topics.

Lewin’s university consortium had been a

godsend to the Macintosh group, but he had become

frustrated after Jobs left and Bill Campbell had

reorganized marketing in a way that reduced the role of

direct sales to universities. He had been meaning to

call Jobs when, that Labor Day weekend, Jobs called

ﬁrst. He drove to Jobs’s unfurnished mansion, and they

walked the grounds while discussing the possibility of

creating a new company. Lewin was excited, but not

ready to commit. He was going to Austin with Campbell

the following week, and he wanted to wait until then to

decide. Upon his return, he gave his answer: He was in.

The news came just in time for the September 13 Apple

board meeting.

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Although Jobs was still nominally the board’s

chairman, he had not been to any meetings since he

lost power. He called Sculley, said he was going to

attend, and asked that an item be added to the end of

the agenda for a “chairman’s report.” He didn’t say what

it was about, and Sculley assumed it would be a

criticism of the latest reorganization. Instead, when his

turn came to speak, Jobs described to the board his

plans to start a new company. “I’ve been thinking a lot,

and it’s time for me to get on with my life,” he began. “It’s

obvious that I’ve got to do something. I’m thirty years

old.” Then he referred to some prepared notes to

describe his plan to create a computer for the higher

education market. The new company would not be

competitive with Apple, he promised, and he would take

with him only a handful of non-key personnel. He

offered to resign as chairman of Apple, but he

expressed hope that they could work together. Perhaps

Apple would want to buy the distribution rights to his

product, he suggested, or license Macintosh software to

it.

Mike Markkula rankled at the possibility that Jobs

would hire anyone from Apple. “Why would you take

anyone at all?” he asked.

“Don’t get upset,” Jobs assured him and the rest of

the board. “These are very low-level people that you

won’t miss, and they will be leaving anyway.”

The board initially seemed disposed to wish Jobs

well in his venture. After a private discussion, the

directors even proposed that Apple take a 10% stake in

the new company and that Jobs remain on the board.

That night Jobs and his ﬁve renegades met again

at his house for dinner. He was in favor of taking the

Apple investment, but the others convinced him it was

unwise. They also agreed that it would be best if they

resigned all at once, right away. Then they could make

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a clean break.

So Jobs wrote a formal letter telling Sculley the

names of the ﬁve who would be leaving, signed it in his

spidery lowercase signature, and drove to Apple the

next morning to hand it to him before his 7:30 staff

meeting.

“Steve, these are not low-level people,” Sculley

said.

“Well, these people were going to resign anyway,”

Jobs replied. “They are going to be handing in their

resignations by nine this morning.”

From Jobs’s perspective, he had been honest. The

ﬁve were not division managers or members of

Sculley’s top team. They had all felt diminished, in fact,

by the company’s new organization. But from Sculley’s

perspective, these were important players; Page was

an Apple Fellow, and Lewin was a key to the higher

education market. In addition, they knew about the

plans for Big Mac; even though it had been shelved,

this was still proprietary information. Nevertheless

Sculley was sanguine. Instead of pushing the point, he

asked Jobs to remain on the board. Jobs replied that he

would think about it.

But when Sculley walked into his 7:30 staff

meeting and told his top lieutenants who was leaving,

there was an uproar. Most of them felt that Jobs had

breached his duties as chairman and displayed

stunning disloyalty to the company. “We should expose

him for the fraud that he is so that people here stop

regarding him as a messiah,” Campbell shouted,

according to Sculley.

Campbell admitted that, although he later became

a great Jobs defender and supportive board member,

he was ballistic that morning. “I was fucking furious,

especially about him taking Dan’l Lewin,” he recalled.

“Dan’l had built the relationships with the universities.

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He was always muttering about how hard it was to work

with Steve, and then he left.” Campbell was so angry

that he walked out of the meeting to call Lewin at home.

When his wife said he was in the shower, Campbell

said, “I’ll wait.” A few minutes later, when she said he

was still in the shower, Campbell again said, “I’ll wait.”

When Lewin ﬁnally came on the phone, Campbell

asked him if it was true. Lewin acknowledged it was.

Campbell hung up without saying another word.

After hearing the fury of his senior staff, Sculley

surveyed the members of the board. They likewise felt

that Jobs had misled them with his pledge that he

would not raid important employees. Arthur Rock was

especially angry. Even though he had sided with

Sculley during the Memorial Day showdown, he had

been able to repair his paternal relationship with Jobs.

Just the week before, he had invited Jobs to bring his

girlfriend up to San Francisco so that he and his wife

could meet her, and the four had a nice dinner in

Rock’s Paciﬁc Heights home. Jobs had not mentioned

the new company he was forming, so Rock felt betrayed

when he heard about it from Sculley. “He came to the

board and lied to us,” Rock growled later. “He told us he

was thinking of forming a company when in fact he had

already formed it. He said he was going to take a few

middle-level people. It turned out to be ﬁve senior

people.” Markkula, in his subdued way, was also

offended. “He took some top executives he had secretly

lined up before he left. That’s not the way you do things.

It was ungentlemanly.”

Over the weekend both the board and the

executive staff convinced Sculley that Apple would

have to declare war on its cofounder. Markkula issued a

formal statement accusing Jobs of acting “in direct

contradiction to his statements that he wouldn’t recruit

any key Apple personnel for his company.” He added

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ominously, “We are evaluating what possible actions

should be taken.” Campbell was quoted in the

Wall

Street Journal

as saying he “was stunned and shocked”

by Jobs’s behavior.

Jobs had left his meeting with Sculley thinking that

things might proceed smoothly, so he had kept quiet.

But after reading the newspapers, he felt that he had to

respond. He phoned a few favored reporters and

invited them to his home for private brieﬁngs the next

day. Then he called Andy Cunningham, who had

handled his publicity at Regis McKenna. “I went over to

his unfurnished mansiony place in Woodside,” she

recalled, “and I found him huddled in the kitchen with

his ﬁve colleagues and a few reporters hanging outside

on the lawn.” Jobs told her that he was going to do a

full-ﬂedged press conference and started spewing

some of the derogatory things he was going to say.

Cunningham was appalled. “This is going to reﬂect

badly on you,” she told him. Finally he backed down.

He decided that he would give the reporters a copy of

the resignation letter and limit any on-the-record

comments to a few bland statements.

Jobs had considered just mailing in his letter of

resignation, but Susan Barnes convinced him that this

would be too contemptuous. Instead he drove it to

Markkula’s house, where he also found Al Eisenstat.

There was a tense conversation for about ﬁfteen

minutes; then Barnes, who had been waiting outside,

came to the door to retrieve him before he said anything

he would regret. He left behind the letter, which he had

composed on a Macintosh and printed on the new

LaserWriter:

September 17, 1985

Dear Mike:

This morning’s papers carried suggestions that

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Apple is considering removing me as Chairman. I don’t

know the source of these reports but they are both

misleading to the public and unfair to me.

You will recall that at last Thursday’s Board

meeting I stated I had decided to start a new venture

and I tendered my resignation as Chairman.

The Board declined to accept my resignation and

asked me to defer it for a week. I agreed to do so in light

of the encouragement the Board offered with regard to

the proposed new venture and the indications that

Apple would invest in it. On Friday, after I told John

Sculley who would be joining me, he conﬁrmed Apple’s

willingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration

between Apple and my new venture.

Subsequently the Company appears to be

adopting a hostile posture toward me and the new

venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate

acceptance of my resignation. . . .

As you know, the company’s recent reorganization

left me with no work to do and no access even to

regular management reports. I am but 30 and want still

to contribute and achieve.

After what we have accomplished together, I

would wish our parting to be both amicable and

digniﬁed.

Yours sincerely, steven p. jobs

When a guy from the facilities team went to Jobs’s

ofﬁce to pack up his belongings, he saw a picture frame

on the ﬂoor. It contained a photograph of Jobs and

Sculley in warm conversation, with an inscription from

seven months earlier: “Here’s to Great Ideas, Great

Experiences, and a Great Friendship! John.” The glass

frame was shattered. Jobs had hurled it across the

room before leaving. From that day, he never spoke to

Sculley again.

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Apple’s stock went up a full point, or almost 7%,

when Jobs’s resignation was announced. “East Coast

stockholders always worried about California ﬂakes

running the company,” explained the editor of a tech

stock newsletter. “Now with both Wozniak and Jobs out,

those shareholders are relieved.” But Nolan Bushnell,

the Atari founder who had been an amused mentor ten

years earlier, told

Time

that Jobs would be badly

missed. “Where is Apple’s inspiration going to come

from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new

brand of Pepsi?”

After a few days of failed efforts to reach a

settlement with Jobs, Sculley and the Apple board

decided to sue him “for breaches of ﬁduciary

obligations.” The suit spelled out his alleged

transgressions:

Notwithstanding his ﬁduciary obligations to Apple,

Jobs, while serving as the Chairman of Apple’s Board

of Directors and an ofﬁcer of Apple and pretending

loyalty to the interests of Apple . . .

(a) secretly planned the formation of an enterprise

to compete with Apple;

(b) secretly schemed that his competing enterprise

would wrongfully take advantage of and utilize Apple’s

plan to design, develop and market the Next

Generation Product . . .

At the time, Jobs owned 6.5 million shares of

Apple stock, 11% of the company, worth more than

$100 million. He began to sell his shares, and within

ﬁve months had dumped them all, retaining only one

share so he could attend shareholder meetings if he

wanted. He was furious, and that was reﬂected in his

passion to start what was, no matter how he spun it, a

rival company. “He was angry at Apple,” said Joanna

Hoffman, who brieﬂy went to work for the new company.

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“Aiming at the educational market, where Apple was

strong, was simply Steve being vengeful. He was doing

it for revenge.”

Jobs, of course, didn’t see it that way. “I haven’t got

any sort of odd chip on my shoulder,” he told

Newsweek.

Once again he invited his favorite reporters

over to his Woodside home, and this time he did not

have Andy Cunningham there urging him to be

circumspect. He dismissed the allegation that he had

improperly lured the ﬁve colleagues from Apple. “These

people all called me,” he told the gaggle of journalists

who were milling around in his unfurnished living room.

“They were thinking of leaving the company. Apple has

a way of neglecting people.”

He decided to cooperate with a

Newsweek

cover

in order to get his version of the story out, and the

interview he gave was revealing. “What I’m best at

doing is ﬁnding a group of talented people and making

things with them,” he told the magazine. He said that he

would always harbor affection for Apple. “I’ll always

remember Apple like any man remembers the ﬁrst

woman he’s fallen in love with.” But he was also willing

to ﬁght with its management if need be. “When

someone calls you a thief in public, you have to

respond.” Apple’s threat to sue him was outrageous. It

was also sad. It showed that Apple was no longer a

conﬁdent, rebellious company. “It’s hard to think that a

$2 billion company with 4,300 employees couldn’t

compete with six people in blue jeans.”

To try to counter Jobs’s spin, Sculley called

Wozniak and urged him to speak out. “Steve can be an

insulting and hurtful guy,” he told

Time

that week. He

revealed that Jobs had asked him to join his new ﬁrm—

it would have been a sly way to land another blow

against Apple’s current management—but he wanted

no part of such games and had not returned Jobs’s

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phone call. To the

San Francisco Chronicle

, he

recounted how Jobs had blocked frogdesign from

working on his remote control under the pretense that it

might compete with Apple products. “I look forward to a

great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I

cannot trust,” Wozniak said.

To Be on Your Own

“The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when

we ﬁred him, told him to get lost,” Arthur Rock later said.

The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love

made him wiser and more mature. But it’s not that

simple. At the company he founded after being ousted

from Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts,

both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a

series of spectacular products that were dazzling

market ﬂops.

This

was the true learning experience.

What prepared him for the great success he would have

in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his

brilliant failures in Act II.

The ﬁrst instinct that he indulged was his passion

for design. The name he chose for his new company

was rather straightforward: Next. In order to make it

more distinctive, he decided he needed a world-class

logo. So he courted the dean of corporate logos, Paul

Rand. At seventy-one, the Brooklyn-born graphic

designer had already created some of the best-known

logos in business, including those of

Esquire

, IBM,

Westinghouse, ABC, and UPS. He was under contract

to IBM, and his supervisors there said that it would

obviously be a conﬂict for him to create a logo for

another computer company. So Jobs picked up the

phone and called IBM’s CEO, John Akers. Akers was

out of town, but Jobs was so persistent that he was

ﬁnally put through to Vice Chairman Paul Rizzo. After

two days, Rizzo concluded that it was futile to resist

Jobs, and he gave permission for Rand to do the work.

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Rand ﬂew out to Palo Alto and spent time walking

with Jobs and listening to his vision. The computer

would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that

shape. It was perfect and simple. So Rand decided that

the logo should be a cube as well, one that was tilted at

a 28° angle. When Jobs asked for a number of options

to consider, Rand declared that he did not create

different

options

for clients. “I will solve your problem,

and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I

produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way

you will pay me.”

Jobs admired that kind of thinking, so he made

what was quite a gamble. The company would pay an

astonishing $100,000 ﬂat fee to get

one

design. “There

was a clarity in our relationship,” Jobs said. “He had a

purity as an artist, but he was astute at solving business

problems. He had a tough exterior, and had perfected

the image of a curmudgeon, but he was a teddy bear

inside.” It was one of Jobs’s highest praises: purity as

an artist.

It took Rand just two weeks. He ﬂew back to

deliver the result to Jobs at his Woodside house. First

they had dinner, then Rand handed him an elegant and

vibrant booklet that described his thought process. On

the ﬁnal spread, Rand presented the logo he had

chosen. “In its design, color arrangement, and

orientation, the logo is a study in contrasts,” his booklet

proclaimed. “Tipped at a jaunty angle, it brims with the

informality, friendliness, and spontaneity of a Christmas

seal and the authority of a rubber stamp.” The word

“next” was split into two lines to ﬁll the square face of

the cube, with only the “e” in lowercase. That letter

stood out, Rand’s booklet explained, to connote

“education, excellence . . . e = mc

.”

It was often hard to predict how Jobs would react

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to a presentation. He could label it shitty or brilliant; one

never knew which way he might go. But with a

legendary designer such as Rand, the chances were

that Jobs would embrace the proposal. He stared at the

ﬁnal spread, looked up at Rand, and then hugged him.

They had one minor disagreement: Rand had used a

dark yellow for the “e” in the logo, and Jobs wanted him

to change it to a brighter and more traditional yellow.

Rand banged his ﬁst on the table and declared, “I’ve

been doing this for ﬁfty years, and I know what I’m

doing.” Jobs relented.

The company had not only a new logo, but a new

name. No longer was it Next. It was NeXT. Others might

not have understood the need to obsess over a logo,

much less pay $100,000 for one. But for Jobs it meant

that NeXT was starting life with a world-class feel and

identity, even if it hadn’t yet designed its ﬁrst product. As

Markkula had taught him, a great company must be

able to impute its values from the ﬁrst impression it

makes.

As a bonus, Rand agreed to design a personal

calling card for Jobs. He came up with a colorful type

treatment, which Jobs liked, but they ended up having a

lengthy and heated disagreement about the placement

of the period after the “P” in Steven P. Jobs. Rand had

placed the period to the right of the “P.”, as it would

appear if set in lead type. Steve preferred the period to

be nudged to the left, under the curve of the “P.”, as is

possible with digital typography. “It was a fairly large

argument about something relatively small,” Susan

Kare recalled. On this one Jobs prevailed.

In order to translate the NeXT logo into the look of

real products, Jobs needed an industrial designer he

trusted. He talked to a few possibilities, but none of

them impressed him as much as the wild Bavarian he

had imported to Apple: Hartmut Esslinger, whose

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frogdesign had set up shop in Silicon Valley and who,

thanks to Jobs, had a lucrative contract with Apple.

Getting IBM to permit Paul Rand to do work for NeXT

was a small miracle willed into existence by Jobs’s

belief that reality can be distorted. But that was a snap

compared to the likelihood that he could convince

Apple to permit Esslinger to work for NeXT.

This did not keep Jobs from trying. At the

beginning of November 1985, just ﬁve weeks after

Apple ﬁled suit against him, Jobs wrote to Eisenstat and

asked for a dispensation. “I spoke with Hartmut

Esslinger this weekend and he suggested I write you a

note expressing why I wish to work with him and

frogdesign on the new products for NeXT,” he said.

Astonishingly, Jobs’s argument was that he did not

know what Apple had in the works, but Esslinger did.

“NeXT has no knowledge as to the current or future

directions of Apple’s product designs, nor do other

design ﬁrms we might deal with, so it is possible to

inadvertently design similar looking products. It is in

both Apple’s and NeXT’s best interest to rely on

Hartmut’s professionalism to make sure this does not

occur.” Eisenstat recalled being ﬂabbergasted by

Jobs’s audacity, and he replied curtly. “I have

previously expressed my concern on behalf of Apple

that you are engaged in a business course which

involves your utilization of Apple’s conﬁdential business

information,” he wrote. “Your letter does not alleviate my

concern in any way. In fact it heightens my concern

because it states that you have ‘no knowledge as to the

current or future directions of Apple’s product designs,’

a statement which is not true.” What made the request

all the more astonishing to Eisenstat was that it was

Jobs who, just a year earlier, had forced frogdesign to

abandon its work on Wozniak’s remote control device.

Jobs realized that in order to work with Esslinger

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(and for a variety of other reasons), it would be

necessary to resolve the lawsuit that Apple had ﬁled.

Fortunately Sculley was willing. In January 1986 they

reached an out-of-court agreement involving no

ﬁnancial damages. In return for Apple’s dropping its

suit, NeXT agreed to a variety of restrictions: Its product

would be marketed as a high-end workstation, it would

be sold directly to colleges and universities, and it

would not ship before March 1987. Apple also insisted

that the NeXT machine “not use an operating system

compatible with the Macintosh,” though it could be

argued that Apple would have been better served by

insisting on just the opposite.

After the settlement Jobs continued to court

Esslinger until the designer decided to wind down his

contract with Apple. That allowed frogdesign to work

with NeXT at the end of 1986. Esslinger insisted on

having free rein, just as Paul Rand had. “Sometimes

you have to use a big stick with Steve,” he said. Like

Rand, Esslinger was an artist, so Jobs was willing to

grant him indulgences he denied other mortals.

Jobs decreed that the computer should be an

absolutely perfect cube, with each side exactly a foot

long and every angle precisely 90 degrees. He liked

cubes. They had gravitas but also the slight whiff of a

toy. But the NeXT cube was a Jobsian example of

design desires trumping engineering considerations.

The circuit boards, which ﬁtted nicely into the traditional

pizza-box shape, had to be reconﬁgured and stacked in

order to nestle into a cube.

Even worse, the perfection of the cube made it

hard to manufacture. Most parts that are cast in molds

have angles that are slightly greater than pure 90

degrees, so that it’s easier to get them out of the mold

(just as it is easier to get a cake out of a pan that has

angles slightly greater than 90 degrees). But Esslinger

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dictated, and Jobs enthusiastically agreed, that there

would be no such “draft angles” that would ruin the

purity and perfection of the cube. So the sides had to be

produced separately, using molds that cost $650,000,

at a specialty machine shop in Chicago. Jobs’s passion

for perfection was out of control. When he noticed a tiny

line in the chassis caused by the molds, something that

any other computer maker would accept as

unavoidable, he ﬂew to Chicago and convinced the die

caster to start over and do it perfectly. “Not a lot of die

casters expect a celebrity to ﬂy in,” noted one of the

engineers. Jobs also had the company buy a $150,000

sanding machine to remove all lines where the mold

faces met and insisted that the magnesium case be a

matte black, which made it more susceptible to showing

blemishes.

Jobs had always indulged his obsession that the

unseen parts of a product should be crafted as

beautifully as its façade, just as his father had taught

him when they were building a fence. This too he took

to extremes when he found himself unfettered at NeXT.

He made sure that the screws inside the machine had

expensive plating. He even insisted that the matte black

ﬁnish be coated onto the inside of the cube’s case,

even though only repairmen would see it.

Joe Nocera, then writing for

Esquire

, captured

Jobs’s intensity at a NeXT staff meeting:

It’s not quite right to say that he is sitting through

this staff meeting, because Jobs doesn’t sit through

much of anything; one of the ways he dominates is

through sheer movement. One moment he’s kneeling in

his chair; the next minute he’s slouching in it; the next

he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is scribbling

on the blackboard directly behind him. He is full of

mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with

unnerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His

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hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in

constant motion.

What particularly struck Nocera was Jobs’s

“almost willful lack of tact.” It was more than just an

inability to hide his opinions when others said

something he thought dumb; it was a conscious

readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people

down, humiliate them, show he was smarter. When

Dan’l Lewin handed out an organization chart, for

example, Jobs rolled his eyes. “These charts are

bullshit,” he interjected. Yet his moods still swung

wildly, as at Apple. A ﬁnance person came into the

meeting and Jobs lavished praise on him for a “really,

really great job on this”; the previous day Jobs had told

him, “This deal is crap.”

One of NeXT’s ﬁrst ten employees was an interior

designer for the company’s ﬁrst headquarters, in Palo

Alto. Even though Jobs had leased a building that was

new and nicely designed, he had it completely gutted

and rebuilt. Walls were replaced by glass, the carpets

were replaced by light hardwood ﬂooring. The process

was repeated when NeXT moved to a bigger space in

Redwood City in 1989. Even though the building was

brand-new, Jobs insisted that the elevators be moved

so that the entrance lobby would be more dramatic. As

a centerpiece, Jobs commissioned I. M. Pei to design a

grand staircase that seemed to ﬂoat in the air. The

contractor said it couldn’t be built. Jobs said it could,

and it was. Years later Jobs would make such

staircases a feature at Apple’s signature stores.

The Computer

During the early months of NeXT, Jobs and Dan’l

Lewin went on the road, often accompanied by a few

colleagues, to visit campuses and solicit opinions. At

Harvard they met with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of

Lotus software, over dinner at Harvest restaurant. When

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Kapor began slathering butter on his bread, Jobs asked

him, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?”

Kapor responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away

from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay

away from the subject of your personality.” It was meant

humorously, but as Kapor later commented, “Human

relationships were not his strong suit.” Lotus agreed to

write a spreadsheet program for the NeXT operating

system.

Jobs wanted to bundle useful content with the

machine, so Michael Hawley, one of the engineers,

developed a digital dictionary. He learned that a friend

of his at Oxford University Press had been involved in

the typesetting of a new edition of Shakespeare’s

works. That meant that there was probably a computer

tape he could get his hands on and, if so, incorporate it

into the NeXT’s memory. “So I called up Steve, and he

said that would be awesome, and we ﬂew over to

Oxford together.” On a beautiful spring day in 1986,

they met in the publishing house’s grand building in the

heart of Oxford, where Jobs made an offer of $2,000

plus 74 cents for every computer sold in order to have

the rights to Oxford’s edition of Shakespeare. “It will be

all gravy to you,” he argued. “You will be ahead of the

parade. It’s never been done before.” They agreed in

principle and then went out to play skittles over beer at

a nearby pub where Lord Byron used to drink. By the

time it launched, the NeXT would also include a

dictionary, a thesaurus, and the

Oxford Dictionary of

Quotations

, making it one of the pioneers of the concept

of searchable electronic books.

Instead of using off-the-shelf chips for the NeXT,

Jobs had his engineers design custom ones that

integrated a variety of functions on one chip. That would

have been hard enough, but Jobs made it almost

impossible by continually revising the functions he

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wanted it to do. After a year it became clear that this

would be a major source of delay.

He also insisted on building his own fully

automated and futuristic factory, just as he had for the

Macintosh; he had not been chastened by that

experience. This time too he made the same mistakes,

only more excessively. Machines and robots were

painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his

color scheme. The walls were museum white, as they

had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were

$20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made

staircase, just as in the corporate headquarters. He

insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly

line be conﬁgured to move the circuit boards from right

to left as they got built, so that the process would look

better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.

Empty circuit boards were fed in at one end and twenty

minutes later, untouched by humans, came out the

other end as completed boards. The process followed

the Japanese principle known as

kanban

, in which

each machine performs its task only when the next

machine is ready to receive another part.

Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with

employees. “He applied charm or public humiliation in

a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective,”

Tribble recalled. But sometimes it wasn’t. One engineer,

David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the ﬁrst ten

months at NeXT. He quit when “Steve walked in one

Friday afternoon and told us how unimpressed he was

with what we were doing.” When

Business Week

asked

him why he treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it

made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to

be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an

environment where excellence is expected.” But he still

had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty of ﬁeld

trips, visits by akido masters, and off-site retreats. And

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he still exuded the pirate ﬂag spunkiness. When Apple

ﬁred Chiat/Day, the ad ﬁrm that had done the “1984” ad

and taken out the newspaper ad saying “Welcome IBM

—seriously,” Jobs took out a full-page ad in the

Wall

Street Journal

proclaiming, “Congratulations Chiat/Day

—Seriously . . . Because I can guarantee you: there is

life after Apple.”

Perhaps the greatest similarity to his days at Apple

was that Jobs brought with him his reality distortion

ﬁeld. It was on display at the company’s ﬁrst retreat at

Pebble Beach in late 1985. There Jobs pronounced

that the ﬁrst NeXT computer would be shipped in just

eighteen months. It was already clear that this date was

impossible, but he blew off a suggestion from one

engineer that they be realistic and plan on shipping in

1988. “If we do that, the world isn’t standing still, the

technology window passes us by, and all the work

we’ve done we have to throw down the toilet,” he

argued.

Joanna Hoffman, the veteran of the Macintosh

team who was among those willing to challenge Jobs,

did so. “Reality distortion has motivational value, and I

think that’s ﬁne,” she said as Jobs stood at a

whiteboard. “However, when it comes to setting a date

in a way that affects the design of the product, then we

get into real deep shit.” Jobs didn’t agree: “I think we

have to drive a stake in the ground somewhere, and I

think if we miss this window, then our credibility starts to

erode.” What he did not say, even though it was

suspected by all, was that if their targets slipped they

might run out of money. Jobs had pledged $7 million of

his own funds, but at their current burn rate that would

run out in eighteen months if they didn’t start getting

some revenue from shipped products.

Three months later, when they returned to Pebble

Beach for their next retreat, Jobs began his list of

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maxims with “The honeymoon is over.” By the time of

the third retreat, in Sonoma in September 1986, the

timetable was gone, and it looked as though the

company would hit a ﬁnancial wall.

Perot to the Rescue

In late 1986 Jobs sent out a proposal to venture

capital ﬁrms offering a 10% stake in NeXT for $3 million.

That put a valuation on the entire company of $30

million, a number that Jobs had pulled out of thin air.

Less than $7 million had gone into the company thus

far, and there was little to show for it other than a neat

logo and some snazzy ofﬁces. It had no revenue or

products, nor any on the horizon. Not surprisingly, the

venture capitalists all passed on the offer to invest.

There was, however, one cowboy who was

dazzled. Ross Perot, the bantam Texan who had

founded Electronic Data Systems, then sold it to

General Motors for $2.4 billion, happened to watch a

PBS documentary,

The Entrepreneurs

, which had a

segment on Jobs and NeXT in November 1986. He

instantly identiﬁed with Jobs and his gang, so much so

that, as he watched them on television, he said, “I was

ﬁnishing their sentences for them.” It was a line eerily

similar to one Sculley had often used. Perot called Jobs

the next day and offered, “If you ever need an investor,

call me.”

Jobs did indeed need one, badly. But he was

careful not to show it. He waited a week before calling

back. Perot sent some of his analysts to size up NeXT,

but Jobs took care to deal directly with Perot. One of his

great regrets in life, Perot later said, was that he had not

bought Microsoft, or a large stake in it, when a very

young Bill Gates had come to visit him in Dallas in

1979. By the time Perot called Jobs, Microsoft had just

gone public with a $1 billion valuation. Perot had

missed out on the opportunity to make a lot of money

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and have a fun adventure. He was eager not to make

that mistake again.

Jobs made an offer to Perot that was three times

more costly than had quietly been offered to venture

capitalists a few months earlier. For $20 million, Perot

would get 16% of the equity in the company, after Jobs

put in another $5 million. That meant the company

would be valued at about $126 million. But money was

not a major consideration for Perot. After a meeting with

Jobs, he declared that he was in. “I pick the jockeys,

and the jockeys pick the horses and ride them,” he told

Jobs. “You guys are the ones I’m betting on, so you

ﬁgure it out.”

Perot brought to NeXT something that was almost

as valuable as his $20 million lifeline: He was a

quotable, spirited cheerleader for the company, who

could lend it an air of credibility among grown-ups. “In

terms of a startup company, it’s one that carries the

least risk of any I’ve seen in 25 years in the computer

industry,” he told the

New York Times.

“We’ve had

some sophisticated people see the hardware—it blew

them away. Steve and his whole NeXT team are the

darnedest bunch of perfectionists I’ve ever seen.”

Perot also traveled in rareﬁed social and business

circles that complemented Jobs’s own. He took Jobs to

a black-tie dinner dance in San Francisco that Gordon

and Ann Getty gave for King Juan Carlos I of Spain.

When the king asked Perot whom he should meet,

Perot immediately produced Jobs. They were soon

engaged in what Perot later described as “electric

conversation,” with Jobs animatedly describing the next

wave in computing. At the end the king scribbled a note

and handed it to Jobs. “What happened?” Perot asked.

Jobs answered, “I sold him a computer.”

These and other stories were incorporated into the

mythologized story of Jobs that Perot told wherever he

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went. At a brieﬁng at the National Press Club in

Washington, he spun Jobs’s life story into a Texas-size

yarn about a young man

so poor he couldn’t afford to go to college, working

in his garage at night, playing with computer chips,

which was his hobby, and his dad—who looks like a

character out of a Norman Rockwell painting—comes in

one day and said, “Steve, either make something you

can sell or go get a job.” Sixty days later, in a wooden

box that his dad made for him, the ﬁrst Apple computer

was created. And this high school graduate literally

changed the world.

The one phrase that was true was the one about

Paul Jobs’s looking like someone in a Rockwell

painting. And perhaps the last phrase, the one about

Jobs changing the world. Certainly Perot believed that.

Like Sculley, he saw himself in Jobs. “Steve’s like me,”

Perot told the

Washington Post

’s David Remnick.

“We’re weird in the same way. We’re soul mates.”

Gates and NeXT

Bill Gates was not a soul mate. Jobs had

convinced him to produce software applications for the

Macintosh, which had turned out to be hugely proﬁtable

for Microsoft. But Gates was one person who was

resistant to Jobs’s reality distortion ﬁeld, and as a result

he decided not to create software tailored for the NeXT

platform. Gates went to California to get periodic

demonstrations, but each time he came away

unimpressed. “The Macintosh was truly unique, but I

personally don’t understand what is so unique about

Steve’s new computer,” he told

Fortune.

Part of the problem was that the rival titans were

congenitally unable to be deferential to each other.

When Gates made his ﬁrst visit to NeXT’s Palo Alto

headquarters, in the summer of 1987, Jobs kept him

waiting for a half hour in the lobby, even though Gates

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could see through the glass walls that Jobs was

walking around having casual conversations. “I’d gone

down to NeXT and I had the Odwalla, the most

expensive carrot juice, and I’d never seen tech ofﬁces

so lavish,” Gates recalled, shaking his head with just a

hint of a smile. “And Steve comes a half hour late to the

meeting.”

Jobs’s sales pitch, according to Gates, was simple.

“We did the Mac together,” Jobs said. “How did that

work for you? Very well. Now, we’re going to do this

together and this is going to be great.”

But Gates was brutal to Jobs, just as Jobs could be

to others. “This machine is crap,” he said. “The optical

disk has too low latency, the fucking case is too

expensive. This thing is ridiculous.” He decided then,

and reafﬁrmed on each subsequent visit, that it made

no sense for Microsoft to divert resources from other

projects to develop applications for NeXT. Worse yet,

he repeatedly said so publicly, which made others less

likely to spend time developing for NeXT. “Develop for

it? I’ll piss on it,” he told

InfoWorld.

When they happened to meet in the hallway at a

conference, Jobs started berating Gates for his refusal

to do software for NeXT. “When you get a market, I will

consider it,” Gates replied. Jobs got angry. “It was a

screaming battle, right in front of everybody,” recalled

Adele Goldberg, the Xerox PARC engineer. Jobs

insisted that NeXT was the next wave of computing.

Gates, as he often did, got more expressionless as Jobs

got more heated. He ﬁnally just shook his head and

walked away.

Beneath their personal rivalry—and occasional

grudging respect—was their basic philosophical

difference. Jobs believed in an end-to-end integration

of hardware and software, which led him to build a

machine that was not compatible with others. Gates

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believed in, and proﬁted from, a world in which different

companies made machines that were compatible with

one another; their hardware ran a standard operating

system (Microsoft’s Windows) and could all use the

same software apps (such as Microsoft’s Word and

Excel). “His product comes with an interesting feature

called incompatibility,” Gates told the

Washington Post.

“It doesn’t run any of the existing software. It’s a super-

nice computer. I don’t think if I went out to design an

incompatible computer I would have done as well as he

did.”

At a forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989,

Jobs and Gates appeared sequentially, laying out their

competing worldviews. Jobs spoke about how new

waves come along in the computer industry every few

years. Macintosh had launched a revolutionary new

approach with the graphical interface; now NeXT was

doing it with object-oriented programming tied to a

powerful new machine based on an optical disk. Every

major software vendor realized they had to be part of

this new wave, he said, “except Microsoft.” When Gates

came up, he reiterated his belief that Jobs’s end-to-end

control of the software and the hardware was destined

for failure, just as Apple had failed in competing against

the Microsoft Windows standard. “The hardware market

and the software market are separate,” he said. When

asked about the great design that could come from

Jobs’s approach, Gates gestured to the NeXT prototype

that was still sitting onstage and sneered, “If you want

black, I’ll get you a can of paint.”

IBM

Jobs came up with a brilliant jujitsu maneuver

against Gates, one that could have changed the

balance of power in the computer industry forever. It

required Jobs to do two things that were against his

nature: licensing out his software to another hardware

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maker and getting into bed with IBM. He had a

pragmatic streak, albeit a tiny one, so he was able to

overcome his reluctance. But his heart was never fully

in it, which is why the alliance would turn out to be

short-lived.

It began at a party, a truly memorable one, for the

seventieth birthday of the

Washington Post

publisher

Katharine Graham in June 1987 in Washington. Six

hundred guests attended, including President Ronald

Reagan. Jobs ﬂew in from California and IBM’s

chairman John Akers from New York. It was the ﬁrst

time they had met. Jobs took the opportunity to bad-

mouth Microsoft and attempt to wean IBM from using its

Windows operating system. “I couldn’t resist telling him I

thought IBM was taking a giant gamble betting its entire

software strategy on Microsoft, because I didn’t think its

software was very good,” Jobs recalled.

To Jobs’s delight, Akers replied, “How would you

like to help us?” Within a few weeks Jobs showed up at

IBM’s Armonk, New York, headquarters with his

software engineer Bud Tribble. They put on a demo of

NeXT, which impressed the IBM engineers. Of

particular signiﬁcance was NeXTSTEP, the machine’s

object-oriented operating system. “NeXTSTEP took

care of a lot of trivial programming chores that slow

down the software development process,” said Andrew

Heller, the general manager of IBM’s workstation unit,

who was so impressed by Jobs that he named his

newborn son Steve.

The negotiations lasted into 1988, with Jobs

becoming prickly over tiny details. He would stalk out of

meetings over disagreements about colors or design,

only to be calmed down by Tribble or Lewin. He didn’t

seem to know which frightened him more, IBM or

Microsoft. In April Perot decided to play host for a

mediating session at his Dallas headquarters, and a

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deal was struck: IBM would license the current version

of the NeXTSTEP software, and if the managers liked it,

they would use it on some of their workstations. IBM

sent to Palo Alto a 125-page contract. Jobs tossed it

down without reading it. “You don’t get it,” he said as he

walked out of the room. He demanded a simpler

contract of only a few pages, which he got within a

week.

Jobs wanted to keep the arrangement secret from

Bill Gates until the big unveiling of the NeXT computer,

scheduled for October. But IBM insisted on being

forthcoming. Gates was furious. He realized this could

wean IBM off its dependence on Microsoft operating

systems. “NeXTSTEP isn’t compatible with anything,”

he raged to IBM executives.

At ﬁrst Jobs seemed to have pulled off Gates’s

worst nightmare. Other computer makers that were

beholden to Microsoft’s operating systems, most

notably Compaq and Dell, came to ask Jobs for the

right to clone NeXT and license NeXTSTEP. There

were even offers to pay a lot more if NeXT would get out

of the hardware business altogether.

That was too much for Jobs, at least for the time

being. He cut off the clone discussions. And he began

to cool toward IBM. The chill became reciprocal. When

the person who made the deal at IBM moved on, Jobs

went to Armonk to meet his replacement, Jim

Cannavino. They cleared the room and talked one-on-

one. Jobs demanded more money to keep the

relationship going and to license newer versions of

NeXTSTEP to IBM. Cannavino made no commitments,

and he subsequently stopped returning Jobs’s phone

calls. The deal lapsed. NeXT got a bit of money for a

licensing fee, but it never got the chance to change the

world.

The Launch, October 1988

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Jobs had perfected the art of turning product

launches into theatrical productions, and for the world

premiere of the NeXT computer—on October 12, 1988,

in San Francisco’s Symphony Hall—he wanted to outdo

himself. He needed to blow away the doubters. In the

weeks leading up to the event, he drove up to San

Francisco almost every day to hole up in the Victorian

house of Susan Kare, NeXT’s graphic designer, who

had done the original fonts and icons for the Macintosh.

She helped prepare each of the slides as Jobs fretted

over everything from the wording to the right hue of

green to serve as the background color. “I like that

green,” he said proudly as they were doing a trial run in

front of some staffers. “Great green, great green,” they

all murmured in assent.

No detail was too small. Jobs went over the

invitation list and even the lunch menu (mineral water,

croissants, cream cheese, bean sprouts). He picked out

a video projection company and paid it $60,000 for

help. And he hired the postmodernist theater producer

George Coates to stage the show. Coates and Jobs

decided, not surprisingly, on an austere and radically

simple stage look. The unveiling of the black perfect

cube would occur on a starkly minimalist stage setting

with a black background, a table covered by a black

cloth, a black veil draped over the computer, and a

simple vase of ﬂowers. Because neither the hardware

nor the operating system was actually ready, Jobs was

urged to do a simulation. But he refused. Knowing it

would be like walking a tightrope without a net, he

decided to do the demonstration live.

More than three thousand people showed up at

the event, lining up two hours before curtain time. They

were not disappointed, at least by the show. Jobs was

onstage for three hours, and he again proved to be, in

the words of Andrew Pollack of the

New York Times

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“the Andrew Lloyd Webber of product introductions, a

master of stage ﬂair and special effects.” Wes Smith of

the

Chicago Tribune

said the launch was “to product

demonstrations what Vatican II was to church

meetings.”

Jobs had the audience cheering from his opening

line: “It’s great to be back.” He began by recounting the

history of personal computer architecture, and he

promised that they would now witness an event “that

occurs only once or twice in a decade—a time when a

new architecture is rolled out that is going to change the

face of computing.” The NeXT software and hardware

were designed, he said, after three years of consulting

with universities across the country. “What we realized

was that higher ed wants a personal mainframe.”

As usual there were superlatives. The product was

“incredible,” he said, “the best thing we could have

imagined.” He praised the beauty of even the parts

unseen. Balancing on his ﬁngertips the foot-square

circuit board that would be nestled in the foot-cube box,

he enthused, “I hope you get a chance to look at this a

little later. It’s the most beautiful printed circuit board I’ve

ever seen in my life.” He then showed how the

computer could play speeches—he featured King’s “I

Have a Dream” and Kennedy’s “Ask Not”—and send

email with audio attachments. He leaned into the

microphone on the computer to record one of his own.

“Hi, this is Steve, sending a message on a pretty historic

day.” Then he asked those in the audience to add “a

round of applause” to the message, and they did.

One of Jobs’s management philosophies was that

it is crucial, every now and then, to roll the dice and “bet

the company” on some new idea or technology. At the

NeXT launch, he boasted of an example that, as it

turned out, would not be a wise gamble: having a high-

capacity (but slow) optical read/write disk and no ﬂoppy

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disk as a backup. “Two years ago we made a decision,”

he said. “We saw some new technology and we made a

decision to risk our company.”

Then he turned to a feature that would prove more

prescient. “What we’ve done is made the ﬁrst real digital

books,” he said, noting the inclusion of the Oxford

edition of Shakespeare and other tomes. “There has not

been an advancement in the state of the art of printed

book technology since Gutenberg.”

At times he could be amusingly aware of his own

foibles, and he used the electronic book demonstration

to poke fun at himself. “A word that’s sometimes used to

describe me is ‘mercurial,’” he said, then paused. The

audience laughed knowingly, especially those in the

front rows, which were ﬁlled with NeXT employees and

former members of the Macintosh team. Then he pulled

up the word in the computer’s dictionary and read the

ﬁrst deﬁnition: “Of or relating to, or born under the planet

Mercury.” Scrolling down, he said, “I think the third one

is the one they mean: ‘Characterized by unpredictable

changeableness of mood.’” There was a bit more

laughter. “If we scroll down the thesaurus, though, we

see that the antonym is ‘saturnine.’ Well what’s that? By

simply double-clicking on it, we immediately look that

up in the dictionary, and here it is: ‘Cold and steady in

moods. Slow to act or change. Of a gloomy or surly

disposition.’” A little smile came across his face as he

waited for the ripple of laughter. “Well,” he concluded, “I

don’t think ‘mercurial’ is so bad after all.” After the

applause, he used the quotations book to make a more

subtle point, about his reality distortion ﬁeld. The quote

he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s

Through the Looking

Glass.

After Alice laments that no matter how hard she

tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White

Queen retorts, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many

as six impossible things before breakfast.” Especially

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from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing

laughter.

All of the good cheer served to sugarcoat, or

distract attention from, the bad news. When it came time

to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did

what he would often do in product demonstrations: reel

off the features, describe them as being “worth

thousands and thousands of dollars,” and get the

audience to imagine how expensive it really should be.

Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a

low price: “We’re going to be charging higher education

a single price of $6,500.” From the faithful, there was

scattered applause. But his panel of academic advisors

had long pushed to keep the price to between $2,000

and $3,000, and they thought that Jobs had promised to

do so. Some of them were appalled. This was

especially true once they discovered that the optional

printer would cost another $2,000, and the slowness of

the optical disk would make the purchase of a $2,500

external hard disk advisable.

There was another disappointment that he tried to

downplay: “Early next year, we will have our 0.9

release, which is for software developers and

aggressive end users.” There was a bit of nervous

laughter. What he was saying was that the real release

of the machine and its software, known as the 1.0

release, would not actually be happening in early 1989.

In fact he didn’t set a hard date. He merely suggested it

would be sometime in the second quarter of that year.

At the ﬁrst NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had

refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman’s pushback,

from his commitment to have the machine ﬁnished in

early 1987. Now it was clear it would be more than two

years later.

The event ended on a more upbeat note, literally.

Jobs brought onstage a violinist from the San Francisco

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Symphony who played Bach’s A Minor Violin Concerto

in a duet with the NeXT computer onstage. People

erupted in jubilant applause. The price and the delayed

release were forgotten in the frenzy. When one reporter

asked him immediately afterward why the machine was

going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s ﬁve

years ahead of its time.”

As would become his standard practice, Jobs

offered to provide “exclusive” interviews to anointed

publications in return for their promising to put the story

on the cover. This time he went one “exclusive” too far,

though it didn’t really hurt. He agreed to a request from

Business Week

’s Katie Hafner for exclusive access to

him before the launch, but he also made a similar deal

with

Newsweek

and then with

Fortune.

What he didn’t

consider was that one of

Fortune

’s top editors, Susan

Fraker, was married to

Newsweek

’s editor Maynard

Parker. At the

Fortune

story conference, when they

were talking excitedly about their exclusive, Fraker

mentioned that she happened to know that

Newsweek

had also been promised an exclusive, and it would be

coming out a few days before

Fortune.

So Jobs ended

up that week on only two magazine covers.

Newsweek

used the cover line “Mr. Chips” and showed him

leaning on a beautiful NeXT, which it proclaimed to be

“the most exciting machine in years.”

Business Week

showed him looking angelic in a dark suit, ﬁngertips

pressed together like a preacher or professor. But

Hafner pointedly reported on the manipulation that

surrounded her exclusive. “NeXT carefully parceled out

interviews with its staff and suppliers, monitoring them

with a censor’s eye,” she wrote. “That strategy worked,

but at a price: Such maneuvering—self-serving and

relentless—displayed the side of Steve Jobs that so

hurt him at Apple. The trait that most stands out is

Jobs’s need to control events.”

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When the hype died down, the reaction to the

NeXT computer was muted, especially since it was not

yet commercially available. Bill Joy, the brilliant and wry

chief scientist at rival Sun Microsystems, called it “the

ﬁrst Yuppie workstation,” which was not an unalloyed

compliment. Bill Gates, as might be expected,

continued to be publicly dismissive. “Frankly, I’m

disappointed,” he told the

Wall Street Journal.

“Back in

1981, we were truly excited by the Macintosh when

Steve showed it to us, because when you put it side-by-

side with another computer, it was unlike anything

anybody had ever seen before.” The NeXT machine

was not like that. “In the grand scope of things, most of

these features are truly trivial.” He said that Microsoft

would continue its plans not to write software for the

NeXT. Right after the announcement event, Gates wrote

a parody email to his staff. “All reality has been

completely suspended,” it began. Looking back at it,

Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I

ever wrote.”

When the NeXT computer ﬁnally went on sale in

mid-1989, the factory was primed to churn out ten

thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were

about four hundred a month. The beautiful factory

robots, so nicely painted, remained mostly idle, and

NeXT continued to hemorrhage cash.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

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PIXAR

Technology Meets Art

Lucasﬁlm’s Computer Division

When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the

summer of 1985, he went for a walk with Alan Kay, who

had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple

Fellow. Kay knew that Jobs was interested in the

intersection of creativity and technology, so he

suggested they go see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who

was running the computer division of George Lucas’s

ﬁlm studio. They rented a limo and rode up to Marin

County to the edge of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where

Catmull and his little computer division were based. “I

was blown away, and I came back and tried to convince

Sculley to buy it for Apple,” Jobs recalled. “But the folks

running Apple weren’t interested, and they were busy

kicking me out anyway.”

The Lucasﬁlm computer division made hardware

and software for rendering digital images, and it also

had a group of computer animators making shorts,

which was led by a talented cartoon-loving executive

named John Lasseter. Lucas, who had completed his

ﬁrst

Star Wars

trilogy, was embroiled in a contentious

divorce, and he needed to sell off the division. He told

Catmull to ﬁnd a buyer as soon as possible.

After a few potential purchasers balked in the fall

of 1985, Catmull and his colleague Alvy Ray Smith

decided to seek investors so that they could buy the

division themselves. So they called Jobs, arranged

another meeting, and drove down to his Woodside

house. After railing for a while about the perﬁdies and

idiocies of Sculley, Jobs proposed that he buy their

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Lucasﬁlm division outright. Catmull and Smith

demurred: They wanted an investor, not a new owner.

But it soon became clear that there was a middle

ground: Jobs could buy a majority of the division and

serve as chairman but allow Catmull and Smith to run it.

“I wanted to buy it because I was really into

computer graphics,” Jobs recalled. “I realized they were

way ahead of others in combining art and technology,

which is what I’ve always been interested in.” He

offered to pay Lucas $5 million plus invest another $5

million to capitalize the division as a stand-alone

company. That was far less than Lucas had been

asking, but the timing was right. They decided to

negotiate a deal.

The chief ﬁnancial ofﬁcer at Lucasﬁlm found Jobs

arrogant and prickly, so when it came time to hold a

meeting of all the players, he told Catmull, “We have to

establish the right pecking order.” The plan was to

gather everyone in a room with Jobs, and then the CFO

would come in a few minutes late to establish that he

was the person running the meeting. “But a funny thing

happened,” Catmull recalled. “Steve started the

meeting on time without the CFO, and by the time the

CFO walked in Steve was already in control of the

meeting.”

Jobs met only once with George Lucas, who

warned him that the people in the division cared more

about making animated movies than they did about

making computers. “You know, these guys are hell-bent

on animation,” Lucas told him. Lucas later recalled, “I

did warn him that was basically Ed and John’s agenda.

I think in his heart he bought the company because that

was his agenda too.”

The ﬁnal agreement was reached in January

1986. It provided that, for his $10 million investment,

Jobs would own 70% of the company, with the rest of

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the stock distributed to Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and

the thirty-eight other founding employees, down to the

receptionist. The division’s most important piece of

hardware was called the Pixar Image Computer, and

from it the new company took its name.

For a while Jobs let Catmull and Smith run Pixar

without much interference. Every month or so they

would gather for a board meeting, usually at NeXT

headquarters, where Jobs would focus on the ﬁnances

and strategy. Nevertheless, by dint of his personality

and controlling instincts, Jobs was soon playing a

stronger role. He spewed out a stream of ideas—some

reasonable, others wacky—about what Pixar’s

hardware and software could become. And on his

occasional visits to the Pixar ofﬁces, he was an

inspiring presence. “I grew up a Southern Baptist, and

we had revival meetings with mesmerizing but corrupt

preachers,” recounted Alvy Ray Smith. “Steve’s got it:

the power of the tongue and the web of words that

catches people up. We were aware of this when we had

board meetings, so we developed signals—nose

scratching or ear tugs—for when someone had been

caught up in Steve’s distortion ﬁeld and he needed to

be tugged back to reality.”

Jobs had always appreciated the virtue of

integrating hardware and software, which is what Pixar

did with its Image Computer and rendering software. It

also produced creative content, such as animated ﬁlms

and graphics. All three elements beneﬁted from Jobs’s

combination of artistic creativity and technological

geekiness. “Silicon Valley folks don’t really respect

Hollywood creative types, and the Hollywood folks think

that tech folks are people you hire and never have to

meet,” Jobs later said. “Pixar was one place where both

cultures were respected.”

Initially the revenue was supposed to come from

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the hardware side. The Pixar Image Computer sold for

$125,000. The primary customers were animators and

graphic designers, but the machine also soon found

specialized markets in the medical industry (CAT scan

data could be rendered in three-dimensional graphics)

and intelligence ﬁelds (for rendering information from

reconnaissance ﬂights and satellites). Because of the

sales to the National Security Agency, Jobs had to get a

security clearance, which must have been fun for the

FBI agent assigned to vet him. At one point, a Pixar

executive recalled, Jobs was called by the investigator

to go over the drug use questions, which he answered

unabashedly. “The last time I used that . . . ,” he would

say, or on occasion he would answer that no, he had

actually never tried that particular drug.

Jobs pushed Pixar to build a lower-cost version of

the computer that would sell for around $30,000. He

insisted that Hartmut Esslinger design it, despite

protests by Catmull and Smith about his fees. It ended

up looking like the original Pixar Image Computer,

which was a cube with a round dimple in the middle,

but it had Esslinger’s signature thin grooves.

Jobs wanted to sell Pixar’s computers to a mass

market, so he had the Pixar folks open up sales ofﬁces

—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on

the theory that creative people would soon come up

with all sorts of ways to use the machine. “My view is

that people are creative animals and will ﬁgure out

clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never

imagined,” he later said. “I thought that would happen

with the Pixar computer, just as it did with the Mac.” But

the machine never took hold with regular consumers. It

cost too much, and there were not many software

programs for it.

On the software side, Pixar had a rendering

program, known as Reyes (Renders everything you

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ever saw), for making 3-D graphics and images. After

Jobs became chairman, the company created a new

language and interface, named RenderMan, that it

hoped would become a standard for 3-D graphics

rendering, just as Adobe’s PostScript was for laser

printing.

As he had with the hardware, Jobs decided that

they should try to ﬁnd a mass market, rather than just a

specialized one, for the software they made. He was

never content to aim only at the corporate or high-end

specialized markets. “He would have these great

visions of how RenderMan could be for everyman,”

recalled Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s marketing director. “He

kept coming up with ideas about how ordinary people

would use it to make amazing 3-D graphics and

photorealistic images.” The Pixar team would try to

dissuade him by saying that RenderMan was not as

easy to use as, say, Excel or Adobe Illustrator. Then

Jobs would go to a whiteboard and show them how to

make it simpler and more user-friendly. “We would be

nodding our heads and getting excited and say, ‘Yes,

yes, this will be great!’” Kerwin recalled. “And then he

would leave and we would consider it for a moment and

then say, ‘What the heck was he thinking!’ He was so

weirdly charismatic that you almost had to get

deprogrammed after you talked to him.” As it turned out,

average consumers were not craving expensive

software that would let them render realistic images.

RenderMan didn’t take off.

There was, however, one company that was eager

to automate the rendering of animators’ drawings into

color images for ﬁlm. When Roy Disney led a board

revolution at the company that his uncle Walt had

founded, the new CEO, Michael Eisner, asked what role

he wanted. Disney said that he would like to revive the

company’s venerable but fading animation department.

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One of his ﬁrst initiatives was to look at ways to

computerize the process, and Pixar won the contract. It

created a package of customized hardware and

software known as CAPS, Computer Animation

Production System. It was ﬁrst used in 1988 for the ﬁnal

scene of

The Little Mermaid

, in which King Triton waves

good-bye to Ariel. Disney bought dozens of Pixar Image

Computers as CAPS became an integral part of its

production.

Animation

The digital animation business at Pixar—the group

that made little animated ﬁlms—was originally just a

sideline, its main purpose being to show off the

hardware and software of the company. It was run by

John Lasseter, a man whose childlike face and

demeanor masked an artistic perfectionism that rivaled

that of Jobs. Born in Hollywood, Lasseter grew up

loving Saturday morning cartoon shows. In ninth grade,

he wrote a report on the history of Disney Studios, and

he decided then how he wished to spend his life.

When he graduated from high school, Lasseter

enrolled in the animation program at the California

Institute of the Arts, founded by Walt Disney. In his

summers and spare time, he researched the Disney

archives and worked as a guide on the Jungle Cruise

ride at Disneyland. The latter experience taught him the

value of timing and pacing in telling a story, an

important but difﬁcult concept to master when creating,

frame by frame, animated footage. He won the Student

Academy Award for the short he made in his junior

year,

Lady and the Lamp

, which showed his debt to

Disney ﬁlms and foreshadowed his signature talent for

infusing inanimate objects such as lamps with human

personalities. After graduation he took the job for which

he was destined: as an animator at Disney Studios.

Except it didn’t work out. “Some of us younger

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guys wanted to bring

Star Wars

–level quality to the art

of animation, but we were held in check,” Lasseter

recalled. “I got disillusioned, then I got caught in a feud

between two bosses, and the head animation guy ﬁred

me.” So in 1984 Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith were

able to recruit him to work where

Star Wars

–level

quality was being deﬁned, Lucasﬁlm. It was not certain

that George Lucas, already worried about the cost of his

computer division, would really approve of hiring a full-

time animator, so Lasseter was given the title “interface

designer.”

After Jobs came onto the scene, he and Lasseter

began to share their passion for graphic design. “I was

the only guy at Pixar who was an artist, so I bonded with

Steve over his design sense,” Lasseter said. He was a

gregarious, playful, and huggable man who wore

ﬂowery Hawaiian shirts, kept his ofﬁce cluttered with

vintage toys, and loved cheeseburgers. Jobs was a

prickly, whip-thin vegetarian who favored austere and

uncluttered surroundings. But they were actually well-

suited for each other. Lasseter was an artist, so Jobs

treated him deferentially, and Lasseter viewed Jobs,

correctly, as a patron who could appreciate artistry and

knew how it could be interwoven with technology and

commerce.

Jobs and Catmull decided that, in order to show off

their hardware and software, Lasseter should produce

another short animated ﬁlm in 1986 for SIGGRAPH, the

annual computer graphics conference. At the time,

Lasseter was using the Luxo lamp on his desk as a

model for graphic rendering, and he decided to turn

Luxo into a lifelike character. A friend’s young child

inspired him to add Luxo Jr., and he showed a few test

frames to another animator, who urged him to make

sure he told a story. Lasseter said he was making only

a short, but the animator reminded him that a story can

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be told even in a few seconds. Lasseter took the lesson

to heart.

Luxo Jr.

ended up being just over two minutes;

it told the tale of a parent lamp and a child lamp

pushing a ball back and forth until the ball bursts, to the

child’s dismay.

Jobs was so excited that he took time off from the

pressures at NeXT to ﬂy down with Lasseter to

SIGGRAPH, which was being held in Dallas that

August. “It was so hot and muggy that when we’d walk

outside the air hit us like a tennis racket,” Lasseter

recalled. There were ten thousand people at the trade

show, and Jobs loved it. Artistic creativity energized

him, especially when it was connected to technology.

There was a long line to get into the auditorium

where the ﬁlms were being screened, so Jobs, not one

to wait his turn, fast-talked their way in ﬁrst.

Luxo Jr.

got

a prolonged standing ovation and was named the best

ﬁlm. “Oh, wow!” Jobs exclaimed at the end. “I really get

this, I get what it’s all about.” As he later explained, “Our

ﬁlm was the only one that had art to it, not just good

technology. Pixar was about making that combination,

just as the Macintosh had been.”

Luxo Jr.

was nominated for an Academy Award,

and Jobs ﬂew down to Los Angeles to be there for the

ceremony. It didn’t win, but Jobs became committed to

making new animated shorts each year, even though

there was not much of a business rationale for doing so.

As times got tough at Pixar, he would sit through brutal

budget-cutting meetings showing no mercy. Then

Lasseter would ask that the money they had just saved

be used for his next ﬁlm, and Jobs would agree.

Tin Toy

Not all of Jobs’s relationships at Pixar were as

good. His worst clash came with Catmull’s cofounder,

Alvy Ray Smith. From a Baptist background in rural

north Texas, Smith became a free-spirited hippie

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computer imaging engineer with a big build, big laugh,

and big personality—and occasionally an ego to match.

“Alvy just glows, with a high color, friendly laugh, and a

whole bunch of groupies at conferences,” said Pam

Kerwin. “A personality like Alvy’s was likely to rufﬂe

Steve. They are both visionaries and high energy and

high ego. Alvy is not as willing to make peace and

overlook things as Ed was.”

Smith saw Jobs as someone whose charisma and

ego led him to abuse power. “He was like a

televangelist,” Smith said. “He wanted to control people,

but I would not be a slave to him, which is why we

clashed. Ed was much more able to go with the ﬂow.”

Jobs would sometimes assert his dominance at a

meeting by saying something outrageous or untrue.

Smith took great joy in calling him on it, and he would

do so with a large laugh and a smirk. This did not

endear him to Jobs.

One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating

Smith and other top Pixar executives for the delay in

getting the circuit boards completed for the new version

of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was

also very late in completing its own computer boards,

and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with

your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went

ballistic, or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When

Smith was feeling attacked or confrontational, he

tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs

started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was a bully

tactic, and I exploded with everything I had,” Smith

recalled. “Before I knew it, we were in each other’s

faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each

other.”

Jobs was very possessive about control of the

whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly Smith

pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do

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that!” Jobs shouted.

“What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your

whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point Jobs stormed out.

Smith eventually resigned to form a new company

to make software for digital drawing and image editing.

Jobs refused him permission to use some code he had

created while at Pixar, which further inﬂamed their

enmity. “Alvy eventually got what he needed,” said

Catmull, “but he was very stressed for a year and

developed a lung infection.” In the end it worked out

well enough; Microsoft eventually bought Smith’s

company, giving him the distinction of being a founder

of one company that was sold to Jobs and another that

was sold to Gates.

Ornery in the best of times, Jobs became

particularly so when it became clear that all three Pixar

endeavors—hardware, software, and animated content

—were losing money. “I’d get these plans, and in the

end I kept having to put in more money,” he recalled.

He would rail, but then write the check. Having been

ousted at Apple and ﬂailing at NeXT, he couldn’t afford

a third strike.

To stem the losses, he ordered a round of deep

layoffs, which he executed with his typical empathy

deﬁciency. As Pam Kerwin put it, he had “neither the

emotional nor ﬁnancial runway to be decent to people

he was letting go.” Jobs insisted that the ﬁrings be done

immediately, with no severance pay. Kerwin took Jobs

on a walk around the parking lot and begged that the

employees be given at least two weeks notice. “Okay,”

he shot back, “but the notice is retroactive from two

weeks ago.” Catmull was in Moscow, and Kerwin put in

frantic calls to him. When he returned, he was able to

institute a meager severance plan and calm things

down just a bit.

At one point the members of the Pixar animation

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team were trying to convince Intel to let them make

some of its commercials, and Jobs became impatient.

During a meeting, in the midst of berating an Intel

marketing director, he picked up the phone and called

CEO Andy Grove directly. Grove, still playing mentor,

tried to teach Jobs a lesson: He supported his Intel

manager. “I stuck by my employee,” he recalled. “Steve

doesn’t like to be treated like a supplier.”

Grove also played mentor when Jobs proposed

that Pixar give Intel suggestions on how to improve the

capacity of its processors to render 3-D graphics. When

the engineers at Intel accepted the offer, Jobs sent an

email back saying Pixar would need to be paid for its

advice. Intel’s chief engineer replied, “We have not

entered into any ﬁnancial arrangement in exchange for

good ideas for our microprocessors in the past and

have no intention for the future.” Jobs forwarded the

answer to Grove, saying that he found the engineer’s

response to be “extremely arrogant, given Intel’s dismal

showing in understanding computer graphics.” Grove

sent Jobs a blistering reply, saying that sharing ideas is

“what friendly companies and friends do for each other.”

Grove added that he had often freely shared ideas with

Jobs in the past and that Jobs should not be so

mercenary. Jobs relented. “I have many faults, but one

of them is not ingratitude,” he responded. “Therefore, I

have changed my position 180 degrees—we will freely

help. Thanks for the clearer perspective.”

Pixar was able to create some powerful software

products aimed at average consumers, or at least those

average consumers who shared Jobs’s passion for

designing things. Jobs still hoped that the ability to

make super-realistic 3-D images at home would

become part of the desktop publishing craze. Pixar’s

Showplace, for example, allowed users to change the

shadings on the 3-D objects they created so that they

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could display them from various angles with

appropriate shadows. Jobs thought it was incredibly

compelling, but most consumers were content to live

without it. It was a case where his passions misled him:

The software had so many amazing features that it

lacked the simplicity Jobs usually demanded. Pixar

couldn’t compete with Adobe, which was making

software that was less sophisticated but far less

complicated and expensive.

Even as Pixar’s hardware and software product

lines foundered, Jobs kept protecting the animation

group. It had become for him a little island of magical

artistry that gave him deep emotional pleasure, and he

was willing to nurture it and bet on it. In the spring of

1988 cash was running so short that he convened a

meeting to decree deep spending cuts across the

board. When it was over, Lasseter and his animation

group were almost too afraid to ask Jobs about

authorizing some extra money for another short. Finally,

they broached the topic and Jobs sat silent, looking

skeptical. It would require close to $300,000 more out of

his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked if there were

any storyboards. Catmull took him down to the

animation ofﬁces, and once Lasseter started his show—

displaying his boards, doing the voices, showing his

passion for his product—Jobs started to warm up.

The story was about Lasseter’s love, classic toys. It

was told from the perspective of a toy one-man band

named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and

terrorizes him. Escaping under the couch, Tinny ﬁnds

other frightened toys, but when the baby hits his head

and cries, Tinny goes back out to cheer him up.

Jobs said he would provide the money. “I believed

in what John was doing,” he later said. “It was art. He

cared, and I cared. I always said yes.” His only

comment at the end of Lasseter’s presentation was, “All

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I ask of you, John, is to make it great.”

Tin Toy

went on to win the 1988 Academy Award

for animated short ﬁlms, the ﬁrst computer-generated

ﬁlm to do so. To celebrate, Jobs took Lasseter and his

team to Greens, a vegetarian restaurant in San

Francisco. Lasseter grabbed the Oscar, which was in

the center of the table, held it aloft, and toasted Jobs by

saying, “All you asked is that we make a great movie.”

The new team at Disney—Michael Eisner the CEO

and Jeffrey Katzenberg in the ﬁlm division—began a

quest to get Lasseter to come back. They liked

Tin Toy

and they thought that something more could be done

with animated stories of toys that come alive and have

human emotions. But Lasseter, grateful for Jobs’s faith

in him, felt that Pixar was the only place where he could

create a new world of computer-generated animation.

He told Catmull, “I can go to Disney and be a director,

or I can stay here and make history.” So Disney began

talking about making a production deal with Pixar.

“Lasseter’s shorts were really breathtaking both in

storytelling and in the use of technology,” recalled

Katzenberg. “I tried so hard to get him to Disney, but he

was loyal to Steve and Pixar. So if you can’t beat them,

join them. We decided to look for ways we could join up

with Pixar and have them make a ﬁlm about toys for us.”

By this point Jobs had poured close to $50 million

of his own money into Pixar—more than half of what he

had pocketed when he cashed out of Apple—and he

was still losing money at NeXT. He was hard-nosed

about it; he forced all Pixar employees to give up their

options as part of his agreement to add another round

of personal funding in 1991. But he was also a romantic

in his love for what artistry and technology could do

together. His belief that ordinary consumers would love

to do 3-D modeling on Pixar software turned out to be

wrong, but that was soon replaced by an instinct that

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turned out to be right: that combining great art and

digital technology would transform animated ﬁlms more

than anything had since 1937, when Walt Disney had

given life to Snow White.

Looking back, Jobs said that, had he known more,

he would have focused on animation sooner and not

worried about pushing the company’s hardware or

software applications. On the other hand, had he known

the hardware and software would never be proﬁtable,

he would not have taken over Pixar. “Life kind of

snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for

the better.”

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CHAPTER TWENTY

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A REGULAR GUY

Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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FAMILY MAN

At Home with the Jobs Clan

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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up with waiting and moved out. The following month, he

gave her a diamond engagement ring, and she moved

back in.

In December Jobs took Powell to his favorite

vacation spot, Kona Village in Hawaii. He had started

going there nine years earlier when, stressed out at

Apple, he had asked his assistant to pick out a place for

him to escape. At ﬁrst glance, he didn’t like the cluster of

sparse thatched-roof bungalows nestled on a beach on

the big island of Hawaii. It was a family resort, with

communal eating. But within hours he had begun to

view it as paradise. There was a simplicity and spare

beauty that moved him, and he returned whenever he

could. He especially enjoyed being there that

December with Powell. Their love had matured. The

night before Christmas he again declared, even more

formally, that he wanted to marry her. Soon another

factor would drive that decision. While in Hawaii, Powell

got pregnant. “We know exactly where it happened,”

Jobs later said with a laugh.

The Wedding, March 18, 1991

Powell’s pregnancy did not completely settle the

issue. Jobs again began balking at the idea of

marriage, even though he had dramatically proposed to

her both at the very beginning and the very end of

1990. Furious, she moved out of his house and back to

her apartment. For a while he sulked or ignored the

situation. Then he thought he might still be in love with

Tina Redse; he sent her roses and tried to convince her

to return to him, maybe even get married. He was not

sure what he wanted, and he surprised a wide swath of

friends and even acquaintances by asking them what

he should do. Who was prettier, he would ask, Tina or

Laurene? Who did they like better? Who should he

marry? In a chapter about this in Mona Simpson’s novel

A Regular Guy

, the Jobs character “asked more than a

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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It’s a nutso way to live. We just decided that’s not how

we wanted to raise our kids.”

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

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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

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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

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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THE SECOND COMING

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at

Last . . .

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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$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

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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

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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

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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.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 421

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

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 423

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 428

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.”

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 435

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

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 444

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.

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 445

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.”

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 447

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.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 449

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, 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

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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

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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,

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 453

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

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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

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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

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—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

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

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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.”

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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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,”

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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

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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:

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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 TBWAad 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,

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

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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

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$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:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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the planet, at Apple and Pixar. But these jobs are team

sports. I accept your thanks on behalf of everybody at

Apple.”

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

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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

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”

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

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CHAPTER THIRTY

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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

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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

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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.

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 TBWAwanted 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

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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

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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

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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.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

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THE iTUNES STORE

I’m the Pied Piper

Warner Music

At the beginning of 2002 Apple faced a challenge.

The seamless connection between your iPod, iTunes

software, and computer made it easy to manage the

music you already owned. But to get new music, you

had to venture out of this cozy environment and go buy

a CD or download the songs online. The latter

endeavor usually meant foraying into the murky

domains of ﬁle-sharing and piracy services. So Jobs

wanted to offer iPod users a way to download songs

that was simple, safe, and legal.

The music industry also faced a challenge. It was

being plagued by a bestiary of piracy services—

Napster, Grokster, Gnutella, Kazaa—that enabled

people to get songs for free. Partly as a result, legal

sales of CDs were down 9% in 2002.

The executives at the music companies were

desperately scrambling, with the elegance of second-

graders playing soccer, to agree on a common

standard for copy-protecting digital music. Paul Vidich

of Warner Music and his corporate colleague Bill

Raduchel of AOL Time Warner were working with Sony

in that effort, and they hoped to get Apple to be part of

their consortium. So a group of them ﬂew to Cupertino

in January 2002 to see Jobs.

It was not an easy meeting. Vidich had a cold and

was losing his voice, so his deputy, Kevin Gage, began

the presentation. Jobs, sitting at the head of the

conference table, ﬁdgeted and looked annoyed. After

four slides, he waved his hand and broke in. “You have

your heads up your asses,” he pointed out. Everyone

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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

PC World

’s list of “the 25 worst tech products of all

time.” The magazine declared, “The services’

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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%.

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 555

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.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 557

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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 558

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

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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,

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 560

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.

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“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

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them when we were growing up, his son, then eighteen,

came in the room. “Reed doesn’t understand,” Jobs

lamented. Or perhaps he did. He was wearing a Joan

Baez T-shirt, with the words “Forever Young” on it.

Bob Dylan

The only time Jobs can ever recall being tongue-

tied was in the presence of Bob Dylan. He was playing

near Palo Alto in October 2004, and Jobs was

recovering from his ﬁrst cancer surgery. Dylan was not

a gregarious man, not a Bono or a Bowie. He was

never Jobs’s friend, nor did he care to be. He did,

however, invite Jobs to visit him at his hotel before the

concert. Jobs recalled:

We sat on the patio outside his room and talked for

two hours. I was really nervous, because he was one of

my heroes. And I was also afraid that he wouldn’t be

really smart anymore, that he’d be a caricature of

himself, like happens to a lot of people. But I was

delighted. He was as sharp as a tack. He was

everything I’d hoped. He was really open and honest.

He was just telling me about his life and about writing

his songs. He said, “They just came through me, it

wasn’t like I was having to compose them. That doesn’t

happen anymore, I just can’t write them that way

anymore.” Then he paused and said to me with his

raspy voice and little smile, “But I still can sing them.”

The next time Dylan played nearby, he invited

Jobs to drop by his tricked-up tour bus just before the

concert. When Dylan asked what his favorite song was,

Jobs said “One Too Many Mornings.” So Dylan sang it

that night. After the concert, as Jobs was walking out the

back, the tour bus came by and screeched to a stop.

The door ﬂipped open. “So, did you hear my song I

sang for you?” Dylan rasped. Then he drove off. When

Jobs tells the tale, he does a pretty good impression of

Dylan’s voice. “He’s one of my all-time heroes,” Jobs

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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

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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

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.

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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

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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’

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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

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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

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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,

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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.”

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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.”

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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

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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.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

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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

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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

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

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

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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

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

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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 579

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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 580

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.”

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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

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‘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.

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 583

“When the steelworkers were putting up the beams,

they would bring their families on the weekend to show

them.”

The wackiest piece of serendipity was “The Love

Lounge.” One of the animators found a small door on

the back wall when he moved into his ofﬁce. It opened

to a low corridor that you could crawl through to a room

clad in sheet metal that provided access to the air-

conditioning valves. He and his colleagues

commandeered the secret room, festooned it with

Christmas lights and lava lamps, and furnished it with

benches upholstered in animal prints, tasseled pillows,

a fold-up cocktail table, liquor bottles, bar equipment,

and napkins that read “The Love Lounge.” A video

camera installed in the corridor allowed occupants to

monitor who might be approaching.

Lasseter and Jobs brought important visitors there

and had them sign the wall. The signatures include

Michael Eisner, Roy Disney, Tim Allen, and Randy

Newman. Jobs loved it, but since he wasn’t a drinker he

sometimes referred to it as the Meditation Room. It

reminded him, he said, of the one that he and Daniel

Kottke had at Reed, but without the acid.

The Divorce

In testimony before a Senate committee in

February 2002, Michael Eisner blasted the ads that

Jobs had created for Apple’s iTunes. “There are

computer companies that have full-page ads and

billboards that say: Rip, mix, burn,” he declared. “In

other words, they can create a theft and distribute it to

all their friends if they buy this particular computer.”

This was not a smart comment. It misunderstood

the meaning of “rip” and assumed it involved ripping

someone off, rather than importing ﬁles from a CD to a

computer. More signiﬁcantly, it truly pissed off Jobs, as

Eisner should have known. That too was not smart.

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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

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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.

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Finding Nemo

became Pixar’s (and Disney’s)

biggest hit thus far. It easily beat out

The Lion King

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

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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

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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

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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.

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Iger went to work. He ﬂew from Los Angeles to

Lasseter’s house for dinner, and stayed up well past

midnight talking. He also took Catmull out to dinner,

and then he visited Pixar Studios, alone, with no

entourage and without Jobs. “I went out and met all the

directors one on one, and they each pitched me their

movie,” he said. Lasseter was proud of how much his

team impressed Iger, which of course made him warm

up to Iger. “I never had more pride in Pixar than that

day,” he said. “All the teams and pitches were amazing,

and Bob was blown away.”

Indeed after seeing what was coming up over the

next few years—

Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E

—Iger told

his chief ﬁnancial ofﬁcer at Disney, “Oh my God, they’ve

got great stuff. We’ve got to get this deal done. It’s the

future of the company.” He admitted that he had no faith

in the movies that Disney animation had in the works.

The deal they proposed was that Disney would

purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. Jobs would thus

become Disney’s largest shareholder, with

approximately 7% of the company’s stock compared to

1.7% owned by Eisner and 1% by Roy Disney. Disney

Animation would be put under Pixar, with Lasseter and

Catmull running the combined unit. Pixar would retain

its independent identity, its studio and headquarters

would remain in Emeryville, and it would even keep its

own email addresses.

Iger asked Jobs to bring Lasseter and Catmull to a

secret meeting of the Disney board in Century City, Los

Angeles, on a Sunday morning. The goal was to make

them feel comfortable with what would be a radical and

expensive deal. As they prepared to take the elevator

from the parking garage, Lasseter said to Jobs, “If I start

getting too excited or go on too long, just touch my leg.”

Jobs ended up having to do it once, but otherwise

Lasseter made the perfect sales pitch. “I talked about

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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

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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.”

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,”

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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

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Apple Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson — page 607

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.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

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ROUND ONE

Memento Mori

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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external expectations, all pride, all fear of

embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in

the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I

know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something

to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not

to follow your heart.

The artful minimalism of the speech gave it

simplicity, purity, and charm. Search where you will,

from anthologies to YouTube, and you won’t ﬁnd a

better commencement address. Others may have been

more important, such as George Marshall’s at Harvard

in 1947 announcing a plan to rebuild Europe, but none

has had more grace.

A Lion at Fifty

For his thirtieth and fortieth birthdays, Jobs had

celebrated with the stars of Silicon Valley and other

assorted celebrities. But when he turned ﬁfty in 2005,

after coming back from his cancer surgery, the surprise

party that his wife arranged featured mainly his closest

friends and professional colleagues. It was at the

comfortable San Francisco home of some friends, and

the great chef Alice Waters prepared salmon from

Scotland along with couscous and a variety of garden-

raised vegetables. “It was beautifully warm and

intimate, with everyone and the kids all able to sit in one

room,” Waters recalled. The entertainment was comedy

improvisation done by the cast of

Whose Line Is It

Anyway?

Jobs’s close friend Mike Slade was there,

along with colleagues from Apple and Pixar, including

Lasseter, Cook, Schiller, Clow, Rubinstein, and

Tevanian.

Cook had done a good job running the company

during Jobs’s absence. He kept Apple’s temperamental

actors performing well, and he avoided stepping into

the limelight. Jobs liked strong personalities, up to a

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

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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.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

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ROUND TWO

The Cancer Recurs

The Battles of 2008

By the beginning of 2008 it was clear to Jobs and

his doctors that his cancer was spreading. When they

had taken out his pancreatic tumors in 2004, he had the

cancer genome partially sequenced. That helped his

doctors determine which pathways were broken, and

they were treating him with targeted therapies that they

thought were most likely to work.

He was also being treated for pain, usually with

morphine-based analgesics. One day in February 2008

when Powell’s close friend Kathryn Smith was staying

with them in Palo Alto, she and Jobs took a walk. “He

told me that when he feels really bad, he just

concentrates on the pain, goes into the pain, and that

seems to dissipate it,” she recalled. That wasn’t exactly

true, however. When Jobs was in pain, he let everyone

around him know it.

There was another health issue that became

increasingly problematic, one that medical researchers

didn’t focus on as rigorously as they did cancer or pain.

He was having eating problems and losing weight.

Partly this was because he had lost much of his

pancreas, which produces the enzymes needed to

digest protein and other nutrients. It was also because

both the cancer and the morphine reduced his appetite.

And then there was the psychological component,

which the doctors barely knew how to address: Since

his early teens, he had indulged his weird obsession

with extremely restrictive diets and fasts.

Even after he married and had children, he

retained his dubious eating habits. He would spend

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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

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also investigated his involvement in the backdating of

Apple stock options. As the story was being prepared,