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

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:01

本帖最后由科夫维奇斯基于 2011-11-8 20:46 编辑

[史蒂夫·乔布斯传].(Steve.Jobs).Walter.Isaacson.中文文字版.pdf
下载地址：

游客，如果您要查看本帖隐藏内容请回复

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING BIOGRAPHIES OF BENJAMIN

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 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

COPYRIGHT © 2011 SIMON & SCHUSTER

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

The people who are crazy enough
to think they can change
the world are the ones who do.

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

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
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
NeXT: 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
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
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

Paul Jobs with Steve, 1956

The Los Altos house with the garage where Apple was born

With the “SWAB JOB” school prank sign

CHAPTER ONE

该贴已经同步到科夫维奇斯基的微博

菜小小欣 · 发表于 2012-4-8 14:58

非常感謝！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！

百鹤折 · 发表于 2012-2-29 09:31

好东西，求分享啊

徐鲁宾 · 发表于 2012-2-12 15:04

like it so much.

徐鲁宾 · 发表于 2012-2-12 15:01

I want to get the whole translation of the book "Steve Jobs".

clounddeng · 发表于 2011-12-27 22:58

第一次，这里东东不错呵{:soso_e113:}

王者归来 · 发表于 2011-11-8 22:38

中文版

风暴 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:46

很难看懂

隐市隐士 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:45

有中文版就好

admin · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:40

[史蒂夫·乔布斯传].(Steve.Jobs).Walter.Isaacson.中文文字版.pdf
下载地址：

游客，如果您要查看本帖隐藏内容请回复

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:32

The Whiteness of the Whale: Interviews with James Vincent, Lee Clow, Steve Jobs.
Wozniak, 298; Levy, The Perfect Thing, 73; Johnny Davis, “Ten Years of the iPod,”
Guardian, Mar. 18, 2011.

CHAPTER 31: THE iTUNES STORE
Warner Music: Interviews with Paul Vidich, Steve Jobs, Doug Morris, Barry Schuler,
Roger Ames, Eddy Cue. Paul Sloan, “What’s Next for Apple,” Business 2.0, Apr. 1, 2005;
Knopper, 157–161,170; Devin Leonard, “Songs in the Key of Steve,” Fortune, May 12,
2003; Tony Perkins, interview with Nobuyuki Idei and Sir Howard Stringer, World
Economic Forum, Davos, Jan. 25, 2003; Dan Tynan, “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All
Time,” PC World, Mar. 26, 2006; Andy Langer, “The God of Music,” Esquire, July 2003;
Jeff Goodell, “Steve Jobs,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003.
Herding Cats: Interviews with Doug Morris, Roger Ames, Steve Jobs, Jimmy Iovine,
Andy Lack, Eddy Cue, Wynton Marsalis. Knopper, 172; Devin Leonard, “Songs in the Key
of Steve,” Fortune, May 12, 2003; Peter Burrows, “Show Time!” Business Week, Feb. 2,
2004; Pui-Wing Tam, Bruce Orwall, and Anna Wilde Mathews, “Going Hollywood,” Wall
Street Journal, Apr. 25, 2003; Steve Jobs, keynote speech, Apr. 28, 2003; Andy Langer,
“The God of Music,” Esquire, July 2003; Steven Levy, “Not the Same Old Song,”
Newsweek, May 12, 2003.
Microsoft: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Jon Rubinstein, Tony
Fadell, Eddy Cue. Emails from Jim Allchin, David Cole, Bill Gates, Apr. 30, 2003 (these
emails later became part of an Iowa court case and Steve Jobs sent me copies); Steve Jobs,
presentation, Oct. 16, 2003; Walt Mossberg interview with Steve Jobs, All Things Digital
conference, May 30, 2007; Bill Gates, “We’re Early on the Video Thing,” Business Week,
Sept. 2, 2004.
Mr. Tambourine Man: Interviews with Andy Lack, Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell,
Jon Rubinstein. Ken Belson, “Infighting Left Sony behind Apple in Digital Music,” New
York Times, Apr. 19, 2004; Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired,
Nov. 2005; Saul Hansel, “Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2004;
John Borland, “Can Glaser and Jobs Find Harmony?” CNET News, Aug. 17, 2004; Levy,
The Perfect Thing, 169.

CHAPTER 32: MUSIC MAN
On His iPod: Interviews with Steve Jobs, James Vincent. Elisabeth Bumiller, “President
Bush’s iPod,” New York Times, Apr. 11, 2005; Levy, The Perfect Thing, 26–29; Devin
Leonard, “Songs in the Key of Steve,” Fortune, May 12, 2003.
Bob Dylan: Interviews with Jeff Rosen, Andy Lack, Eddy Cue, Steve Jobs, James
Vincent, Lee Clow. Matthew Creamer, “Bob Dylan Tops Music Chart Again—and Apple’s
a Big Reason Why,” Ad Age, Oct. 8, 2006.
The Beatles; Bono; Yo-Yo Ma: Interviews with Bono, John Eastman, Steve Jobs, Yo-Yo
Ma, George Riley.

CHAPTER 33: PIXAR’S FRIENDS

A Bug’s Life: Interviews with Jeffrey Katzenberg, John Lasseter, Steve Jobs. Price, 171–
174; Paik, 116; Peter Burrows, “Antz vs. Bugs” and “Steve Jobs: Movie Mogul,” Business
Week, Nov. 23, 1998; Amy Wallace, “Ouch! That Stings,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 21,
1998; Kim Masters, “Battle of the Bugs,” Time, Sept. 28, 1998; Richard Schickel, “Antz,”
Time, Oct. 12, 1998; Richard Corliss, “Bugs Funny,” Time, Nov. 30, 1998.
Steve’s Own Movie: Interviews with John Lasseter, Pam Kerwin, Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs.
Paik, 168; Rick Lyman, “A Digital Dream Factory in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, June
11, 2001.
The Divorce: Interviews with Mike Slade, Oren Jacob, Michael Eisner, Bob Iger, Steve
Jobs, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull. James Stewart, Disney War (Simon & Schuster, 2005),
383; Price, 230–235; Benny Evangelista, “Parting Slam by Pixar’s Jobs,” San Francisco
Chronicle, Feb. 5, 2004; John Markoff and Laura Holson, “New iPod Will Play TV
Shows,” New York Times, Oct. 13, 2005.

CHAPTER 34: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MACS
Clams, Ice Cubes, and Sunflowers: Interviews with Jon Rubinstein, Jony Ive, Laurene
Powell, Steve Jobs, Fred Anderson, George Riley. Steven Levy, “Thinking inside the Box,”
Newsweek, July 31, 2000; Brent Schlender, “Steve Jobs,” Fortune, May 14, 2001; Ian
Fried, “Apple Slices Revenue Forecast Again,” CNET News, Dec. 6, 2000; Linzmayer, 301;
U.S. Design Patent D510577S, granted on Oct. 11, 2005.
Intel Inside: Interviews with Paul Otellini, Bill Gates, Art Levinson. Carlton, 436.
Options: Interviews with Ed Woolard, George Riley, Al Gore, Fred Anderson, Eric
Schmidt. Geoff Colvin, “The Great CEO Heist,” Fortune, June 25, 2001; Joe Nocera,
“Weighing Jobs’s Role in a Scandal,” New York Times, Apr. 28, 2007; Deposition of Steven
P. Jobs, Mar. 18, 2008, SEC v. Nancy Heinen, U.S. District Court, Northern District of
California; William Barrett, “Nobody Loves Me,” Forbes, May 11, 2009; Peter Elkind,
“The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Mar. 5, 2008.

CHAPTER 35: ROUND ONE
Cancer: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, Art Levinson, Larry Brilliant, Dean
Ornish, Bill Campbell, Andy Grove, Andy Hertzfeld.
The Stanford Commencement: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell. Steve Jobs,
Stanford commencement address.
A Lion at Fifty: Interviews with Mike Slade, Alice Waters, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Avie
Tevanian, Jony Ive, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell, George Riley, Bono, Walt Mossberg,
Steven Levy, Kara Swisher. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviews with Steve Jobs
and Bill Gates, All Things Digital conference, May 30, 2007; Steven Levy, “Finally, Vista
Makes Its Debut,” Newsweek, Feb. 1, 2007.

CHAPTER 36: THE iPHONE
An iPod That Makes Calls: Interviews with Art Levinson, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell,
George Riley, Tim Cook. Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, Nov.
2005.

Multi-touch: Interviews with Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Tim Cook.
Gorilla Glass: Interviews with Wendell Weeks, John Seeley Brown, Steve Jobs.
The Design: Interviews with Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell. Fred Vogelstein, “The
Untold Story,” Wired, Jan. 9, 2008.
The Launch: Interviews with John Huey, Nicholas Negroponte. Lev Grossman, “Apple’s
New Calling,” Time, Jan. 22, 2007; Steve Jobs, speech, Macworld, Jan. 9, 2007; John
Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, Jan. 10, 2007; John
Heilemann, “Steve Jobs in a Box,” New York, June 17, 2007; Janko Roettgers, “Alan Kay:
With the Tablet, Apple Will Rule the World,” GigaOM, Jan. 26, 2010.

CHAPTER 37: ROUND TWO
The Battles of 2008: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Bill Campbell, Art
Levinson, Al Gore, John Huey, Andy Serwer, Laurene Powell, Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine.
Peter Elkind, “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Mar. 5, 2008; Joe Nocera, “Apple’s
Culture of Secrecy,” New York Times, July 26, 2008; Steve Jobs, letter to the Apple
community, Jan. 5 and Jan. 14, 2009; Doron Levin, “Steve Jobs Went to Switzerland in
Search of Cancer Treatment,” Fortune.com, Jan. 18, 2011; Yukari Kanea and Joann Lublin,
“On Apple’s Board, Fewer Independent Voices,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 24, 2010; Micki
Maynard (Micheline Maynard), Twitter post, 2:45 p.m., Jan. 18, 2011; Ryan Chittum, “The
Dead Source Who Keeps on Giving,” Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 18, 2011.
Memphis: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, George Riley, Kristina Kiehl,
Kathryn Smith. John Lauerman and Connie Guglielmo, “Jobs Liver Transplant,”
Bloomberg, Aug. 21, 2009.
Return: Interviews with Steve Jobs, George Riley, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Brian Roberts,
Andy Hertzfeld.

CHAPTER 38: THE iPAD
You Say You Want a Revolution: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook,
Jony Ive, Tony Fadell, Paul Otellini. All Things Digital conference, May 30, 2003.
The Launch, January 2010: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke. Brent Schlender,
“Bill Gates Joins the iPad Army of Critics,” bnet.com, Feb. 10, 2010; Steve Jobs, keynote
address in San Francisco, Jan. 27, 2010; Nick Summers, “Instant Apple iPad Reaction,”
Newsweek.com, Jan. 27, 2010; Adam Frucci, “Eight Things That Suck about the iPad”
Gizmodo, Jan. 27, 2010; Lev Grossman, “Do We Need the iPad?” Time, Apr. 1, 2010;
Daniel Lyons, “Think Really Different,” Newsweek, Mar. 26, 2010; Techmate debate,
Fortune, Apr. 12, 2010; Eric Laningan, “Wozniak on the iPad” TwiT TV, Apr. 5, 2010;
Michael Shear, “At White House, a New Question: What’s on Your iPad?” Washington
Post, June 7, 2010; Michael Noer, “The Stable Boy and the iPad,” Forbes.com, Sept. 8,
2010.
Advertising: Interviews with Steve Jobs, James Vincent, Lee Clow.
Apps: Interviews with Art Levinson, Phil Schiller, Steve Jobs, John Doerr.
Publishing and Journalism: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Jeff Bewkes, Rick Stengel,
Andy Serwer, Josh Quittner, Rupert Murdoch. Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish,” New

Yorker, Apr. 26, 2010; Ryan Tate, “The Price of Crossing Steve Jobs,” Gawker, Sept. 30,
2010.

CHAPTER 39: NEW BATTLES
Google: Open versus Closed: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt,
John Doerr, Tim Cook, Bill Gates. John Abell, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra Is
‘Bullshit,’” Wired, Jan. 30, 2010; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “A Battle for the Future Is
Getting Personal,” New York Times, March 14, 2010.
Flash, the App Store, and Control: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Tom
Friedman, Art Levinson, Al Gore. Leander Kahney, “What Made Apple Freeze Out
Adobe?” Wired, July 2010; Jean-Louis Gassée, “The Adobe-Apple Flame War,” Monday
Note, Apr. 11, 2010; Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Flash,” Apple.com, Apr. 29, 2010; Walt
Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Steve Jobs interview, All Things Digital conference, June 1,
2010; Robert X. Cringely (pseudonym), “Steve Jobs: Savior or Tyrant?” InfoWorld, Apr.
21, 2010; Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Valleywag, May 15,
2010; JR Raphael, “I Want Porn,” esarcasm.com, Apr. 20, 2010; Jon Stewart, The Daily
Show, Apr. 28, 2010.
Antennagate: Design versus Engineering: Interviews with Tony Fadell, Jony Ive, Steve
Jobs, Art Levinson, Tim Cook, Regis McKenna, Bill Campbell, James Vincent. Mark
Gikas, “Why Consumer Reports Can’t Recommend the iPhone4,” Consumer Reports, July
12, 2010; Michael Wolff, “Is There Anything That Can Trip Up Steve Jobs?” newser.com
and vanityfair.com, July 19, 2010; Scott Adams, “High Ground Maneuver,” dilbert.com,
July 19, 2010.
Here Comes the Sun: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Eddy Cue, James Vincent.

CHAPTER 40: TO INFINITY
The iPad 2: Interviews with Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell. Steve Jobs,
speech, iPad 2 launch event, Mar. 2, 2011.
iCloud: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Eddy Cue. Steve Jobs, keynote address, Worldwide
Developers Conference, June 6, 2011; Walt Mossberg, “Apple’s Mobile Me Is Far Too
Flawed to Be Reliable,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2008; Adam Lashinsky, “Inside
Apple,” Fortune, May 23, 2011; Richard Waters, “Apple Races to Keep Users Firmly
Wrapped in Its Cloud,” Financial Times, June 9, 2011.
A New Campus: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ann Bowers. Steve Jobs,
appearance before the Cupertino City Council, June 7, 2011.

CHAPTER 41: ROUND THREE
Family Ties: Interviews with Laurene Powell, Erin Jobs, Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith,
Jennifer Egan. Email from Steve Jobs, June 8, 2010, 4:55 p.m.; Tina Redse to Steve Jobs,
July 20, 2010, and Feb. 6, 2011.
President Obama: Interviews with David Axelrod, Steve Jobs, John Doerr, Laurene
Powell, Valerie Jarrett, Eric Schmidt, Austan Goolsbee.
Third Medical Leave, 2011: Interviews with Kathryn Smith, Steve Jobs, Larry Brilliant.

Visitors: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mike Slade.

CHAPTER 42: LEGACY
Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (Yale, 2008), 2; Cory
Doctorow, “Why I Won’t Buy an iPad,” Boing Boing, Apr. 2, 2010.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:32

“Macintosh’s Other Designers,” Byte, Aug. 1984; Young, 202, 208–214; “Apple Launches
a Mac Attack,” Time, Jan. 30, 1984; Malone, 255–258.
Texaco Towers: Interviews with Andrea Cunningham, Bruce Horn, Andy Hertzfeld,
Mike Scott, Mike Markkula. Hertzfeld, 19–20, 26–27; Wozniak, 241–242.

CHAPTER 11: THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD
Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Debi Coleman, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce
Horn, Joanna Hoffman, Al Eisenstat, Ann Bowers, Steve Jobs. Some of these tales have
variations. See Hertzfeld, 24, 68, 161.

CHAPTER 12: THE DESIGN
A Bauhaus Aesthetic: Interviews with Dan’l Lewin, Steve Jobs, Maya Lin, Debi
Coleman. Steve Jobs in conversation with Charles Hampden-Turner, International Design
Conference in Aspen, June 15, 1983. (The design conference audiotapes are stored at the
Aspen Institute. I want to thank Deborah Murphy for finding them.)
Like a Porsche: Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Alain Rossmann, Mike Markkula, Steve
Jobs. “The Macintosh Design Team,” Byte, Feb. 1984; Hertzfeld, 29–31, 41, 46, 63, 68;
Sculley, 157; Jerry Manock, “Invasion of Texaco Towers,” Folklore.org; Kunkel, 26–30;
Jobs, Stanford commencement address; email from Susan Kare; Susan Kare, “World Class
Cities,” in Hertzfeld, 165; Laurence Zuckerman, “The Designer Who Made the Mac
Smile,” New York Times, Aug. 26, 1996; Susan Kare interview, Sept. 8, 2000, Stanford
University Library, Special Collections; Levy, Insanely Great, 156; Hartmut Esslinger, A
Fine Line (Jossey-Bass, 2009), 7–9; David Einstein, “Where Success Is by Design,” San
Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 6, 1995; Sheff.

CHAPTER 13: BUILDING THE MAC
Competition: Interview with Steve Jobs. Levy, Insanely Great, 125; Sheff; Hertzfeld,
71–73; Wall Street Journal advertisement, Aug. 24, 1981.
End-to-end Control: Interview with Berry Cash. Kahney, 241; Dan Farber, “Steve Jobs,
the iPhone and Open Platforms,” ZDNet.com, Jan. 13, 2007; Tim Wu, The Master Switch
(Knopf, 2010), 254–276; Mike Murray, “Mac Memo” to Steve Jobs, May 19, 1982
(courtesy of Mike Murray).
Machines of the Year: Interviews with Daniel Kottke, Steve Jobs, Ray Cave. “The
Computer Moves In,” Time, Jan. 3, 1983; “The Updated Book of Jobs,” Time, Jan. 3, 1983;
Moritz, 11; Young, 293; Rose, 9–11; Peter McNulty, “Apple’s Bid to Stay in the Big Time,”
Fortune, Feb. 7, 1983; “The Year of the Mouse,” Time, Jan. 31, 1983.
Let’s Be Pirates! Interviews with Ann Bowers, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Arthur
Rock, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs, Debi Coleman; email from Susan Kare. Hertzfeld, 76,
135–138, 158, 160, 166; Moritz, 21–28; Young, 295–297, 301–303; Susan Kare interview,
Sept. 8, 2000, Stanford University Library; Jeff Goodell, “The Rise and Fall of Apple
Computer,” Rolling Stone, Apr. 4, 1996; Rose, 59–69, 93.

CHAPTER 14: ENTER SCULLEY

The Courtship: Interviews with John Sculley, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs. Rose, 18, 74–
75; Sculley, 58–90, 107; Elliot, 90–93; Mike Murray, “Special Mac Sneak” memo to staff,
Mar. 3, 1983 (courtesy of Mike Murray); Hertzfeld, 149–150.
The Honeymoon: Interviews with Steve Jobs, John Sculley, Joanna Hoffman. Sculley,
127–130, 154–155, 168, 179; Hertzfeld, 195.

CHAPTER 15: THE LAUNCH
Real Artists Ship: Interviews with Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs. Video of Apple sales
conference, Oct. 1983; “Personal Computers: And the Winner Is . . . IBM,” Business Week,
Oct. 3, 1983; Hertzfeld, 208–210; Rose, 147–153; Levy, Insanely Great, 178–180; Young,
327–328.
The “1984” Ad: Interviews with Lee Clow, John Sculley, Mike Markkula, Bill
Campbell, Steve Jobs. Steve Hayden interview, Weekend Edition, NPR, Feb. 1, 2004;
Linzmayer, 109–114; Sculley, 176.
Publicity Blast: Hertzfeld, 226–227; Michael Rogers, “It’s the Apple of His Eye,”
Newsweek, Jan. 30, 1984; Levy, Insanely Great, 17–27.
January 24, 1984: Interviews with John Sculley, Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld. Video of
Jan. 1984 Apple shareholders meeting; Hertzfeld, 213–223; Sculley, 179–181; William
Hawkins, “Jobs’ Revolutionary New Computer,” Popular Science, Jan. 1989.

CHAPTER 16: GATES AND JOBS
The Macintosh Partnership: Interviews with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bruce Horn.
Hertzfeld, 52–54; Steve Lohr, “Creating Jobs,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997; Triumph of
the Nerds, PBS, part 3; Rusty Weston, “Partners and Adversaries,” MacWeek, Mar. 14,
1989; Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, All
Things Digital, May 31, 2007; Young, 319–320; Carlton, 28; Brent Schlender, “How Steve
Jobs Linked Up with IBM,” Fortune, Oct. 9, 1989; Steven Levy, “A Big Brother?”
Newsweek, Aug. 18, 1997.
The Battle of the GUI: Interviews with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. Hertzfeld, 191–193;
Michael Schrage, “IBM Compatibility Grows,” Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1983; Triumph
of the Nerds, PBS, part 3.

CHAPTER 17: ICARUS
Flying High: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Debi Coleman, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld,
Alain Rossmann, Joanna Hoffman, Jean-Louis Gassée, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur Rock,
John Sculley. Sheff; Hertzfeld, 206–207, 230; Sculley, 197–199; Young, 308–309; George
Gendron and Bo Burlingham, “Entrepreneur of the Decade,” Inc., Apr. 1, 1989.
Falling: Interviews with Joanna Hoffman, John Sculley, Lee Clow, Debi Coleman,
Andrea Cunningham, Steve Jobs. Sculley, 201, 212–215; Levy, Insanely Great, 186–192;
Michael Rogers, “It’s the Apple of His Eye,” Newsweek, Jan. 30, 1984; Rose, 207, 233;
Felix Kessler, “Apple Pitch,” Fortune, Apr. 15, 1985; Linzmayer, 145.
Thirty Years Old: Interviews with Mallory Walker, Andy Hertzfeld, Debi Coleman,
Elizabeth Holmes, Steve Wozniak, Don Valentine. Sheff.

Exodus: Interviews with Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Wozniak, Bruce Horn. Hertzfeld, 253,
263–264; Young, 372–376; Wozniak, 265–266; Rose, 248–249; Bob Davis, “Apple’s Head,
Jobs, Denies Ex-Partner Use of Design Firm,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 22, 1985.
Showdown, Spring 1985: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Al Alcorn, John Sculley, Mike
Murray. Elliot, 15; Sculley, 205–206, 227, 238–244; Young, 367–379; Rose, 238, 242,
254–255; Mike Murray, “Let’s Wake Up and Die Right,” memo to undisclosed recipients,
Mar. 7, 1985 (courtesy of Mike Murray).
Plotting a Coup: Interviews with Steve Jobs, John Sculley. Rose, 266–275; Sculley, ix–
x, 245–246; Young, 388–396; Elliot, 112.
Seven Days in May: Interviews with Jean-Louis Gassée, Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Al
Eisenstat, John Sculley, Mike Murray, Mike Markkula, Debi Coleman. Bro Uttal, “Behind
the Fall of Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Aug. 5, 1985; Sculley, 249–260; Rose, 275–290; Young,
396–404.
Like a Rolling Stone: Interviews with Mike Murray, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs, John
Sculley, Bob Metcalfe, George Riley, Andy Hertzfeld, Tina Redse, Mike Merin, Al
Eisenstat, Arthur Rock. Tina Redse email to Steve Jobs, July 20, 2010; “No Job for Jobs,”
AP, July 26, 1985; “Jobs Talks about His Rise and Fall,” Newsweek, Sept. 30, 1985;
Hertzfeld, 269–271; Young, 387, 403–405; Young and Simon, 116; Rose, 288–292;
Sculley, 242–245, 286–287; letter from Al Eisenstat to Arthur Hartman, July 23, 1985
(courtesy of Al Eisenstat).

CHAPTER 18: NeXT
The Pirates Abandon Ship: Interviews with Dan’l Lewin, Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell,
Arthur Rock, Mike Markkula, John Sculley, Andrea Cunningham, Joanna Hoffman.
Patricia Bellew Gray and Michael Miller, “Apple Chairman Jobs Resigns,” Wall Street
Journal, Sept. 18, 1985; Gerald Lubenow and Michael Rogers, “Jobs Talks about His Rise
and Fall,” Newsweek, Sept. 30, 1985; Bro Uttal, “The Adventures of Steve Jobs,” Fortune,
Oct. 14, 1985; Susan Kerr, “Jobs Resigns,” Computer Systems News, Sept. 23, 1985;
“Shaken to the Very Core,” Time, Sept. 30, 1985; John Eckhouse, “Apple Board Fuming at
Steve Jobs,” San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 17, 1985; Hertzfeld, 132–133; Sculley, 313–
317; Young, 415–416; Young and Simon, 127; Rose, 307–319; Stross, 73; Deutschman, 36;
Complaint for Breaches of Fiduciary Obligations, Apple Computer v. Steven P. Jobs and
Richard A. Page, Superior Court of California, Santa Clara County, Sept. 23, 1985; Patricia
Bellew Gray, “Jobs Asserts Apple Undermined Efforts to Settle Dispute,” Wall Street
Journal, Sept. 25, 1985.
To Be on Your Own: Interviews with Arthur Rock, Susan Kare, Steve Jobs, Al Eisenstat.
“Logo for Jobs’ New Firm,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 1986; Phil Patton, “Steve
Jobs: Out for Revenge,” New York Times, Aug. 6, 1989; Paul Rand, NeXT Logo
presentation, 1985; Doug Evans and Allan Pottasch, video interview with Steve Jobs on
Paul Rand, 1993; Steve Jobs to Al Eisenstat, Nov. 4, 1985; Eisenstat to Jobs, Nov. 8, 1985;
Agreement between Apple Computer Inc. and Steven P. Jobs, and Request for Dismissal of
Lawsuit without Prejudice, filed in the Superior Court of California, Santa Clara County,
Jan. 17, 1986; Deutschman, 47, 43; Stross, 76, 118–120, 245; Kunkel, 58–63; “Can He Do

It Again?” Business Week, Oct. 24, 1988; Joe Nocera, “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs,”
Esquire, Dec. 1986, reprinted in Good Guys and Bad Guys (Portfolio, 2008), 49; Brenton
Schlender, “How Steve Jobs Linked Up with IBM,” Fortune, Oct. 9, 1989.
The Computer: Interviews with Mitch Kapor, Michael Hawley, Steve Jobs. Peter
Denning and Karen Frenkle, “A Conversation with Steve Jobs,” Communications of the
Association for Computer Machinery, Apr. 1, 1989; John Eckhouse, “Steve Jobs Shows Off
Ultra-Robotic Assembly Line,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 1989; Stross, 122–125;
Deutschman, 60–63; Young, 425; Katie Hafner, “Can He Do It Again?” Business Week,
Oct. 24, 1988; The Entrepreneurs, PBS, Nov. 5, 1986, directed by John Nathan.
Perot to the Rescue: Stross, 102–112; “Perot and Jobs,” Newsweek, Feb. 9, 1987;
Andrew Pollack, “Can Steve Jobs Do It Again?” New York Times, Nov. 8, 1987; Katie
Hafner, “Can He Do It Again?” Business Week, Oct. 24, 1988; Pat Steger, “A Gem of an
Evening with King Juan Carlos,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 5, 1987; David Remnick,
“How a Texas Playboy Became a Billionaire,” Washington Post, May 20, 1987.
Gates and NeXT: Interviews with Bill Gates, Adele Goldberg, Steve Jobs. Brit Hume,
“Steve Jobs Pulls Ahead,” Washington Post, Oct. 31, 1988; Brent Schlender, “How Steve
Jobs Linked Up with IBM,” Fortune, Oct. 9, 1989; Stross, 14; Linzmayer, 209; “William
Gates Talks,” Washington Post, Dec. 30, 1990; Katie Hafner, “Can He Do It Again?”
Business Week, Oct. 24, 1988; John Thompson, “Gates, Jobs Swap Barbs,” Computer
System News, Nov. 27, 1989.
IBM: Brent Schlender, “How Steve Jobs Linked Up with IBM,” Fortune, Oct. 9, 1989;
Phil Patton, “Out for Revenge,” New York Times, Aug. 6, 1989; Stross, 140–142;
Deutschman, 133.
The Launch, October 1988: Stross, 166–186; Wes Smith, “Jobs Has Returned,” Chicago
Tribune, Nov. 13, 1988; Andrew Pollack, “NeXT Produces a Gala,” New York Times, Oct.
10, 1988; Brenton Schlender, “Next Project,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 13, 1988; Katie
Hafner, “Can He Do It Again?” Business Week, Oct. 24, 1988; Deutschman, 128; “Steve
Jobs Comes Back,” Newsweek, Oct. 24, 1988; “The NeXT Generation,” San Jose Mercury
News, Oct. 10, 1988.

CHAPTER 19: PIXAR
Lucasfilm’s Computer Division: Interviews with Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Steve
Jobs, Pam Kerwin, Michael Eisner. Price, 71–74, 89–101; Paik, 53–57, 226; Young and
Simon, 169; Deutschman, 115.
Animation: Interviews with John Lasseter, Steve Jobs. Paik, 28–44; Price, 45–56.
Tin Toy: Interviews with Pam Kerwin, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, Steve
Jobs, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Michael Eisner, Andy Grove. Steve Jobs email to Albert Yu, Sept.
23, 1995; Albert Yu to Steve Jobs, Sept. 25, 1995; Steve Jobs to Andy Grove, Sept. 25,
1995; Andy Grove to Steve Jobs, Sept. 26, 1995; Steve Jobs to Andy Grove, Oct. 1, 1995;
Price, 104–114; Young and Simon, 166.

CHAPTER 20: A REGULAR GUY

Joan Baez: Interviews with Joan Baez, Steve Jobs, Joanna Hoffman, Debi Coleman,
Andy Hertzfeld. Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With (Summit, 1989), 144, 380.
Finding Joanne and Mona: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Mona Simpson.
The Lost Father: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, Mona Simpson, Ken
Auletta, Nick Pileggi.
Lisa: Interviews with Chrisann Brennan, Avie Tevanian, Joanna Hoffman, Andy
Hertzfeld. Lisa Brennan-Jobs, “Confessions of a Lapsed Vegetarian,” Southwest Review,
2008; Young, 224; Deutschman, 76.
The Romantic: Interviews with Jennifer Egan, Tina Redse, Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld,
Joanna Hoffman. Deutschman, 73, 138. Mona Simpson’s A Regular Guy is a novel loosely
based on the relationship between Jobs, Lisa and Chrisann Brennan, and Tina Redse, who
is the basis for the character named Olivia.

CHAPTER 21: FAMILY MAN
Laurene Powell: Interviews with Laurene Powell, Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Avie
Tevanian, Andy Hertzfeld, Marjorie Powell Barden.
The Wedding, March 18, 1991: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, Andy
Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Avie Tevanian, Mona Simpson. Simpson, A Regular Guy, 357.
A Family Home: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, Andy Hertzfeld. David
Weinstein, “Taking Whimsy Seriously,” San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 13, 2003; Gary
Wolfe, “Steve Jobs,” Wired, Feb. 1996; “Former Apple Designer Charged with Harassing
Steve Jobs,” AP, June 8, 1993.
Lisa Moves In: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, Mona Simpson, Andy
Hertzfeld. Lisa Brennan-Jobs, “Driving Jane,” Harvard Advocate, Spring 1999; Simpson,
A Regular Guy, 251; email from Chrisann Brennan, Jan. 19, 2011; Bill Workman, “Palo
Alto High School’s Student Scoop,” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 16, 1996; Lisa
Brennan-Jobs, “Waterloo,” Massachusetts Review, Spring 2006; Deutschman, 258;
Chrisann Brennan website, chrysanthemum.com; Steve Lohr, “Creating Jobs,” New York
Times, Jan. 12, 1997.
Children: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell.

CHAPTER 22: TOY STORY
Jeffrey Katzenberg: Interviews with John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Alvy
Ray Smith, Steve Jobs. Price, 84–85, 119–124; Paik, 71, 90; Robert Murphy, “John Cooley
Looks at Pixar’s Creative Process,” Silicon Prairie News, Oct. 6, 2010.
Cut! Interviews with Steve Jobs, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ed Catmull, Larry Ellison. Paik,
90; Deutschman, 194–198; “Toy Story: The Inside Buzz,” Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 8,
1995.
To Infinity! Interviews with Steve Jobs, Michael Eisner. Janet Maslin, “There’s a New
Toy in the House. Uh-Oh,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 1995; “A Conversation with Steve
Jobs and John Lasseter,” Charlie Rose, PBS, Oct. 30, 1996; John Markoff, “Apple
Computer Co-Founder Strikes Gold,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1995.

CHAPTER 23: THE SECOND COMING
Things Fall Apart: Interview with Jean-Louis Gassée. Bart Ziegler, “Industry Has Next
to No Patience with Jobs’ NeXT,” AP, Aug. 19, 1990; Stross, 226–228; Gary Wolf, “The
Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired, Feb. 1996; Anthony Perkins, “Jobs’ Story,” Red
Herring, Jan. 1, 1996.
Apple Falling: Interviews with Steve Jobs, John Sculley, Larry Ellison. Sculley, 248,
273; Deutschman, 236; Steve Lohr, “Creating Jobs,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997;
Amelio, 190 and preface to the hardback edition; Young and Simon, 213–214; Linzmayer,
273–279; Guy Kawasaki, “Steve Jobs to Return as Apple CEO,” Macworld, Nov. 1, 1994.
Slouching toward Cupertino: Interviews with Jon Rubinstein, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison,
Avie Tevanian, Fred Anderson, Larry Tesler, Bill Gates, John Lasseter. John Markoff,
“Why Apple Sees Next as a Match Made in Heaven,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 1996;
Steve Lohr, “Creating Jobs,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Steve
Jobs Returning to Apple,” Washington Post, Dec. 21, 1996; Louise Kehoe, “Apple’s
Prodigal Son Returns,” Financial Times, Dec. 23, 1996; Amelio, 189–201, 238; Carlton,
409; Linzmayer, 277; Deutschman, 240.

CHAPTER 24: THE RESTORATION
Hovering Backstage: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Ed
Woolard, Larry Ellison, Fred Anderson, email from Gina Smith. Sheff; Brent Schlender,
“Something’s Rotten in Cupertino,” Fortune, Mar. 3, 1997; Dan Gillmore, “Apple’s
Prospects Better Than Its CEO’s Speech,” San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 13, 1997; Carlton,
414–416, 425; Malone, 531; Deutschman, 241–245; Amelio, 219, 238–247, 261;
Linzmayer, 201; Kaitlin Quistgaard, “Apple Spins Off Newton,” Wired.com, May 22, 1997;
Louise Kehoe, “Doubts Grow about Leadership at Apple,” Financial Times, Feb. 25, 1997;
Dan Gillmore, “Ellison Mulls Apple Bid,” San Jose Mercury News, Mar. 27, 1997;
Lawrence Fischer, “Oracle Seeks Public Views on Possible Bid for Apple,” New York
Times, Mar. 28, 1997; Mike Barnicle, “Roadkill on the Info Highway,” Boston Globe, Aug.
5, 1997.
Exit, Pursued by a Bear: Interviews with Ed Woolard, Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, Steve
Wozniak, Fred Anderson, Larry Ellison, Bill Campbell. Privately printed family memoir by
Ed Woolard (courtesy of Woolard); Amelio, 247, 261, 267; Gary Wolf, “The World
According to Woz,” Wired, Sept. 1998; Peter Burrows and Ronald Grover, “Steve Jobs’
Magic Kingdom,” Business Week, Feb. 6, 2006; Peter Elkind, “The Trouble with Steve
Jobs,” Fortune, Mar. 5, 2008; Arthur Levitt, Take on the Street (Pantheon, 2002), 204–206.
Macworld Boston, August 1997: Steve Jobs, Macworld Boston speech, Aug. 6, 1997.
The Microsoft Pact: Interviews with Joel Klein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. Cathy Booth,
“Steve’s Job,” Time, Aug. 18, 1997; Steven Levy, “A Big Brother?” Newsweek, Aug. 18,
1997. Jobs’s cell phone call with Gates was reported by Time photographer Diana Walker,
who shot the picture of him crouching onstage that appeared on the Time cover and in the
photo section of this book.

CHAPTER 25: THINK DIFFERENT

Here’s to the Crazy Ones: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Lee Clow, James Vincent, Norman
Pearlstine. Cathy Booth, “Steve’s Job,” Time, Aug. 18, 1997; John Heilemann, “Steve Jobs
in a Box,” New York, June 17, 2007.
iCEO: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Fred Anderson. Video of Sept. 1997 staff meeting
(courtesy of Lee Clow); “Jobs Hints That He May Want to Stay at Apple,” New York Times,
Oct. 10, 1997; Jon Swartz, “No CEO in Sight for Apple,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec.
12, 1997; Carlton, 437.
Killing the Clones: Interviews with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ed Woolard. Steve Wozniak,
“How We Failed Apple,” Newsweek, Feb. 19, 1996; Linzmayer, 245–247, 255; Bill Gates,
“Licensing of Mac Technology,” a memo to John Sculley, June 25, 1985; Tom Abate, “How
Jobs Killed Mac Clone Makers,” San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 6, 1997.
Product Line Review: Interviews with Phil Schiller, Ed Woolard, Steve Jobs.
Deutschman, 248; Steve Jobs, speech at iMac launch event, May 6, 1998; video of Sept.
1997 staff meeting.

CHAPTER 26: DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Jony Ive: Interviews with Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller. John Arlidge, “Father of
Invention,” Observer (London), Dec. 21, 2003; Peter Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?”
Business Week, Sept. 25, 2006; “Apple’s One-Dollar-a-Year Man,” Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000;
Rob Walker, “The Guts of a New Machine,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 2003; Leander
Kahney, “Design According to Ive,” Wired.com, June 25, 2003.
Inside the Studio: Interview with Jony Ive. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, online
database, patft.uspto.gov; Leander Kahney, “Jobs Awarded Patent for iPhone Packaging,”
Cult of Mac, July 22, 2009; Harry McCracken, “Patents of Steve Jobs,” Technologizer.com,
May 28, 2009.

CHAPTER 27: THE iMAC
Back to the Future: Interviews with Phil Schiller, Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Steve
Jobs, Fred Anderson, Mike Markkula, Jony Ive, Lee Clow. Thomas Hormby, “Birth of the
iMac,” Mac Observer, May 25, 2007; Peter Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?” Business
Week, Sept. 25, 2006; Lev Grossman, “How Apple Does It,” Time, Oct. 16, 2005; Leander
Kahney, “The Man Who Named the iMac and Wrote Think Different,” Cult of Mac, Nov. 3,
2009; Levy, The Perfect Thing, 198; gawker.com/comment/21123257/; “Steve’s Two Jobs,”
Time, Oct. 18, 1999.
The Launch, May 6, 1998: Interviews with Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon
Rubinstein. Steven Levy, “Hello Again,” Newsweek, May 18, 1998; Jon Swartz,
“Resurgence of an American Icon,” Forbes, Apr. 14, 2000; Levy, The Perfect Thing, 95.

CHAPTER 28: CEO
Tim Cook: Interviews with Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, Jon Rubinstein. Peter Burrows, “Yes,
Steve, You Fixed It. Congratulations. Now What?” Business Week, July 31, 2000; Tim
Cook, Auburn commencement address, May 14, 2010; Adam Lashinsky, “The Genius

behind Steve,” Fortune, Nov. 10, 2008; Nick Wingfield, “Apple’s No. 2 Has Low Profile,”
Wall Street Journal, Oct. 16, 2006.
Mock Turtlenecks and Teamwork: Interviews with Steve Jobs, James Vincent, Jony Ive,
Lee Clow, Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein. Lev Grossman, “How Apple Does It,” Time, Oct.
16, 2005; Leander Kahney, “How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything
Wrong,” Wired, Mar. 18, 2008.
From iCEO to CEO: Interviews with Ed Woolard, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs. Apple
proxy statement, Mar. 12, 2001.

CHAPTER 29: APPLE STORES
The Customer Experience: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Ron Johnson. Jerry Useem,
“America’s Best Retailer,” Fortune, Mar. 19, 2007; Gary Allen, “Apple Stores,”
ifoAppleStore.com.
The Prototype: Interviews with Art Levinson, Ed Woolard, Millard “Mickey” Drexler,
Larry Ellison, Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs, Art Levinson. Cliff Edwards, “Sorry, Steve . . . ,”
Business Week, May 21, 2001.
Wood, Stone, Steel, Glass: Interviews with Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs. U.S. Patent Office,
D478999, Aug. 26, 2003, US2004/0006939, Jan. 15, 2004; Gary Allen, “About Me,”
ifoapplestore.com.

CHAPTER 30: THE DIGITAL HUB
Connecting the Dots: Interviews with Lee Clow, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs. Sheff; Steve Jobs,
Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001.
FireWire: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein. Steve Jobs,
Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001; Joshua Quittner, “Apple’s New Core,” Time, Jan.
14, 2002; Mike Evangelist, “Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article,” Writer’s Block Live, Oct. 7,
2005; Farhad Manjoo, “Invincible Apple,” Fast Company, July 1, 2010; email from Phil
Schiller.
iTunes: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell. Brent
Schlender, “How Big Can Apple Get,” Fortune, Feb. 21, 2005; Bill Kincaid, “The True
Story of SoundJam,” http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-sjstory.html; Levy, The
Perfect Thing, 49–60; Knopper, 167; Lev Grossman, “How Apple Does It,” Time, Oct. 17,
2005; Markoff, xix.
The iPod: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell. Steve
Jobs, iPod announcement, Oct. 23, 2001; Toshiba press releases, PR Newswire, May 10,
2000, and June 4, 2001; Tekla Perry, “From Podfather to Palm’s Pilot,” IEEE Spectrum,
Sept. 2008; Leander Kahney, “Inside Look at Birth of the iPod,” Wired, July 21, 2004; Tom
Hormby and Dan Knight, “History of the iPod,” Low End Mac, Oct. 14, 2005.
That’s It! Interviews with Tony Fadell, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Jony Ive, Steve
Jobs. Levy, The Perfect Thing, 17, 59–60; Knopper, 169; Leander Kahney, “Straight Dope
on the IPod’s Birth,” Wired, Oct. 17, 2006.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:32

John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t know
anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the
company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It
happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when
Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think
anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.
I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to
do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re
unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in
business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who
went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two
from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built
Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to
be.
I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their
face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be
right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone
can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we’ve had some
rip-roaring arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it’s some of the best times
I’ve ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying “Ron, that store looks like shit” in front of
everyone else. Or I might say “God, we really fucked up the engineering on this” in front of
the person that’s responsible. That’s the ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to
be super honest. Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and
speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because
I am middle class from California.
I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the
time when Reed was six years old, coming home, and I had just fired somebody that day,
and I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his family and his young son that he
had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody’s got to do it. I figured that it was always my
job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do
it.
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs
forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he
did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his
greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitar, and the audiences loved him.
Then he brought out what became The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the
audience sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing “Like a
Rolling Stone” and someone from the audience yells “Judas!” And Dylan then says, “Play
it fucking loud!” And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving,
moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving. Otherwise, as
Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able
to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the

language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes.
Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand
on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something
to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know
how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the
talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the
contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has
driven me.

Coda

One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house
and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier,
his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m
about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there
must be more to our existence than meets the eye.”
He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire
to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said.
“It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom,
and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your
consciousness endures.”
He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off
switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.”
Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off
switches on Apple devices.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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

SOURCES

Interviews (conducted 2009–2011)

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

Bibliography

Amelio, Gil. On the Firing Line. HarperBusiness, 1998.
Berlin, Leslie. The Man behind the Microchip. Oxford, 2005.
Butcher, Lee. The Accidental Millionaire. Paragon House, 1988.
Carlton, Jim. Apple. Random House, 1997.
Cringely, Robert X. Accidental Empires. Addison Wesley, 1992.
Deutschman, Alan. The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Broadway Books, 2000.

Elliot, Jay, with William Simon. The Steve Jobs Way. Vanguard, 2011.
Freiberger, Paul, and Michael Swaine. Fire in the Valley. McGraw-Hill, 1984.
Garr, Doug. Woz. Avon, 1984.
Hertzfeld, Andy. Revolution in the Valley. O’Reilly, 2005. (See also his website,
folklore.org.)
Hiltzik, Michael. Dealers of Lightning. HarperBusiness, 1999.
Jobs, Steve. Smithsonian oral history interview with Daniel Morrow, April 20, 1995.
———. Stanford commencement address, June 12, 2005.
Kahney, Leander. Inside Steve’s Brain. Portfolio, 2008. (See also his website,
cultofmac.com.)
Kawasaki, Guy. The Macintosh Way. Scott, Foresman, 1989.
Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction. Free Press, 2009.
Kot, Greg. Ripped. Scribner, 2009.
Kunkel, Paul. AppleDesign. Graphis Inc., 1997.
Levy, Steven. Hackers. Doubleday, 1984.
———. Insanely Great. Viking Penguin, 1994.
———. The Perfect Thing. Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Linzmayer, Owen. Apple Confidential 2.0. No Starch Press, 2004.
Malone, Michael. Infinite Loop. Doubleday, 1999.
Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said. Viking Penguin, 2005.
McNish, Jacquie. The Big Score. Doubleday Canada, 1998.
Moritz, Michael. Return to the Little Kingdom. Overlook Press, 2009. Originally
published, without prologue and epilogue, as The Little Kingdom (Morrow, 1984).
Nocera, Joe. Good Guys and Bad Guys. Portfolio, 2008.
Paik, Karen. To Infinity and Beyond! Chronicle Books, 2007.
Price, David. The Pixar Touch. Knopf, 2008.
Rose, Frank. West of Eden. Viking, 1989.
Sculley, John. Odyssey. Harper & Row, 1987.
Sheff, David. “Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs.” Playboy, February 1985.
Simpson, Mona. Anywhere but Here. Knopf, 1986.
———. A Regular Guy. Knopf, 1996.
Smith, Douglas, and Robert Alexander. Fumbling the Future. Morrow, 1988.
Stross, Randall. Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. Atheneum, 1993.
“Triumph of the Nerds,” PBS Television, hosted by Robert X. Cringely, June 1996.
Wozniak, Steve, with Gina Smith. iWoz. Norton, 2006.
Young, Jeffrey. Steve Jobs. Scott, Foresman, 1988.
———, and William Simon. iCon. John Wiley, 2005.

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:31

They were both right. Each model had worked in the realm of personal computers, where
Macintosh coexisted with a variety of Windows machines, and that was likely to be true in
the realm of mobile devices as well. But after recounting their discussion, Gates added a
caveat: “The integrated approach works well when Steve is at the helm. But it doesn’t mean
it will win many rounds in the future.” Jobs similarly felt compelled to add a caveat about
Gates after describing their meeting: “Of course, his fragmented model worked, but it
didn’t make really great products. It produced crappy products. That was the problem. The
big problem. At least over time.”

“That Day Has Come”

Jobs had many other ideas and projects that he hoped to develop. He wanted to disrupt the
textbook industry and save the spines of spavined students bearing backpacks by creating
electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad. He was also working with Bill
Atkinson, his friend from the original Macintosh team, on devising new digital
technologies that worked at the pixel level to allow people to take great photographs using
their iPhones even in situations without much light. And he very much wanted to do for
television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them
simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to
use,” he told me. “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.”
No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable
channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”
But by July 2011, his cancer had spread to his bones and other parts of his body, and his
doctors were having trouble finding targeted drugs that could beat it back. He was in pain,
sleeping erratically, had little energy, and stopped going to work. He and Powell had
reserved a sailboat for a family cruise scheduled for the end of that month, but those plans
were scuttled. He was eating almost no solid food, and he spent most of his days in his
bedroom watching television.
In August, I got a message that he wanted me to come visit. When I arrived at his house,
at mid-morning on a Saturday, he was still asleep, so I sat with his wife and kids in the
garden, filled with a profusion of yellow roses and various types of daisies, until he sent
word that I should come in. I found him curled up on the bed, wearing khaki shorts and a
white turtleneck. His legs were shockingly sticklike, but his smile was easy and his mind
quick. “We better hurry, because I have very little energy,” he said.
He wanted to show me some of his personal pictures and let me pick a few to use in the
book. Because he was too weak to get out of bed, he pointed to various drawers in the
room, and I carefully brought him the photographs in each. As I sat on the side of the bed, I
held them up, one at a time, so he could see them. Some prompted stories; others merely
elicited a grunt or a smile. I had never seen a picture of his father, Paul Jobs, and I was
startled when I came across a snapshot of a handsome hardscrabble 1950s dad holding a
toddler. “Yes, that’s him,” he said. “You can use it.” He then pointed to a box near the
window that contained a picture of his father looking at him lovingly at his wedding. “He

was a great man,” Jobs said quietly. I murmured something along the lines of “He would
have been proud of you.” Jobs corrected me: “He was proud of me.”
For a while, the pictures seemed to energize him. We discussed what various people
from his past, ranging from Tina Redse to Mike Markkula to Bill Gates, now thought of
him. I recounted what Gates had said after he described his last visit with Jobs, which was
that Apple had shown that the integrated approach could work, but only “when Steve is at
the helm.” Jobs thought that was silly. “Anyone could make better products that way, not
just me,” he said. So I asked him to name another company that made great products by
insisting on end-to-end integration. He thought for a while, trying to come up with an
example. “The car companies,” he finally said, but then he added, “Or at least they used
to.”
When our discussion turned to the sorry state of the economy and politics, he offered a
few sharp opinions about the lack of strong leadership around the world. “I’m disappointed
in Obama,” he said. “He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or
piss them off.” He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s
not a problem I ever had.”
After two hours, he grew quiet, so I got off the bed and started to leave. “Wait,” he said,
as he waved to me to sit back down. It took a minute or two for him to regain enough
energy to talk. “I had a lot of trepidation about this project,” he finally said, referring to his
decision to cooperate with this book. “I was really worried.”
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted
them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other
people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all
wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.”
He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what
conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in
your book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me
for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he
said. “Then it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t
want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.” By then, his eyes were
closed and his energy gone, so I quietly took my leave.

As his health deteriorated throughout the summer, Jobs slowly began to face the inevitable:
He would not be returning to Apple as CEO. So it was time for him to resign. He wrestled
with the decision for weeks, discussing it with his wife, Bill Campbell, Jony Ive, and
George Riley. “One of the things I wanted to do for Apple was to set an example of how
you do a transfer of power right,” he told me. He joked about all the rough transitions that
had occurred at the company over the past thirty-five years. “It’s always been a drama, like
a third-world country. Part of my goal has been to make Apple the world’s best company,
and having an orderly transition is key to that.”
The best time and place to make the transition, he decided, was at the company’s
regularly scheduled August 24 board meeting. He was eager to do it in person, rather than

merely send in a letter or attend by phone, so he had been pushing himself to eat and regain
strength. The day before the meeting, he decided he could make it, but he needed the help
of a wheelchair. Arrangements were made to have him driven to headquarters and wheeled
to the boardroom as secretly as possible.
He arrived just before 11 a.m., when the board members were finishing committee
reports and other routine business. Most knew what was about to happen. But instead of
going right to the topic on everyone’s mind, Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer, the chief
financial officer, went through the results for the quarter and the projections for the year
ahead. Then Jobs said quietly that he had something personal to say. Cook asked if he and
the other top managers should leave, and Jobs paused for more than thirty seconds before
he decided they should. Once the room was cleared of all but the six outside directors, he
began to read aloud from a letter he had dictated and revised over the previous weeks. “I
have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and
expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,” it began.
“Unfortunately, that day has come.”
The letter was simple, direct, and only eight sentences long. In it he suggested that Cook
replace him, and he offered to serve as chairman of the board. “I believe Apple’s brightest
and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing
to its success in a new role.”
There was a long silence. Al Gore was the first to speak, and he listed Jobs’s
accomplishments during his tenure. Mickey Drexler added that watching Jobs transform
Apple was “the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in business,” and Art Levinson praised
Jobs’s diligence in ensuring that there was a smooth transition. Campbell said nothing, but
there were tears in his eyes as the formal resolutions transferring power were passed.
Over lunch, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller came in to display mockups of some
products that Apple had in the pipeline. Jobs peppered them with questions and thoughts,
especially about what capacities the fourth-generation cellular networks might have and
what features needed to be in future phones. At one point Forstall showed off a voice
recognition app. As he feared, Jobs grabbed the phone in the middle of the demo and
proceeded to see if he could confuse it. “What’s the weather in Palo Alto?” he asked. The
app answered. After a few more questions, Jobs challenged it: “Are you a man or a
woman?” Amazingly, the app answered in its robotic voice, “They did not assign me a
gender.” For a moment the mood lightened.
When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that HP
had suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber
and declared that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett and Packard built a great
company, and they thought they had left it in good hands,” he said. “But now it’s being
dismembered and destroyed. It’s tragic. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never
happen at Apple.” As he prepared to leave, the board members gathered around to give him
a hug.
After meeting with his executive team to explain the news, Jobs rode home with George
Riley. When they arrived at the house, Powell was in the backyard harvesting honey from
her hives, with help from Eve. They took off their screen helmets and brought the honey

pot to the kitchen, where Reed and Erin had gathered, so that they could all celebrate the
graceful transition. Jobs took a spoonful of the honey and pronounced it wonderfully sweet.
That evening, he stressed to me that his hope was to remain as active as his health
allowed. “I’m going to work on new products and marketing and the things that I like,” he
said. But when I asked how it really felt to be relinquishing control of the company he had
built, his tone turned wistful, and he shifted into the past tense. “I’ve had a very lucky
career, a very lucky life,” he replied. “I’ve done all that I can do.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

LEGACY

The Brightest Heaven of Invention

At the 2006 Macworld, in front of a slide of him and Wozniak from thirty years earlier

FireWire

His personality was reflected in the products he created. Just as the core of Apple’s
philosophy, from the original Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad a generation later, was the end-
to-end integration of hardware and software, so too was it the case with Steve Jobs: His
passions, perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were
integrally connected to his approach to business and the products that resulted.
The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products begins with his
most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught
himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way,
such as when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan’s music or why whatever
product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever
made. At other times it could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google
or Microsoft ripping off Apple.
This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world. Colleagues referred to the
hero/shithead dichotomy. You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day. The
same was true of products, ideas, even food: Something was either “the best thing ever,” or
it was shitty, brain-dead, inedible. As a result, any perceived flaw could set off a rant. The

finish on a piece of metal, the curve of the head of a screw, the shade of blue on a box, the
intuitiveness of a navigation screen—he would declare them to “completely suck” until that
moment when he suddenly pronounced them “absolutely perfect.” He thought of himself as
an artist, which he was, and he indulged in the temperament of one.
His quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end control of
every product that it made. He got hives, or worse, when contemplating great Apple
software running on another company’s crappy hardware, and he likewise was allergic to
the thought of unapproved apps or content polluting the perfection of an Apple device. This
ability to integrate hardware and software and content into one unified system enabled him
to impose simplicity. The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves
simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.
This instinct for integrated systems put him squarely on one side of the most
fundamental divide in the digital world: open versus closed. The hacker ethos handed down
from the Homebrew Computer Club favored the open approach, in which there was little
centralized control and people were free to modify hardware and software, share code,
write to open standards, shun proprietary systems, and have content and apps that were
compatible with a variety of devices and operating systems. The young Wozniak was in
that camp: The Apple II he designed was easily opened and sported plenty of slots and
ports that people could jack into as they pleased. With the Macintosh Jobs became a
founding father of the other camp. The Macintosh would be like an appliance, with the
hardware and software tightly woven together and closed to modifications. The hacker
ethos would be sacrificed in order to create a seamless and simple user experience.
This led Jobs to decree that the Macintosh operating system would not be available for
any other company’s hardware. Microsoft pursued the opposite strategy, allowing its
Windows operating system to be promiscuously licensed. That did not produce the most
elegant computers, but it did lead to Microsoft’s dominating the world of operating
systems. After Apple’s market share shrank to less than 5%, Microsoft’s approach was
declared the winner in the personal computer realm.
In the longer run, however, there proved to be some advantages to Jobs’s model. Even
with a small market share, Apple was able to maintain a huge profit margin while other
computer makers were commoditized. In 2010, for example, Apple had just 7% of the
revenue in the personal computer market, but it grabbed 35% of the operating profit.
More significantly, in the early 2000s Jobs’s insistence on end-to-end integration gave
Apple an advantage in developing a digital hub strategy, which allowed your desktop
computer to link seamlessly with a variety of portable devices. The iPod, for example, was
part of a closed and tightly integrated system. To use it, you had to use Apple’s iTunes
software and download content from its iTunes Store. The result was that the iPod, like the
iPhone and iPad that followed, was an elegant delight in contrast to the kludgy rival
products that did not offer a seamless end-to-end experience.
The strategy worked. In May 2000 Apple’s market value was one-twentieth that of
Microsoft. In May 2010 Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s most valuable
technology company, and by September 2011 it was worth 70% more than Microsoft. In

the first quarter of 2011 the market for Windows PCs shrank by 1%, while the market for
Macs grew 28%.
By then the battle had begun anew in the world of mobile devices. Google took the more
open approach, and it made its Android operating system available for use by any maker of
tablets or cell phones. By 2011 its share of the mobile market matched Apple’s. The
drawback of Android’s openness was the fragmentation that resulted. Various handset and
tablet makers modified Android into dozens of variants and flavors, making it hard for apps
to remain consistent or make full use if its features. There were merits to both approaches.
Some people wanted the freedom to use more open systems and have more choices of
hardware; others clearly preferred Apple’s tight integration and control, which led to
products that had simpler interfaces, longer battery life, greater user-friendliness, and easier
handling of content.
The downside of Jobs’s approach was that his desire to delight the user led him to resist
empowering the user. Among the most thoughtful proponents of an open environment is
Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard. He begins his book The Future of the Internet—And How to
Stop It with the scene of Jobs introducing the iPhone, and he warns of the consequences of
replacing personal computers with “sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.”
Even more fervent is Cory Doctorow, who wrote a manifesto called “Why I Won’t Buy an
iPad” for Boing Boing. “There’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the
design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner,” he wrote. “Buying an iPad for
your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart
and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is
something you have to leave to the professionals.”
For Jobs, belief in an integrated approach was a matter of righteousness. “We do these
things not because we are control freaks,” he explained. “We do them because we want to
make great products, because we care about the user, and because we like to take
responsibility for the entire experience rather than turn out the crap that other people
make.” He also believed he was doing people a service: “They’re busy doing whatever they
do best, and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other
things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.”
This approach sometimes went against Apple’s short-term business interests. But in a
world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces, it led
to astonishing products marked by beguiling user experiences. Using an Apple product
could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and
neither experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness or by letting a
thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.

Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his
laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him—the user
interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music
companies into the iTunes Store—he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with
something—a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug—he
would resolutely ignore it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track

by cutting all except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons,
software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options.
He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed
his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or
unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.
Unfortunately his Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm or inner
serenity, and that too is part of his legacy. He was often tightly coiled and impatient, traits
he made no effort to hide. Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that
modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of
being brutally honest. “My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it,” he
said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also, to use the technical term, an
asshole at times.
Andy Hertzfeld once told me, “The one question I’d truly love Steve to answer is, ‘Why
are you sometimes so mean?’” Even his family members wondered whether he simply
lacked the filter that restrains people from venting their wounding thoughts or willfully
bypassed it. Jobs claimed it was the former. “This is who I am, and you can’t expect me to
be someone I’m not,” he replied when I asked him the question. But I think he actually
could have controlled himself, if he had wanted. When he hurt people, it was not because
he was lacking in emotional awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up,
understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them
at will.
The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped
him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid
bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues
whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to
do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A
players.

The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching a startup in
his parents’ garage and building it into the world’s most valuable company. He didn’t
invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and
technology in ways that invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating the
power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod
after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which
had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by
being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.
As a result he launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole
industries:
• The Apple II, which took Wozniak’s circuit board and turned it into the first personal
computer that was not just for hobbyists.
• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphical
user interfaces.

• Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle of digital
imagination.
• Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.
• The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.
• The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.
• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email, and
web devices.
• The App Store, which spawned a new content-creation industry.
• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital
newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.
• iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our content
and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.
• And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where
imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it became the
most valuable company on earth.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were
instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the
mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of
the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder,
he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.
Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain
to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to
Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were
completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that
could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world’s
most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities,
perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the
company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

And One More Thing . . .

Biographers are supposed to have the last word. But this is a biography of Steve Jobs. Even
though he did not impose his legendary desire for control on this project, I suspect that I
would not be conveying the right feel for him—the way he asserted himself in any situation
—if I just shuffled him onto history’s stage without letting him have some last words.
Over the course of our conversations, there were many times when he reflected on what
he hoped his legacy would be. Here are those thoughts, in his own words:

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to
make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit,
because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the
profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make

money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who
gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our
job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said,
“If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”
People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on
market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I
like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people
innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates
with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists
and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In
fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the
side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great
artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo
knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.
People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think
about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes
you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management.
You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your
products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your
vision.
At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It
was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and
Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s
Apple and Google—and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s
been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on.
It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance.
They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was.
They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-
wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but
he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making
great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he
achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I
admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I enjoyed working with him.
He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the
humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it
well. They totally didn’t get it.
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft.
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some
field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts
valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues,
not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:31

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

ROUND THREE

The Twilight Struggle

Family Ties

Jobs had an aching desire to make it to his son’s graduation from high school in June 2010.
“When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that
I really wanted to see Reed graduate, and that got me through 2009,” he said. As a senior,
Reed looked eerily like his father at eighteen, with a knowing and slightly rebellious smile,
intense eyes, and a shock of dark hair. But from his mother he had inherited a sweetness
and painfully sensitive empathy that his father lacked. He was demonstrably affectionate
and eager to please. Whenever his father was sitting sullenly at the kitchen table and staring
at the floor, which happened often when he was ailing, the only thing sure to cause his eyes
to brighten was Reed walking in.
Reed adored his father. Soon after I started working on this book, he dropped in to where
I was staying and, as his father often did, suggested we take a walk. He told me, with an
intensely earnest look, that his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was
motivated by a love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making.
After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, Reed began spending his summers working in a
Stanford oncology lab doing DNA sequencing to find genetic markers for colon cancer. In
one experiment, he traced how mutations go through families. “One of the very few silver
linings about me getting sick is that Reed’s gotten to spend a lot of time studying with some
very good doctors,” Jobs said. “His enthusiasm for it is exactly how I felt about computers
when I was his age. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the
intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was
when I was his age.”
Reed used his cancer study as the basis for the senior report he presented to his class at
Crystal Springs Uplands School. As he described how he used centrifuges and dyes to
sequence the DNA of tumors, his father sat in the audience beaming, along with the rest of
his family. “I fantasize about Reed getting a house here in Palo Alto with his family and
riding his bike to work as a doctor at Stanford,” Jobs said afterward.
Reed had grown up fast in 2009, when it looked as if his father was going to die. He took
care of his younger sisters while his parents were in Memphis, and he developed a
protective paternalism. But when his father’s health stabilized in the spring of 2010, he

regained his playful, teasing personality. One day during dinner he was discussing with his
family where to take his girlfriend for dinner. His father suggested Il Fornaio, an elegant
standard in Palo Alto, but Reed said he had been unable to get reservations. “Do you want
me to try?” his father asked. Reed resisted; he wanted to handle it himself. Erin, the
somewhat shy middle child, suggested that she could outfit a tepee in their garden and she
and Eve, the younger sister, would serve them a romantic meal there. Reed stood up and
hugged her. He would take her up on that some other time, he promised.
One Saturday Reed was one of the four contestants on his school’s Quiz Kids team
competing on a local TV station. The family—minus Eve, who was in a horse show—came
to cheer him on. As the television crew bumbled around getting ready, his father tried to
keep his impatience in check and remain inconspicuous among the parents sitting in the
rows of folding chairs. But he was clearly recognizable in his trademark jeans and black
turtleneck, and one woman pulled up a chair right next to him and started to take his
picture. Without looking at her, he stood up and moved to the other end of the row. When
Reed came on the set, his nameplate identified him as “Reed Powell.” The host asked the
students what they wanted to be when they grew up. “A cancer researcher,” Reed
answered.
Jobs drove his two-seat Mercedes SL55, taking Reed, while his wife followed in her own
car with Erin. On the way home, she asked Erin why she thought her father refused to have
a license plate on his car. “To be a rebel,” she answered. I later put the question to Jobs.
“Because people follow me sometimes, and if I have a license plate, they can track down
where I live,” he replied. “But that’s kind of getting obsolete now with Google Maps. So I
guess, really, it’s just because I don’t.”
During Reed’s graduation ceremony, his father sent me an email from his iPhone that
simply exulted, “Today is one of my happiest days. Reed is graduating from High School.
Right now. And, against all odds, I am here.” That night there was a party at their house
with close friends and family. Reed danced with every member of his family, including his
father. Later Jobs took his son out to the barnlike storage shed to offer him one of his two
bicycles, which he wouldn’t be riding again. Reed joked that the Italian one looked a bit
too gay, so Jobs told him to take the solid eight-speed next to it. When Reed said he would
be indebted, Jobs answered, “You don’t need to be indebted, because you have my DNA.”
A few days later Toy Story 3 opened. Jobs had nurtured this Pixar trilogy from the
beginning, and the final installment was about the emotions surrounding the departure of
Andy for college. “I wish I could always be with you,” Andy’s mother says. “You always
will be,” he replies.
Jobs’s relationship with his two younger daughters was somewhat more distant. He paid
less attention to Erin, who was quiet, introspective, and seemed not to know exactly how to
handle him, especially when he was emitting wounding barbs. She was a poised and
attractive young woman, with a personal sensitivity more mature than her father’s. She
thought that she might want to be an architect, perhaps because of her father’s interest in
the field, and she had a good sense of design. But when her father was showing Reed the
drawings for the new Apple campus, she sat on the other side of the kitchen, and it seemed
not to occur to him to call her over as well. Her big hope that spring of 2010 was that her

father would take her to the Oscars. She loved the movies. Even more, she wanted to fly
with her father on his private plane and walk up the red carpet with him. Powell was quite
willing to forgo the trip and tried to talk her husband into taking Erin. But he dismissed the
idea.
At one point as I was finishing this book, Powell told me that Erin wanted to give me an
interview. It’s not something that I would have requested, since she was then just turning
sixteen, but I agreed. The point Erin emphasized was that she understood why her father
was not always attentive, and she accepted that. “He does his best to be both a father and
the CEO of Apple, and he juggles those pretty well,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I had
more of his attention, but I know the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s
really cool, so I’m fine. I don’t really need more attention.”
Jobs had promised to take each of his children on a trip of their choice when they
became teenagers. Reed chose to go to Kyoto, knowing how much his father was entranced
by the Zen calm of that beautiful city. Not surprisingly, when Erin turned thirteen, in 2008,
she chose Kyoto as well. Her father’s illness caused him to cancel the trip, so he promised
to take her in 2010, when he was better. But that June he decided he didn’t want to go. Erin
was crestfallen but didn’t protest. Instead her mother took her to France with family
friends, and they rescheduled the Kyoto trip for July.
Powell worried that her husband would again cancel, so she was thrilled when the whole
family took off in early July for Kona Village, Hawaii, which was the first leg of the trip.
But in Hawaii Jobs developed a bad toothache, which he ignored, as if he could will the
cavity away. The tooth collapsed and had to be fixed. Then the iPhone 4 antenna crisis hit,
and he decided to rush back to Cupertino, taking Reed with him. Powell and Erin stayed in
Hawaii, hoping that Jobs would return and continue with the plans to take them to Kyoto.
To their relief, and mild surprise, Jobs actually did return to Hawaii after his press
conference to pick them up and take them to Japan. “It’s a miracle,” Powell told a friend.
While Reed took care of Eve back in Palo Alto, Erin and her parents stayed at the Tawaraya
Ryokan, an inn of sublime simplicity that Jobs loved. “It was fantastic,” Erin recalled.
Twenty years earlier Jobs had taken Erin’s half-sister, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, to Japan when
she was about the same age. Among her strongest memories was sharing with him
delightful meals and watching him, usually such a picky eater, savor unagi sushi and other
delicacies. Seeing him take joy in eating made Lisa feel relaxed with him for the first time.
Erin recalled a similar experience: “Dad knew where he wanted to go to lunch every day.
He told me he knew an incredible soba shop, and he took me there, and it was so good that
it’s been hard to ever eat soba again because nothing comes close.” They also found a tiny
neighborhood sushi restaurant, and Jobs tagged it on his iPhone as “best sushi I’ve ever
had.” Erin agreed.
They also visited Kyoto’s famous Zen Buddhist temples; the one Erin loved most was
Saihō-ji, known as the “moss temple” because of its Golden Pond surrounded by gardens
featuring more than a hundred varieties of moss. “Erin was really really happy, which was
deeply gratifying and helped improve her relationship with her father,” Powell recalled.
“She deserved that.”

Their younger daughter, Eve, was quite a different story. She was spunky, self-assured,
and in no way intimidated by her father. Her passion was horseback riding, and she became
determined to make it to the Olympics. When a coach told her how much work it would
require, she replied, “Tell me exactly what I need to do. I will do it.” He did, and she began
diligently following the program.
Eve was an expert at the difficult task of pinning her father down; she often called his
assistant at work directly to make sure something got put on his calendar. She was also
pretty good as a negotiator. One weekend in 2010, when the family was planning a trip,
Erin wanted to delay the departure by half a day, but she was afraid to ask her father. Eve,
then twelve, volunteered to take on the task, and at dinner she laid out the case to her father
as if she were a lawyer before the Supreme Court. Jobs cut her off—“No, I don’t think I
want to”—but it was clear that he was more amused than annoyed. Later that evening Eve
sat down with her mother and deconstructed the various ways that she could have made her
case better.
Jobs came to appreciate her spirit—and see a lot of himself in her. “She’s a pistol and has
the strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s like payback.” He had a deep
understanding of her personality, perhaps because it bore some resemblance to his. “Eve is
more sensitive than a lot of people think,” he explained. “She’s so smart that she can roll
over people a bit, so that means she can alienate people, and she finds herself alone. She’s
in the process of learning how to be who she is, but tempers it around the edges so that she
can have the friends that she needs.”
Jobs’s relationship with his wife was sometimes complicated but always loyal. Savvy
and compassionate, Laurene Powell was a stabilizing influence and an example of his
ability to compensate for some of his selfish impulses by surrounding himself with strong-
willed and sensible people. She weighed in quietly on business issues, firmly on family
concerns, and fiercely on medical matters. Early in their marriage, she cofounded and
launched College Track, a national after-school program that helps disadvantaged kids
graduate from high school and get into college. Since then she had become a leading force
in the education reform movement. Jobs professed an admiration for his wife’s work:
“What she’s done with College Track really impresses me.” But he tended to be generally
dismissive of philanthropic endeavors and never visited her after-school centers.
In February 2010 Jobs celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday with just his family. The kitchen
was decorated with streamers and balloons, and his kids gave him a red-velvet toy crown,
which he wore. Now that he had recovered from a grueling year of health problems, Powell
hoped that he would become more attentive to his family. But for the most part he resumed
his focus on his work. “I think it was hard on the family, especially the girls,” she told me.
“After two years of him being ill, he finally gets a little better, and they expected he would
focus a bit on them, but he didn’t.” She wanted to make sure, she said, that both sides of his
personality were reflected in this book and put into context. “Like many great men whose
gifts are extraordinary, he’s not extraordinary in every realm,” she said. “He doesn’t have
social graces, such as putting himself in other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about
empowering humankind, the advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in
their hands.”

President Obama

On a trip to Washington in the early fall of 2010, Powell had met with some of her friends
at the White House who told her that President Obama was going to Silicon Valley that
October. She suggested that he might want to meet with her husband. Obama’s aides liked
the idea; it fit into his new emphasis on competitiveness. In addition, John Doerr, the
venture capitalist who had become one of Jobs’s close friends, had told a meeting of the
President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board about Jobs’s views on why the United
States was losing its edge. He too suggested that Obama should meet with Jobs. So a half
hour was put on the president’s schedule for a session at the Westin San Francisco Airport.
There was one problem: When Powell told her husband, he said he didn’t want to do it.
He was annoyed that she had arranged it behind his back. “I’m not going to get slotted in
for a token meeting so that he can check off that he met with a CEO,” he told her. She
insisted that Obama was “really psyched to meet with you.” Jobs replied that if that were
the case, then Obama should call and personally ask for the meeting. The standoff went on
for five days. She called in Reed, who was at Stanford, to come home for dinner and try to
persuade his father. Jobs finally relented.
The meeting actually lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. “You’re
headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said,
the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was
to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in
America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.
Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated
and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost
no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as
industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on
how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session
eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still
based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials,
and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing
feedback in real time.
Jobs offered to put together a group of six or seven CEOs who could really explain the
innovation challenges facing America, and the president accepted. So Jobs made a list of
people for a Washington meeting to be held in December. Unfortunately, after Valerie
Jarrett and other presidential aides had added names, the list had expanded to more than
twenty, with GE’s Jeffrey Immelt in the lead. Jobs sent Jarrett an email saying it was a
bloated list and he had no intention of coming. In fact his health problems had flared anew
by then, so he would not have been able to go in any case, as Doerr privately explained to
the president.
In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama
in Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek
restaurant in Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included
Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John

Chambers, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings.
Jobs’s attention to the details of the dinner extended to the food. Doerr sent him the
proposed menu, and he responded that some of the dishes proposed by the caterer—shrimp,
cod, lentil salad—were far too fancy “and not who you are, John.” He particularly objected
to the dessert that was planned, a cream pie tricked out with chocolate truffles, but the
White House advance staff overruled him by telling the caterer that the president liked
cream pie. Because Jobs had lost so much weight that he was easily chilled, Doerr kept the
house so warm that Zuckerberg found himself sweating profusely.
Jobs, sitting next to the president, kicked off the dinner by saying, “Regardless of our
political persuasions, I want you to know that we’re here to do whatever you ask to help
our country.” Despite that, the dinner initially became a litany of suggestions of what the
president could do for the businesses there. Chambers, for example, pushed a proposal for a
repatriation tax holiday that would allow major corporations to avoid tax payments on
overseas profits if they brought them back to the United States for investment during a
certain period. The president was annoyed, and so was Zuckerberg, who turned to Valerie
Jarrett, sitting to his right, and whispered, “We should be talking about what’s important to
the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for him?”
Doerr was able to refocus the discussion by calling on everyone to suggest a list of
action items. When Jobs’s turn came, he stressed the need for more trained engineers and
suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the United States
should be given a visa to stay in the country. Obama said that could be done only in the
context of the “Dream Act,” which would allow illegal aliens who arrived as minors and
finished high school to become legal residents—something that the Republicans had
blocked. Jobs found this an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis. “The
president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done,” he
recalled. “It infuriates me.”
Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had
700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed
30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. “You can’t find that many in America to
hire,” he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply
needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community
colleges, or trade schools could train them. “If you could educate these engineers,” he said,
“we could move more manufacturing plants here.” The argument made a strong impression
on the president. Two or three times over the next month he told his aides, “We’ve got to
find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about.”
Jobs was pleased that Obama followed up, and they talked by telephone a few times after
the meeting. He offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. (He
had made the same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David
Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential.) “I think political advertising is terrible. I’d love to get
Lee Clow out of retirement, and we can come up with great commercials for him,” Jobs
told me a few weeks after the dinner. Jobs had been fighting pain all week, but the talk of
politics energized him. “Every once in a while, a real ad pro gets involved, the way Hal

Riney did with ‘It’s morning in America’ for Reagan’s reelection in 1984. So that’s what
I’d like to do for Obama.”

Third Medical Leave, 2011

The cancer always sent signals as it reappeared. Jobs had learned that. He would lose his
appetite and begin to feel pains throughout his body. His doctors would do tests, detect
nothing, and reassure him that he still seemed clear. But he knew better. The cancer had its
signaling pathways, and a few months after he felt the signs the doctors would discover that
it was indeed no longer in remission.
Another such downturn began in early November 2010. He was in pain, stopped eating,
and had to be fed intravenously by a nurse who came to the house. The doctors found no
sign of more tumors, and they assumed that this was just another of his periodic cycles of
fighting infections and digestive maladies. He had never been one to suffer pain stoically,
so his doctors and family had become somewhat inured to his complaints.
He and his family went to Kona Village for Thanksgiving, but his eating did not
improve. The dining there was in a communal room, and the other guests pretended not to
notice as Jobs, looking emaciated, rocked and moaned at meals, not touching his food. It
was a testament to the resort and its guests that his condition never leaked out. When he
returned to Palo Alto, Jobs became increasingly emotional and morose. He thought he was
going to die, he told his kids, and he would get choked up about the possibility that he
would never celebrate any more of their birthdays.
By Christmas he was down to 115 pounds, which was more than fifty pounds below his
normal weight. Mona Simpson came to Palo Alto for the holiday, along with her ex-
husband, the television comedy writer Richard Appel, and their children. The mood picked
up a bit. The families played parlor games such as Novel, in which participants try to fool
each other by seeing who can write the most convincing fake opening sentence to a book,
and things seemed to be looking up for a while. He was even able to go out to dinner at a
restaurant with Powell a few days after Christmas. The kids went off on a ski vacation for
New Year’s, with Powell and Mona Simpson taking turns staying at home with Jobs in Palo
Alto.
By the beginning of 2011, however, it was clear that this was not merely one of his bad
patches. His doctors detected evidence of new tumors, and the cancer-related signaling
further exacerbated his loss of appetite. They were struggling to determine how much drug
therapy his body, in its emaciated condition, would be able to take. Every inch of his body
felt like it had been punched, he told friends, as he moaned and sometimes doubled over in
pain.
It was a vicious cycle. The first signs of cancer caused pain. The morphine and other
painkillers he took suppressed his appetite. His pancreas had been partly removed and his
liver had been replaced, so his digestive system was faulty and had trouble absorbing
protein. Losing weight made it harder to embark on aggressive drug therapies. His
emaciated condition also made him more susceptible to infections, as did the
immunosuppressants he sometimes took to keep his body from rejecting his liver

transplant. The weight loss reduced the lipid layers around his pain receptors, causing him
to suffer more. And he was prone to extreme mood swings, marked by prolonged bouts of
anger and depression, which further suppressed his appetite.
Jobs’s eating problems were exacerbated over the years by his psychological attitude
toward food. When he was young, he learned that he could induce euphoria and ecstasy by
fasting. So even though he knew that he should eat—his doctors were begging him to
consume high-quality protein—lingering in the back of his subconscious, he admitted, was
his instinct for fasting and for diets like Arnold Ehret’s fruit regimen that he had embraced
as a teenager. Powell kept telling him that it was crazy, even pointing out that Ehret had
died at fifty-six when he stumbled and knocked his head, and she would get angry when he
came to the table and just stared silently at his lap. “I wanted him to force himself to eat,”
she said, “and it was incredibly tense at home.” Bryar Brown, their part-time cook, would
still come in the afternoon and make an array of healthy dishes, but Jobs would touch his
tongue to one or two dishes and then dismiss them all as inedible. One evening he
announced, “I could probably eat a little pumpkin pie,” and the even-tempered Brown
created a beautiful pie from scratch in an hour. Jobs ate only one bite, but Brown was
thrilled.
Powell talked to eating disorder specialists and psychiatrists, but her husband tended to
shun them. He refused to take any medications, or be treated in any way, for his depression.
“When you have feelings,” he said, “like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight,
to mask them is to lead an artificial life.” In fact he swung to the other extreme. He became
morose, tearful, and dramatic as he lamented to all around him that he was about to die.
The depression became part of the vicious cycle by making him even less likely to eat.
Pictures and videos of Jobs looking emaciated began to appear online, and soon rumors
were swirling about how sick he was. The problem, Powell realized, was that the rumors
were true, and they were not going to go away. Jobs had agreed only reluctantly to go on
medical leave two years earlier, when his liver was failing, and this time he also resisted the
idea. It would be like leaving his homeland, unsure that he would ever return. When he
finally bowed to the inevitable, in January 2011, the board members were expecting it; the
telephone meeting in which he told them that he wanted another leave took only three
minutes. He had often discussed with the board, in executive session, his thoughts about
who could take over if anything happened to him, presenting both short-term and longer-
term combinations of options. But there was no doubt that, in this current situation, Tim
Cook would again take charge of day-to-day operations.
The following Saturday afternoon, Jobs allowed his wife to convene a meeting of his
doctors. He realized that he was facing the type of problem that he never permitted at
Apple. His treatment was fragmented rather than integrated. Each of his myriad maladies
was being treated by different specialists—oncologists, pain specialists, nutritionists,
hepatologists, and hematologists—but they were not being co-ordinated in a cohesive
approach, the way James Eason had done in Memphis. “One of the big issues in the health
care industry is the lack of caseworkers or advocates that are the quarterback of each
team,” Powell said. This was particularly true at Stanford, where nobody seemed in charge
of figuring out how nutrition was related to pain care and to oncology. So Powell asked the

various Stanford specialists to come to their house for a meeting that also included some
outside doctors with a more aggressive and integrated approach, such as David Agus of
USC. They agreed on a new regimen for dealing with the pain and for coordinating the
other treatments.
Thanks to some pioneering science, the team of doctors had been able to keep Jobs one
step ahead of the cancer. He had become one of the first twenty people in the world to have
all of the genes of his cancer tumor as well as of his normal DNA sequenced. It was a
process that, at the time, cost more than $100,000.
The gene sequencing and analysis were done collaboratively by teams at Stanford, Johns
Hopkins, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. By knowing the unique genetic and
molecular signature of Jobs’s tumors, his doctors had been able to pick specific drugs that
directly targeted the defective molecular pathways that caused his cancer cells to grow in
an abnormal manner. This approach, known as molecular targeted therapy, was more
effective than traditional chemotherapy, which attacks the process of division of all the
body’s cells, cancerous or not. This targeted therapy was not a silver bullet, but at times it
seemed close to one: It allowed his doctors to look at a large number of drugs—common
and uncommon, already available or only in development—to see which three or four
might work best. Whenever his cancer mutated and repaved around one of these drugs, the
doctors had another drug lined up to go next.
Although Powell was diligent in overseeing her husband’s care, he was the one who
made the final decision on each new treatment regimen. A typical example occurred in May
2011, when he held a meeting with George Fisher and other doctors from Stanford, the
gene-sequencing analysts from the Broad Institute, and his outside consultant David Agus.
They all gathered around a table at a suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Palo Alto. Powell
did not come, but their son, Reed, did. For three hours there were presentations from the
Stanford and Broad researchers on the new information they had learned about the genetic
signatures of his cancer. Jobs was his usual feisty self. At one point he stopped a Broad
Institute analyst who had made the mistake of using PowerPoint slides. Jobs chided him
and explained why Apple’s Keynote presentation software was better; he even offered to
teach him how to use it. By the end of the meeting, Jobs and his team had gone through all
of the molecular data, assessed the rationales for each of the potential therapies, and come
up with a list of tests to help them better prioritize these.
One of his doctors told him that there was hope that his cancer, and others like it, would
soon be considered a manageable chronic disease, which could be kept at bay until the
patient died of something else. “I’m either going to be one of the first to be able to outrun a
cancer like this, or I’m going to be one of the last to die from it,” Jobs told me right after
one of the meetings with his doctors. “Either among the first to make it to shore, or the last
to get dumped.”

Visitors

When his 2011 medical leave was announced, the situation seemed so dire that Lisa
Brennan-Jobs got back in touch after more than a year and arranged to fly from New York

the following week. Her relationship with her father had been built on layers of resentment.
She was understandably scarred by having been pretty much abandoned by him for her first
ten years. Making matters worse, she had inherited some of his prickliness and, he felt,
some of her mother’s sense of grievance. “I told her many times that I wished I’d been a
better dad when she was five, but now she should let things go rather than be angry the rest
of her life,” he recalled just before Lisa arrived.
The visit went well. Jobs was beginning to feel a little better, and he was in a mood to
mend fences and express his affection for those around him. At age thirty-two, Lisa was in
a serious relationship for one of the first times in her life. Her boyfriend was a struggling
young filmmaker from California, and Jobs went so far as to suggest she move back to Palo
Alto if they got married. “Look, I don’t know how long I am for this world,” he told her.
“The doctors can’t really tell me. If you want to see more of me, you’re going to have to
move out here. Why don’t you consider it?” Even though Lisa did not move west, Jobs was
pleased at how the reconciliation had worked out. “I hadn’t been sure I wanted her to visit,
because I was sick and didn’t want other complications. But I’m very glad she came. It
helped settle a lot of things in me.”

Jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to repair fences. Google’s
cofounder Larry Page, who lived less than three blocks away, had just announced plans to
retake the reins of the company from Eric Schmidt. He knew how to flatter Jobs: He asked
if he could come by and get tips on how to be a good CEO. Jobs was still furious at
Google. “My first thought was, ‘Fuck you,’” he recounted. “But then I thought about it and
realized that everybody helped me when I was young, from Bill Hewlett to the guy down
the block who worked for HP. So I called him back and said sure.” Page came over, sat in
Jobs’s living room, and listened to his ideas on building great products and durable
companies. Jobs recalled:

We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how
to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he
would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players.
The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up.
It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the
rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re
causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. I tried to be as helpful as I
could. I will continue to do that with people like Mark Zuckerberg too. That’s how I’m
going to spend part of the time I have left. I can help the next generation remember the
lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been
very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay.

The announcement of Jobs’s 2011 medical leave prompted others to make a pilgrimage
to the house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton, for example, came by and talked about everything
from the Middle East to American politics. But the most poignant visit was from the other

tech prodigy born in 1955, the guy who, for more than three decades, had been Jobs’s rival
and partner in defining the age of personal computers.
Bill Gates had never lost his fascination with Jobs. In the spring of 2011 I was at a dinner
with him in Washington, where he had come to discuss his foundation’s global health
endeavors. He expressed amazement at the success of the iPad and how Jobs, even while
sick, was focusing on ways to improve it. “Here I am, merely saving the world from
malaria and that sort of thing, and Steve is still coming up with amazing new products,” he
said wistfully. “Maybe I should have stayed in that game.” He smiled to make sure that I
knew he was joking, or at least half joking.
Through their mutual friend Mike Slade, Gates made arrangements to visit Jobs in May.
The day before it was supposed to happen, Jobs’s assistant called to say he wasn’t feeling
well enough. But it was rescheduled, and early one afternoon Gates drove to Jobs’s house,
walked through the back gate to the open kitchen door, and saw Eve studying at the table.
“Is Steve around?” he asked. Eve pointed him to the living room.
They spent more than three hours together, just the two of them, reminiscing. “We were
like the old guys in the industry looking back,” Jobs recalled. “He was happier than I’ve
ever seen him, and I kept thinking how healthy he looked.” Gates was similarly struck by
how Jobs, though scarily gaunt, had more energy than he expected. He was open about his
health problems and, at least that day, feeling optimistic. His sequential regimens of
targeted drug treatments, he told Gates, were like “jumping from one lily pad to another,”
trying to stay a step ahead of the cancer.
Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what
schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on
their own while using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed
that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools—far less than on
other realms of society such as media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said,
computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized
lessons and providing motivational feedback.
They also talked a lot about the joys of family, including how lucky they were to have
good kids and be married to the right women. “We laughed about how fortunate it was that
he met Laurene, and she’s kept him semi-sane, and I met Melinda, and she’s kept me semi-
sane,” Gates recalled. “We also discussed how it’s challenging to be one of our children,
and how do we mitigate that. It was pretty personal.” At one point Eve, who in the past had
been in horse shows with Gates’s daughter Jennifer, wandered in from the kitchen, and
Gates asked her what jumping routines she liked best.
As their hours together drew to a close, Gates complimented Jobs on “the incredible
stuff” he had created and for being able to save Apple in the late 1990s from the bozos who
were about to destroy it. He even made an interesting concession. Throughout their careers
they had adhered to competing philosophies on one of the most fundamental of all digital
issues: whether hardware and software should be tightly integrated or more open. “I used to
believe that the open, horizontal model would prevail,” Gates told him. “But you proved
that the integrated, vertical model could also be great.” Jobs responded with his own
admission. “Your model worked too,” he said.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:29

After the launch event, Jobs was energized. He came to the Four Seasons hotel to join me,
his wife, and Reed, plus Reed’s two Stanford pals, for lunch. For a change he was eating,
though still with some pickiness. He ordered fresh-squeezed juice, which he sent back three
times, declaring that each new offering was from a bottle, and a pasta primavera, which he
shoved away as inedible after one taste. But then he ate half of my crab Louie salad and
ordered a full one for himself, followed by a bowl of ice cream. The indulgent hotel was
even able to produce a glass of juice that finally met his standards.
At his house the following day he was still on a high. He was planning to fly to Kona
Village the next day, alone, and I asked to see what he had put on his iPad 2 for the trip.
There were three movies: Chinatown, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Toy Story 3. More
revealingly, there was just one book that he had downloaded: The Autobiography of a Yogi,
the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in
India, and had read once a year ever since.
Midway through the morning he decided he wanted to eat something. He was still too
weak to drive, so I drove him to a café in a shopping mall. It was closed, but the owner was
used to Jobs knocking on the door at off-hours, and he happily let us in. “He’s taken on a
mission to try to fatten me up,” Jobs joked. His doctors had pushed him to eat eggs as a
source of high-quality protein, and he ordered an omelet. “Living with a disease like this,
and all the pain, constantly reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange
things to your brain if you’re not careful,” he said. “You don’t make plans more than a year
out, and that’s bad. You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.”
An example of this magical thinking was his plan to build a luxurious yacht. Before his
liver transplant, he and his family used to rent a boat for vacations, traveling to Mexico, the
South Pacific, or the Mediterranean. On many of these cruises, Jobs got bored or began to
hate the design of the boat, so they would cut the trip short and fly to Kona Village. But
sometimes the cruise worked well. “The best vacation I’ve ever been on was when we went
down the coast of Italy, then to Athens—which is a pit, but the Parthenon is mind-blowing
—and then to Ephesus in Turkey, where they have these ancient public lavatories in marble
with a place in the middle for musicians to serenade.” When they got to Istanbul, he hired a
history professor to give his family a tour. At the end they went to a Turkish bath, where the
professor’s lecture gave Jobs an insight about the globalization of youth:

I had a real revelation. We were all in robes, and they made some Turkish coffee for us.
The professor explained how the coffee was made very different from anywhere else, and I
realized, “So fucking what?” Which kids even in Turkey give a shit about Turkish coffee?
All day I had looked at young people in Istanbul. They were all drinking what every other
kid in the world drinks, and they were wearing clothes that look like they were bought at
the Gap, and they are all using cell phones. They were like kids everywhere else. It hit me
that, for young people, this whole world is the same now. When we’re making products,
there is no such thing as a Turkish phone, or a music player that young people in Turkey
would want that’s different from one young people elsewhere would want. We’re just one
world now.

After the joy of that cruise, Jobs had amused himself by beginning to design, and then
repeatedly redesigning, a boat he said he wanted to build someday. When he got sick again
in 2009, he almost canceled the project. “I didn’t think I would be alive when it got done,”
he recalled. “But that made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to
do, and maybe I have a shot at being alive when it’s done. If I stop work on the boat and
then I make it alive for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I’ve kept going.”
After our omelets at the café, we went back to his house and he showed me all of the
models and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and
minimalist. The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements. As
at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main
living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high.
He had gotten the chief engineer of the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able
to provide structural support.
By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders Feadship,
but Jobs was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave
Laurene with a half-built boat,” he said. “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an
admission that I’m about to die.”

He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later,
and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m
very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,”
he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because
not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a
moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but
said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he
could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know
that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.”
Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays.
But in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee
Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when
Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had
reserved the suite where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I
offered to pay for another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said,
‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s yours.’”
He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made
on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found
the note that he had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud:

We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our
intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee.
Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect
has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back
where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We

now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together.
My feet have never returned to the ground.

By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself,
he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they
might like to see that I was young once.”

iCloud

In 2001 Jobs had a vision: Your personal computer would serve as a “digital hub” for a
variety of lifestyle devices, such as music players, video recorders, phones, and tablets.
This played to Apple’s strength of creating end-to-end products that were simple to use.
The company was thus transformed from a high-end niche computer company to the most
valuable technology company in the world.
By 2008 Jobs had developed a vision for the next wave of the digital era. In the future,
he believed, your desktop computer would no longer serve as the hub for your content.
Instead the hub would move to “the cloud.” In other words, your content would be stored
on remote servers managed by a company you trusted, and it would be available for you to
use on any device, anywhere. It would take him three years to get it right.
He began with a false step. In the summer of 2008 he launched a product called
MobileMe, an expensive ($99 per year) subscription service that allowed you to store your
address book, documents, pictures, videos, email, and calendar remotely in the cloud and to
sync them with any device. In theory, you could go to your iPhone or any computer and
access all aspects of your digital life. There was, however, a big problem: The service, to
use Jobs’s terminology, sucked. It was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and
other data got lost randomly in the ether. “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be
Reliable,” was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s review in the Wall Street Journal.
Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple
campus, stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to
do?” After the team members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why the fuck
doesn’t it do that?” Over the next half hour he continued to berate them. “You’ve tarnished
Apple’s reputation,” he said. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.
Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.” In front of the whole
audience, he got rid of the leader of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue,
who oversaw all Internet content at Apple. As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky reported in a
dissection of the Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly enforced.”
By 2010 it was clear that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others were aiming to be the
company that could best store all of your content and data in the cloud and sync it on your
various devices. So Jobs redoubled his efforts. As he explained it to me that fall:

We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud—streams
your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe
even your medical data. Apple was the first to have the insight about your computer

becoming a digital hub. So we wrote all of these apps—iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes—and tied
in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone and iPad, and it’s worked brilliantly. But over the
next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud. So it’s the
same digital hub strategy, but the hub’s in a different place. It means you will always have
access to your content and you won’t have to sync.
It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen
calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something are usually the last
ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be left behind. I’m going to take
MobileMe and make it free, and we’re going to make syncing content simple. We are
building a server farm in North Carolina. We can provide all the syncing you need, and that
way we can lock in the customer.

Jobs discussed this vision at his Monday morning meetings, and gradually it was refined
to a new strategy. “I sent emails to groups of people at 2 a.m. and batted things around,” he
recalled. “We think about this a lot because it’s not a job, it’s our life.” Although some
board members, including Al Gore, questioned the idea of making MobileMe free, they
supported it. It would be their strategy for attracting customers into Apple’s orbit for the
next decade.
The new service was named iCloud, and Jobs unveiled it in his keynote address to
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2011. He was still on medical leave
and, for some days in May, had been hospitalized with infections and pain. Some close
friends urged him not to make the presentation, which would involve lots of preparation
and rehearsals. But the prospect of ushering in another tectonic shift in the digital age
seemed to energize him.
When he came onstage at the San Francisco Convention Center, he was wearing a
VONROSEN black cashmere sweater on top of his usual Issey Miyake black turtleneck,
and he had thermal underwear beneath his blue jeans. But he looked more gaunt than ever.
The crowd gave him a prolonged standing ovation—“That always helps, and I appreciate
it,” he said—but within minutes Apple’s stock dropped more than $4, to $340. He was
making a heroic effort, but he looked weak.
He handed the stage over to Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall to demo the new operating
systems for Macs and mobile devices, then came back on to show off iCloud himself.
“About ten years ago, we had one of our most important insights,” he said. “The PC was
going to become the hub for your digital life. Your videos, your photos, your music. But it
has broken down in the last few years. Why?” He riffed about how hard it was to get all of
your content synced to each of your devices. If you have a song you’ve downloaded on
your iPad, a picture you’ve taken on your iPhone, and a video you’ve stored on your
computer, you can end up feeling like an old-fashioned switchboard operator as you plug
USB cables into and out of things to get the content shared. “Keeping these devices in sync
is driving us crazy,” he said to great laughter. “We have a solution. It’s our next big insight.
We are going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device, and we are going to move
the digital hub into the cloud.”

Jobs was well aware that this “big insight” was in fact not really new. Indeed he joked
about Apple’s previous attempt: “You may think, Why should I believe them? They’re the
ones who brought me MobileMe.” The audience laughed nervously. “Let me just say it
wasn’t our finest hour.” But as he demonstrated iCloud, it was clear that it would be better.
Mail, contacts, and calendar entries synced instantly. So did apps, photos, books, and
documents. Most impressively, Jobs and Eddy Cue had made deals with the music
companies (unlike the folks at Google and Amazon). Apple would have eighteen million
songs on its cloud servers. If you had any of these on any of your devices or computers—
whether you had bought it legally or pirated it—Apple would let you access a high-quality
version of it on all of your devices without having to go through the time and effort to
upload it to the cloud. “It all just works,” he said.
That simple concept—that everything would just work seamlessly—was, as always,
Apple’s competitive advantage. Microsoft had been advertising “Cloud Power” for more
than a year, and three years earlier its chief software architect, the legendary Ray Ozzie,
had issued a rallying cry to the company: “Our aspiration is that individuals will only need
to license their media once, and use any of their . . . devices to access and enjoy their
media.” But Ozzie had quit Microsoft at the end of 2010, and the company’s cloud
computing push was never manifested in consumer devices. Amazon and Google both
offered cloud services in 2011, but neither company had the ability to integrate the
hardware and software and content of a variety of devices. Apple controlled every link in
the chain and designed them all to work together: the devices, computers, operating
systems, and application software, along with the sale and storage of the content.
Of course, it worked seamlessly only if you were using an Apple device and stayed
within Apple’s gated garden. That produced another benefit for Apple: customer stickiness.
Once you began using iCloud, it would be difficult to switch to a Kindle or Android device.
Your music and other content would not sync to them; in fact they might not even work. It
was the culmination of three decades spent eschewing open systems. “We thought about
whether we should do a music client for Android,” Jobs told me over breakfast the next
morning. “We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an
advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I
don’t want to make Android users happy.”

A New Campus

When Jobs was thirteen, he had looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book, called him to
score a part he needed for a frequency counter he was trying to build, and ended up getting
a summer job at the instruments division of Hewlett-Packard. That same year HP bought
some land in Cupertino to expand its calculator division. Wozniak went to work there, and
it was on this site that he designed the Apple I and Apple II during his moonlighting hours.
When HP decided in 2010 to abandon its Cupertino campus, which was just about a mile
east of Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters, Jobs quietly arranged to buy it and the
adjoining property. He admired the way that Hewlett and Packard had built a lasting
company, and he prided himself on having done the same at Apple. Now he wanted a

showcase headquarters, something that no West Coast technology company had. He
eventually accumulated 150 acres, much of which had been apricot orchards when he was a
boy, and threw himself into what would become a legacy project that combined his passion
for design with his passion for creating an enduring company. “I want to leave a signature
campus that expresses the values of the company for generations,” he said.
He hired what he considered to be the best architectural firm in the world, that of Sir
Norman Foster, which had done smartly engineered buildings such as the restored
Reichstag in Berlin and 30 St. Mary Axe in London. Not surprisingly, Jobs got so involved
in the planning, both the vision and the details, that it became almost impossible to settle on
a final design. This was to be his lasting edifice, and he wanted to get it right. Foster’s firm
assigned fifty architects to the team, and every three weeks throughout 2010 they showed
Jobs revised models and options. Over and over he would come up with new concepts,
sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives.
When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building was
shaped like a huge winding racetrack made of three joined semicircles around a large
central courtyard. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the interior had rows of office
pods that allowed the sunlight to stream down the aisles. “It permits serendipitous and fluid
meeting spaces,” he said, “and everybody gets to participate in the sunlight.”
The next time he showed me the plans, a month later, we were in Apple’s large
conference room across from his office, where a model of the proposed building covered
the table. He had made a major change. The pods would all be set back from the windows
so that long corridors would be bathed in sun. These would also serve as the common
spaces. There was a debate with some of the architects, who wanted to allow the windows
to be opened. Jobs had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. “That
would just allow people to screw things up,” he declared. On that, as on other details, he
prevailed.
When he got home that evening, Jobs showed off the drawings at dinner, and Reed joked
that the aerial view reminded him of male genitalia. His father dismissed the comment as
reflecting the mind-set of a teenager. But the next day he mentioned the comment to the
architects. “Unfortunately, once I’ve told you that, you’re never going to be able to erase
that image from your mind,” he said. By the next time I visited, the shape had been
changed to a simple circle.
The new design meant that there would not be a straight piece of glass in the building.
All would be curved and seamlessly joined. Jobs had long been fascinated with glass, and
his experience demanding huge custom panes for Apple’s retail stores made him confident
that it would be possible to make massive curved pieces in quantity. The planned center
courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the
length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it
could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome. One of his lingering memories was of the
orchards that had once dominated the area, so he hired a senior arborist from Stanford and
decreed that 80% of the property would be landscaped in a natural manner, with six
thousand trees. “I asked him to make sure to include a new set of apricot orchards,” Jobs

recalled. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the corners, and they’re part of the
legacy of this valley.”
By June 2011 the plans for the four-story, three-million-square-foot building, which
would hold more than twelve thousand employees, were ready to unveil. He decided to do
so in a quiet and unpublicized appearance before the Cupertino City Council on the day
after he had announced iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
Even though he had little energy, he had a full schedule that day. Ron Johnson, who had
developed Apple’s stores and run them for more than a decade, had decided to accept an
offer to be the CEO of J.C. Penney, and he came by Jobs’s house in the morning to discuss
his departure. Then Jobs and I went into Palo Alto to a small yogurt and oatmeal café called
Fraiche, where he talked animatedly about possible future Apple products. Later that day he
was driven to Santa Clara for the quarterly meeting that Apple had with top Intel
executives, where they discussed the possibility of using Intel chips in future mobile
devices. That night U2 was playing at the Oakland Coliseum, and Jobs had considered
going. Instead he decided to use that evening to show his plans to the Cupertino Council.
Arriving without an entourage or any fanfare, and looking relaxed in the same black
sweater he had worn for his developers conference speech, he stood on a podium with
clicker in hand and spent twenty minutes showing slides of the design to council members.
When a rendering of the sleek, futuristic, perfectly circular building appeared on the screen,
he paused and smiled. “It’s like a spaceship has landed,” he said. A few moments later he
added, “I think we have a shot at building the best office building in the world.”

The following Friday, Jobs sent an email to a colleague from the distant past, Ann Bowers,
the widow of Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce. She had been Apple’s human resources director
and den mother in the early 1980s, in charge of reprimanding Jobs after his tantrums and
tending to the wounds of his coworkers. Jobs asked if she would come see him the next
day. Bowers happened to be in New York, but she came by his house that Sunday when she
returned. By then he was sick again, in pain and without much energy, but he was eager to
show her the renderings of the new headquarters. “You should be proud of Apple,” he said.
“You should be proud of what we built.”
Then he looked at her and asked, intently, a question that almost floored her: “Tell me,
what was I like when I was young?”
Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very
difficult,” she replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The journey is the
reward.’ That turned out to be true.”
“Yes,” Jobs answered. “I did learn some things along the way.” Then, a few minutes
later, he repeated it, as if to reassure Bowers and himself. “I did learn some things. I really
did.”

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:29

when he walked in. For his part, Murdoch was reported to have uttered a great line about
the organic vegan dishes typically served: “Eating dinner at Steve’s is a great experience, as
long as you get out before the local restaurants close.” Alas, when I asked Murdoch if he
had ever said that, he didn’t recall it.
One visit came early in 2011. Murdoch was due to pass through Palo Alto on February
24, and he texted Jobs to tell him so. He didn’t know it was Jobs’s fifty-sixth birthday, and
Jobs didn’t mention it when he texted back inviting him to dinner. “It was my way of
making sure Laurene didn’t veto the plan,” Jobs joked. “It was my birthday, so she had to
let me have Rupert over.” Erin and Eve were there, and Reed jogged over from Stanford
near the end of the dinner. Jobs showed off the designs for his planned boat, which
Murdoch thought looked beautiful on the inside but “a bit plain” on the outside. “It
certainly shows great optimism about his health that he was talking so much about building
it,” Murdoch later said.
At dinner they talked about the importance of infusing an entrepreneurial and nimble
culture into a company. Sony failed to do that, Murdoch said. Jobs agreed. “I used to
believe that a really big company couldn’t have a clear corporate culture,” Jobs said. “But I
now believe it can be done. Murdoch’s done it. I think I’ve done it at Apple.”
Most of the dinner conversation was about education. Murdoch had just hired Joel Klein,
the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to start a digital
curriculum division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat dismissive of the idea that
technology could transform education. But Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper
textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials.
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform.
He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also
struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have
to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire
great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In
addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about
partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said.
“But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have
to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give
them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

NEW BATTLES

And Echoes of Old Ones

Google: Open versus Closed

A few days after he unveiled the iPad in January 2010, Jobs held a “town hall” meeting
with employees at Apple’s campus. Instead of exulting about their transformative new
product, however, he went into a rant against Google for producing the rival Android
operating system. Jobs was furious that Google had decided to compete with Apple in the
phone business. “We did not enter the search business,” he said. “They entered the phone
business. Make no mistake. They want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” A few
minutes later, after the meeting moved on to another topic, Jobs returned to his tirade to
attack Google’s famous values slogan. “I want to go back to that other question first and
say one more thing. This ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, it’s bullshit.”
Jobs felt personally betrayed. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had been on the Apple board
during the development of the iPhone and iPad, and Google’s founders, Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, had treated him as a mentor. He felt ripped off. Android’s touchscreen
interface was adopting more and more of the features—multi-touch, swiping, a grid of app
icons—that Apple had created.
Jobs had tried to dissuade Google from developing Android. He had gone to Google’s
headquarters near Palo Alto in 2008 and gotten into a shouting match with Page, Brin, and
the head of the Android development team, Andy Rubin. (Because Schmidt was then on the
Apple board, he recused himself from discussions involving the iPhone.) “I said we would,
if we had good relations, guarantee Google access to the iPhone and guarantee it one or two
icons on the home screen,” he recalled. But he also threatened that if Google continued to
develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first
Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android
phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of the iPhone’s look and feel. That
was the context for Jobs’s pronouncement that Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan was
“bullshit.”
So Apple filed suit against HTC (and, by extension, Android), alleging infringement of
twenty of its patents. Among them were patents covering various multi-touch gestures,
swipe to open, double-tap to zoom, pinch and expand, and the sensors that determined how

a device was being held. As he sat in his house in Palo Alto the week the lawsuit was filed,
he became angrier than I had ever seen him:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us
off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every
penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android,
because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are
scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—
Android, Google Docs—are shit.

A few days after this rant, Jobs got a call from Schmidt, who had resigned from the
Apple board the previous summer. He suggested they get together for coffee, and they met
at a café in a Palo Alto shopping center. “We spent half the time talking about personal
matters, then half the time on his perception that Google had stolen Apple’s user interface
designs,” recalled Schmidt. When it came to the latter subject, Jobs did most of the talking.
Google had ripped him off, he said in colorful language. “We’ve got you red-handed,” he
told Schmidt. “I’m not interested in settling. I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5
billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in
Android, that’s all I want.” They resolved nothing.
Underlying the dispute was an even more fundamental issue, one that had unnerving
historical resonance. Google presented Android as an “open” platform; its open-source
code was freely available for multiple hardware makers to use on whatever phones or
tablets they built. Jobs, of course, had a dogmatic belief that Apple should closely integrate
its operating systems with its hardware. In the 1980s Apple had not licensed out its
Macintosh operating system, and Microsoft eventually gained dominant market share by
licensing its system to multiple hardware makers and, in Jobs’s mind, ripping off Apple’s
interface.
The comparison between what Microsoft wrought in the 1980s and what Google was
trying to do in 2010 was not exact, but it was close enough to be unsettling—and
infuriating. It exemplified the great debate of the digital age: closed versus open, or as Jobs
framed it, integrated versus fragmented. Was it better, as Apple believed and as Jobs’s own
controlling perfectionism almost compelled, to tie the hardware and software and content
handling into one tidy system that assured a simple user experience? Or was it better to
give users and manufacturers more choice and free up avenues for more innovation, by
creating software systems that could be modified and used on different devices? “Steve has
a particular way that he wants to run Apple, and it’s the same as it was twenty years ago,
which is that Apple is a brilliant innovator of closed systems,” Schmidt later told me. “They
don’t want people to be on their platform without permission. The benefits of a closed
platform is control. But Google has a specific belief that open is the better approach,
because it leads to more options and competition and consumer choice.”
So what did Bill Gates think as he watched Jobs, with his closed strategy, go into battle
against Google, as he had done against Microsoft twenty-five years earlier? “There are
some benefits to being more closed, in terms of how much you control the experience, and

certainly at times he’s had the benefit of that,” Gates told me. But refusing to license the
Apple iOS, he added, gave competitors like Android the chance to gain greater volume. In
addition, he argued, competition among a variety of devices and manufacturers leads to
greater consumer choice and more innovation. “These companies are not all building
pyramids next to Central Park,” he said, poking fun at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, “but they
are coming up with innovations based on competing for consumers.” Most of the
improvements in PCs, Gates pointed out, came because consumers had a lot of choices, and
that would someday be the case in the world of mobile devices. “Eventually, I think, open
will succeed, but that’s where I come from. In the long run, the coherence thing, you can’t
stay with that.”
Jobs believed in “the coherence thing.” His faith in a controlled and closed environment
remained unwavering, even as Android gained market share. “Google says we exert more
control than they do, that we are closed and they are open,” he railed when I told him what
Schmidt had said. “Well, look at the results—Android’s a mess. It has different screen sizes
and versions, over a hundred permutations.” Even if Google’s approach might eventually
win in the marketplace, Jobs found it repellent. “I like being responsible for the whole user
experience. We do it not to make money. We do it because we want to make great products,
not crap like Android.”

Flash, the App Store, and Control

Jobs’s insistence on end-to-end control was manifested in other battles as well. At the town
hall meeting where he attacked Google, he also assailed Adobe’s multimedia platform for
websites, Flash, as a “buggy” battery hog made by “lazy” people. The iPod and iPhone, he
said, would never run Flash. “Flash is a spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy
performance and really bad security problems,” he said to me later that week.
He even banned apps that made use of a compiler created by Adobe that translated Flash
code so that it would be compatible with Apple’s iOS. Jobs disdained the use of compilers
that allowed developers to write their products once and have them ported to multiple
operating systems. “Allowing Flash to be ported across platforms means things get dumbed
down to the lowest common denominator,” he said. “We spend lots of effort to make our
platform better, and the developer doesn’t get any benefit if Adobe only works with
functions that every platform has. So we said that we want developers to take advantage of
our better features, so that their apps work better on our platform than they work on
anybody else’s.” On that he was right. Losing the ability to differentiate Apple’s platforms
—allowing them to become commoditized like HP and Dell machines—would have meant
death for the company.
There was, in addition, a more personal reason. Apple had invested in Adobe in 1985,
and together the two companies had launched the desktop publishing revolution. “I helped
put Adobe on the map,” Jobs claimed. In 1999, after he returned to Apple, he had asked
Adobe to start making its video editing software and other products for the iMac and its
new operating system, but Adobe refused. It focused on making its products for Windows.
Soon after, its founder, John Warnock, retired. “The soul of Adobe disappeared when

Warnock left,” Jobs said. “He was the inventor, the person I related to. It’s been a bunch of
suits since then, and the company has turned out crap.”
When Adobe evangelists and various Flash supporters in the blogosphere attacked Jobs
for being too controlling, he decided to write and post an open letter. Bill Campbell, his
friend and board member, came by his house to go over it. “Does it sound like I’m just
trying to stick it to Adobe?” he asked Campbell. “No, it’s facts, just put it out there,” the
coach said. Most of the letter focused on the technical drawbacks of Flash. But despite
Campbell’s coaching, Jobs couldn’t resist venting at the end about the problematic history
between the two companies. “Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt
Mac OS X,” he noted.
Apple ended up lifting some of its restrictions on cross-platform compilers later in the
year, and Adobe was able to come out with a Flash authoring tool that took advantage of
the key features of Apple’s iOS. It was a bitter war, but one in which Jobs had the better
argument. In the end it pushed Adobe and other developers of compilers to make better use
of the iPhone and iPad interface and its special features.

Jobs had a tougher time navigating the controversies over Apple’s desire to keep tight
control over which apps could be downloaded onto the iPhone and iPad. Guarding against
apps that contained viruses or violated the user’s privacy made sense; preventing apps that
took users to other websites to buy subscriptions, rather than doing it through the iTunes
Store, at least had a business rationale. But Jobs and his team went further: They decided to
ban any app that defamed people, might be politically explosive, or was deemed by Apple’s
censors to be pornographic.
The problem of playing nanny became apparent when Apple rejected an app featuring
the animated political cartoons of Mark Fiore, on the rationale that his attacks on the Bush
administration’s policy on torture violated the restriction against defamation. Its decision
became public, and was subjected to ridicule, when Fiore won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for
editorial cartooning in April. Apple had to reverse itself, and Jobs made a public apology.
“We’re guilty of making mistakes,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can, we’re learning
as fast as we can—but we thought this rule made sense.”
It was more than a mistake. It raised the specter of Apple’s controlling what apps we got
to see and read, at least if we wanted to use an iPad or iPhone. Jobs seemed in danger of
becoming the Orwellian Big Brother he had gleefully destroyed in Apple’s “1984”
Macintosh ad. He took the issue seriously. One day he called the New York Times columnist
Tom Friedman to discuss how to draw lines without looking like a censor. He asked
Friedman to head an advisory group to help come up with guidelines, but the columnist’s
publisher said it would be a conflict of interest, and no such committee was formed.
The pornography ban also caused problems. “We believe we have a moral responsibility
to keep porn off the iPhone,” Jobs declared in an email to a customer. “Folks who want
porn can buy an Android.”
This prompted an email exchange with Ryan Tate, the editor of the tech gossip site
Valleywag. Sipping a stinger cocktail one evening, Tate shot off an email to Jobs decrying
Apple’s heavy-handed control over which apps passed muster. “If Dylan was 20 today, how

would he feel about your company?” Tate asked. “Would he think the iPad had the faintest
thing to do with ‘revolution’? Revolutions are about freedom.”
To Tate’s surprise, Jobs responded a few hours later, after midnight. “Yep,” he said,
“freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash
your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some
traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.”
In his reply, Tate offered some thoughts on Flash and other topics, then returned to the
censorship issue. “And you know what? I don’t want ‘freedom from porn.’ Porn is just
fine! And I think my wife would agree.”
“You might care more about porn when you have kids,” replied Jobs. “It’s not about
freedom, it’s about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users.” At the end he added a
zinger: “By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just
criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations?”
Tate admitted to being impressed. “Rare is the CEO who will spar one-on-one with
customers and bloggers like this,” he wrote. “Jobs deserves big credit for breaking the mold
of the typical American executive, and not just because his company makes such hugely
superior products: Jobs not only built and then rebuilt his company around some very
strong opinions about digital life, but he’s willing to defend them in public. Vigorously.
Bluntly. At two in the morning on a weekend.” Many in the blogosphere agreed, and they
sent Jobs emails praising his feistiness. Jobs was proud as well; he forwarded his exchange
with Tate and some of the kudos to me.
Still, there was something unnerving about Apple’s decreeing that those who bought
their products shouldn’t look at controversial political cartoons or, for that matter, porn.
The humor site eSarcasm.com launched a “Yes, Steve, I want porn” web campaign. “We
are dirty, sex-obsessed miscreants who need access to smut 24 hours a day,” the site
declared. “Either that, or we just enjoy the idea of an uncensored, open society where a
techno-dictator doesn’t decide what we can and cannot see.”

At the time Jobs and Apple were engaged in a battle with Valleywag’s affiliated website,
Gizmodo, which had gotten hold of a test version of the unreleased iPhone 4 that a hapless
Apple engineer had left in a bar. When the police, responding to Apple’s complaint, raided
the house of the reporter, it raised the question of whether control freakiness had combined
with arrogance.
Jon Stewart was a friend of Jobs and an Apple fan. Jobs had visited him privately in
February when he took his trip to New York to meet with media executives. But that didn’t
stop Stewart from going after him on The Daily Show. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way!
Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one!” Stewart said, only half-jokingly. Behind him,
the word “appholes” appeared on the screen. “You guys were the rebels, man, the
underdogs. But now, are you becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those
awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”
By late spring the issue was being discussed among board members. “There is an
arrogance,” Art Levinson told me over lunch just after he had raised it at a meeting. “It ties
into Steve’s personality. He can react viscerally and lay out his convictions in a forceful

manner.” Such arrogance was fine when Apple was the feisty underdog. But now Apple
was dominant in the mobile market. “We need to make the transition to being a big
company and dealing with the hubris issue,” said Levinson. Al Gore also talked about the
problem at board meetings. “The context for Apple is changing dramatically,” he
recounted. “It’s not hammer-thrower against Big Brother. Now Apple’s big, and people see
it as arrogant.” Jobs became defensive when the topic was raised. “He’s still adjusting to
it,” said Gore. “He’s better at being the underdog than being a humble giant.”
Jobs had little patience for such talk. The reason Apple was being criticized, he told me
then, was that “companies like Google and Adobe are lying about us and trying to tear us
down.” What did he think of the suggestion that Apple sometimes acted arrogantly? “I’m
not worried about that,” he said, “because we’re not arrogant.”

Antennagate: Design versus Engineering

In many consumer product companies, there’s tension between the designers, who want to
make a product look beautiful, and the engineers, who need to make sure it fulfills its
functional requirements. At Apple, where Jobs pushed both design and engineering to the
edge, that tension was even greater.
When he and design director Jony Ive became creative coconspirators back in 1997, they
tended to view the qualms expressed by engineers as evidence of a can’t-do attitude that
needed to be overcome. Their faith that awesome design could force superhuman feats of
engineering was reinforced by the success of the iMac and iPod. When engineers said
something couldn’t be done, Ive and Jobs pushed them to try, and usually they succeeded.
There were occasional small problems. The iPod Nano, for example, was prone to getting
scratched because Ive believed that a clear coating would lessen the purity of his design.
But that was not a crisis.
When it came to designing the iPhone, Ive’s design desires bumped into a fundamental
law of physics that could not be changed even by a reality distortion field. Metal is not a
great material to put near an antenna. As Michael Faraday showed, electromagnetic waves
flow around the surface of metal, not through it. So a metal enclosure around a phone can
create what is known as a Faraday cage, diminishing the signals that get in or out. The
original iPhone started with a plastic band at the bottom, but Ive thought that would wreck
the design integrity and asked that there be an aluminum rim all around. After that ended up
working out, Ive designed the iPhone 4 with a steel rim. The steel would be the structural
support, look really sleek, and serve as part of the phone’s antenna.
There were significant challenges. In order to serve as an antenna, the steel rim had to
have a tiny gap. But if a person covered that gap with a finger or sweaty palm, there could
be some signal loss. The engineers suggested a clear coating over the metal to help prevent
this, but again Ive felt that this would detract from the brushed-metal look. The issue was
presented to Jobs at various meetings, but he thought the engineers were crying wolf. You
can make this work, he said. And so they did.
And it worked, almost perfectly. But not totally perfectly. When the iPhone 4 was
released in June 2010, it looked awesome, but a problem soon became evident: If you held

the phone a certain way, especially using your left hand so your palm covered the tiny gap,
you could lose your connection. It occurred with perhaps one in a hundred calls. Because
Jobs insisted on keeping his unreleased products secret (even the phone that Gizmodo
scored in a bar had a fake case around it), the iPhone 4 did not go through the live testing
that most electronic devices get. So the flaw was not caught before the massive rush to buy
it began. “The question is whether the twin policies of putting design in front of
engineering and having a policy of supersecrecy surrounding unreleased products helped
Apple,” Tony Fadell said later. “On the whole, yes, but unchecked power is a bad thing,
and that’s what happened.”
Had it not been the Apple iPhone 4, a product that had everyone transfixed, the issue of a
few extra dropped calls would not have made news. But it became known as
“Antennagate,” and it boiled to a head in early July, when Consumer Reports did some
rigorous tests and said that it could not recommend the iPhone 4 because of the antenna
problem.
Jobs was in Kona Village, Hawaii, with his family when the issue arose. At first he was
defensive. Art Levinson was in constant contact by phone, and Jobs insisted that the
problem stemmed from Google and Motorola making mischief. “They want to shoot Apple
down,” he said.
Levinson urged a little humility. “Let’s try to figure out if there’s something wrong,” he
said. When he again mentioned the perception that Apple was arrogant, Jobs didn’t like it.
It went against his black-white, right-wrong way of viewing the world. Apple was a
company of principle, he felt. If others failed to see that, it was their fault, not a reason for
Apple to play humble.
Jobs’s second reaction was to be hurt. He took the criticism personally and became
emotionally anguished. “At his core, he doesn’t do things that he thinks are blatantly
wrong, like some pure pragmatists in our business,” Levinson said. “So if he feels he’s
right, he will just charge ahead rather than question himself.” Levinson urged him not to
get depressed. But Jobs did. “Fuck this, it’s not worth it,” he told Levinson. Finally Tim
Cook was able to shake him out of his lethargy. He quoted someone as saying that Apple
was becoming the new Microsoft, complacent and arrogant. The next day Jobs changed his
attitude. “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” he said.
When the data about dropped calls were assembled from AT&T, Jobs realized there was
a problem, even if it was more minor than people were making it seem. So he flew back
from Hawaii. But before he left, he made some phone calls. It was time to gather a couple
of trusted old hands, wise men who had been with him during the original Macintosh days
thirty years earlier.
His first call was to Regis McKenna, the public relations guru. “I’m coming back from
Hawaii to deal with this antenna thing, and I need to bounce some stuff off of you,” Jobs
told him. They agreed to meet at the Cupertino boardroom at 1:30 the next afternoon. The
second call was to the adman Lee Clow. He had tried to retire from the Apple account, but
Jobs liked having him around. His colleague James Vincent was summoned as well.
Jobs also decided to bring his son Reed, then a high school senior, back with him from
Hawaii. “I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I want you to be in

every single one because you’ll learn more in those two days than you would in two years
at business school,” he told him. “You’re going to be in the room with the best people in
the world making really tough decisions and get to see how the sausage is made.” Jobs got
a little misty-eyed when he recalled the experience. “I would go through that all again just
for that opportunity to have him see me at work,” he said. “He got to see what his dad
does.”
They were joined by Katie Cotton, the steady public relations chief at Apple, and seven
other top executives. The meeting lasted all afternoon. “It was one of the greatest meetings
of my life,” Jobs later said. He began by laying out all the data they had gathered. “Here are
the facts. So what should we do about it?”
McKenna was the most calm and straightforward. “Just lay out the truth, the data,” he
said. “Don’t appear arrogant, but appear firm and confident.” Others, including Vincent,
pushed Jobs to be more apologetic, but McKenna said no. “Don’t go into the press
conference with your tail between your legs,” he advised. “You should just say: ‘Phones
aren’t perfect, and we’re not perfect. We’re human and doing the best we can, and here’s
the data.’” That became the strategy. When the topic turned to the perception of arrogance,
McKenna urged him not to worry too much. “I don’t think it would work to try to make
Steve look humble,” McKenna explained later. “As Steve says about himself, ‘What you
see is what you get.’”
At the press event that Friday, held in Apple’s auditorium, Jobs followed McKenna’s
advice. He did not grovel or apologize, yet he was able to defuse the problem by showing
that Apple understood it and would try to make it right. Then he changed the framework of
the discussion, saying that all cell phones had some problems. Later he told me that he had
sounded a bit “too annoyed” at the event, but in fact he was able to strike a tone that was
unemotional and straightforward. He captured it in four short, declarative sentences:
“We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our
users happy.”
If anyone was unhappy, he said, they could return the phone (the return rate turned out to
be 1.7%, less than a third of the return rate for the iPhone 3GS or most other phones) or get
a free bumper case from Apple. He went on to report data showing that other mobile
phones had similar problems. That was not totally true. Apple’s antenna design made it
slightly worse than most other phones, including earlier versions of the iPhone. But it was
true that the media frenzy over the iPhone 4’s dropped calls was overblown. “This is blown
so out of proportion that it’s incredible,” he said. Instead of being appalled that he didn’t
grovel or order a recall, most customers realized that he was right.
The wait list for the phone, which was already sold out, went from two weeks to three. It
remained the company’s fastest-selling product ever. The media debate shifted to the issue
of whether Jobs was right to assert that other smartphones had the same antenna problems.
Even if the answer was no, that was a better story to face than one about whether the
iPhone 4 was a defective dud.
Some media observers were incredulous. “In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling,
righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to
deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone

makers,” Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote. “This is a level of modern marketing,
corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied
incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get
away with it?” Wolff attributed it to Jobs’s mesmerizing effect as “the last charismatic
individual.” Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive
recalls, but Jobs didn’t have to. “The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the
ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in
this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and
what is trivial.”
Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert, was also incredulous, but far more
admiring. He wrote a blog entry a few days later (which Jobs proudly emailed around) that
marveled at how Jobs’s “high ground maneuver” was destined to be studied as a new public
relations standard. “Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public
relations playbook, because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook,” Adams wrote. “If you
want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words.” By proclaiming up front that
phones are not perfect, Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable
assertion. “If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 to all smartphones in
general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it
won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But as soon as the context is changed
to ‘all smartphones have problems,’ the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor
like a general and boring truth.”

Here Comes the Sun

There were a few things that needed to be resolved for the career of Steve Jobs to be
complete. Among them was an end to the Thirty Years’ War with the band he loved, the
Beatles. In 2007 Apple had settled its trademark battle with Apple Corps, the holding
company of the Beatles, which had first sued the fledgling computer company over use of
the name in 1978. But that still did not get the Beatles into the iTunes Store. The band was
the last major holdout, primarily because it had not resolved with EMI music, which owned
most of its songs, how to handle the digital rights.
By the summer of 2010 the Beatles and EMI had sorted things out, and a four-person
summit was held in the boardroom in Cupertino. Jobs and his vice president for the iTunes
Store, Eddy Cue, played host to Jeff Jones, who managed the Beatles’ interests, and Roger
Faxon, the chief of EMI music. Now that the Beatles were ready to go digital, what could
Apple offer to make that milestone special? Jobs had been anticipating this day for a long
time. In fact he and his advertising team, Lee Clow and James Vincent, had mocked up
some ads and commercials three years earlier when strategizing on how to lure the Beatles
on board.
“Steve and I thought about all the things that we could possibly do,” Cue recalled. That
included taking over the front page of the iTunes Store, buying billboards featuring the best
photographs of the band, and running a series of television ads in classic Apple style. The
topper was offering a $149 box set that included all thirteen Beatles studio albums, the two-

volume “Past Masters” collection, and a nostalgia-inducing video of the 1964 Washington
Coliseum concert.
Once they reached an agreement in principle, Jobs personally helped choose the
photographs for the ads. Each commercial ended with a still black-and-white shot of Paul
McCartney and John Lennon, young and smiling, in a recording studio looking down at a
piece of music. It evoked the old photographs of Jobs and Wozniak looking at an Apple
circuit board. “Getting the Beatles on iTunes was the culmination of why we got into the
music business,” said Cue.

CHAPTER FORTY

TO INFINITY

The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond

The iPad 2

Even before the iPad went on sale, Jobs was thinking about what should be in the iPad 2. It
needed front and back cameras—everyone knew that was coming—and he definitely
wanted it to be thinner. But there was a peripheral issue that he focused on that most people
hadn’t thought about: The cases that people used covered the beautiful lines of the iPad and
detracted from the screen. They made fatter what should be thinner. They put a pedestrian
cloak on a device that should be magical in all of its aspects.
Around that time he read an article about magnets, cut it out, and handed it to Jony Ive.
The magnets had a cone of attraction that could be precisely focused. Perhaps they could be
used to align a detachable cover. That way, it could snap onto the front of an iPad but not
have to engulf the entire device. One of the guys in Ive’s group worked out how to make a
detachable cover that could connect with a magnetic hinge. When you began to open it, the
screen would pop to life like the face of a tickled baby, and then the cover could fold into a
stand.
It was not high-tech; it was purely mechanical. But it was enchanting. It also was another
example of Jobs’s desire for end-to-end integration: The cover and the iPad had been
designed together so that the magnets and hinge all connected seamlessly. The iPad 2

would have many improvements, but this cheeky little cover, which most other CEOs
would never have bothered with, was the one that would elicit the most smiles.
Because Jobs was on another medical leave, he was not expected to be at the launch of
the iPad 2, scheduled for March 2, 2011, in San Francisco. But when the invitations were
sent out, he told me that I should try to be there. It was the usual scene: top Apple
executives in the front row, Tim Cook eating energy bars, and the sound system blaring the
appropriate Beatles songs, building up to “You Say You Want a Revolution” and “Here
Comes the Sun.” Reed Jobs arrived at the last minute with two rather wide-eyed freshman
dorm mates.
“We’ve been working on this product for a while, and I just didn’t want to miss today,”
Jobs said as he ambled onstage looking scarily gaunt but with a jaunty smile. The crowd
erupted in whoops, hollers, and a standing ovation.
He began his demo of the iPad 2 by showing off the new cover. “This time, the case and
the product were designed together,” he explained. Then he moved on to address a criticism
that had been rankling him because it had some merit: The original iPad had been better at
consuming content than at creating it. So Apple had adapted its two best creative
applications for the Macintosh, GarageBand and iMovie, and made powerful versions
available for the iPad. Jobs showed how easy it was to compose and orchestrate a song, or
put music and special effects into your home videos, and post or share such creations using
the new iPad.
Once again he ended his presentation with the slide showing the intersection of Liberal
Arts Street and Technology Street. And this time he gave one of the clearest expressions of
his credo, that true creativity and simplicity come from integrating the whole widget—
hardware and software, and for that matter content and covers and salesclerks—rather than
allowing things to be open and fragmented, as happened in the world of Windows PCs and
was now happening with Android devices:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s
technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.
Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. Folks are rushing into this tablet
market, and they’re looking at it as the next PC, in which the hardware and the software are
done by different companies. Our experience, and every bone in our body, says that is not
the right approach. These are post-PC devices that need to be even more intuitive and easier
to use than a PC, and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to be
intertwined in an even more seamless way than they are on a PC. We think we have the
right architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build these kinds of
products.

It was an architecture that was bred not just into the organization he had built, but into his
own soul.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:28

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

THE iPAD

Into the Post-PC Era

You Say You Want a Revolution

Back in 2002, Jobs had been annoyed by the Microsoft engineer who kept proselytizing
about the tablet computer software he had developed, which allowed users to input
information on the screen with a stylus or pen. A few manufacturers released tablet PCs
that year using the software, but none made a dent in the universe. Jobs had been eager to
show how it should be done right—no stylus!—but when he saw the multi-touch
technology that Apple was developing, he had decided to use it first to make an iPhone.
In the meantime, the tablet idea was percolating within the Macintosh hardware group.
“We have no plans to make a tablet,” Jobs declared in an interview with Walt Mossberg in
May 2003. “It turns out people want keyboards. Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of
other PCs and devices already.” Like his statement about having a “hormone imbalance,”
that was misleading; at most of his annual Top 100 retreats, the tablet was among the future
projects discussed. “We showed the idea off at many of these retreats, because Steve never
lost his desire to do a tablet,” Phil Schiller recalled.
The tablet project got a boost in 2007 when Jobs was considering ideas for a low-cost
netbook computer. At an executive team brainstorming session one Monday, Ive asked why
it needed a keyboard hinged to the screen; that was expensive and bulky. Put the keyboard
on the screen using a multi-touch interface, he suggested. Jobs agreed. So the resources
were directed to revving up the tablet project rather than designing a netbook.

The process began with Jobs and Ive figuring out the right screen size. They had twenty
models made—all rounded rectangles, of course—in slightly varying sizes and aspect
ratios. Ive laid them out on a table in the design studio, and in the afternoon they would lift
the velvet cloth hiding them and play with them. “That’s how we nailed what the screen
size was,” Ive said.
As usual Jobs pushed for the purest possible simplicity. That required determining what
was the core essence of the device. The answer: the display screen. So the guiding principle
was that everything they did had to defer to the screen. “How do we get out of the way so
there aren’t a ton of features and buttons that distract from the display?” Ive asked. At
every step, Jobs pushed to remove and simplify.
At one point Jobs looked at the model and was slightly dissatisfied. It didn’t feel casual
and friendly enough, so that you would naturally scoop it up and whisk it away. Ive put his
finger, so to speak, on the problem: They needed to signal that you could grab it with one
hand, on impulse. The bottom of the edge needed to be slightly rounded, so that you’d feel
comfortable just scooping it up rather than lifting it carefully. That meant engineering had
to design the necessary connection ports and buttons in a simple lip that was thin enough to
wash away gently underneath.
If you had been paying attention to patent filings, you would have noticed the one
numbered D504889 that Apple applied for in March 2004 and was issued fourteen months
later. Among the inventors listed were Jobs and Ive. The application carried sketches of a
rectangular electronic tablet with rounded edges, which looked just the way the iPad turned
out, including one of a man holding it casually in his left hand while using his right index
finger to touch the screen.

Since the Macintosh computers were now using Intel chips, Jobs initially planned to use
in the iPad the low-voltage Atom chip that Intel was developing. Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO,
was pushing hard to work together on a design, and Jobs’s inclination was to trust him. His

company was making the fastest processors in the world. But Intel was used to making
processors for machines that plugged into a wall, not ones that had to preserve battery life.
So Tony Fadell argued strongly for something based on the ARM architecture, which was
simpler and used less power. Apple had been an early partner with ARM, and chips using
its architecture were in the original iPhone. Fadell gathered support from other engineers
and proved that it was possible to confront Jobs and turn him around. “Wrong, wrong,
wrong!” Fadell shouted at one meeting when Jobs insisted it was best to trust Intel to make
a good mobile chip. Fadell even put his Apple badge on the table, threatening to resign.
Eventually Jobs relented. “I hear you,” he said. “I’m not going to go against my best
guys.” In fact he went to the other extreme. Apple licensed the ARM architecture, but it
also bought a 150-person microprocessor design firm in Palo Alto, called P.A. Semi, and
had it create a custom system-on-a-chip, called the A4, which was based on the ARM
architecture and manufactured in South Korea by Samsung. As Jobs recalled:

At the high-performance end, Intel is the best. They build the fastest chip, if you don’t
care about power and cost. But they build just the processor on one chip, so it takes a lot of
other parts. Our A4 has the processor and the graphics, mobile operating system, and
memory control all in the chip. We tried to help Intel, but they don’t listen much. We’ve
been telling them for years that their graphics suck. Every quarter we schedule a meeting
with me and our top three guys and Paul Otellini. At the beginning, we were doing
wonderful things together. They wanted this big joint project to do chips for future iPhones.
There were two reasons we didn’t go with them. One was that they are just really slow.
They’re like a steamship, not very flexible. We’re used to going pretty fast. Second is that
we just didn’t want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our
competitors.

According to Otellini, it would have made sense for the iPad to use Intel chips. The
problem, he said, was that Apple and Intel couldn’t agree on price. Also, they disagreed on
who would control the design. It was another example of Jobs’s desire, indeed compulsion,
to control every aspect of a product, from the silicon to the flesh.

The Launch, January 2010

The usual excitement that Jobs was able to gin up for a product launch paled in comparison
to the frenzy that built for the iPad unveiling on January 27, 2010, in San Francisco. The
Economist put him on its cover robed, haloed, and holding what was dubbed “the Jesus
Tablet.” The Wall Street Journal struck a similarly exalted note: “The last time there was
this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”
As if to underscore the historic nature of the launch, Jobs invited back many of the old-
timers from his early Apple days. More poignantly, James Eason, who had performed his
liver transplant the year before, and Jeffrey Norton, who had operated on his pancreas in
2004, were in the audience, sitting with his wife, his son, and Mona Simpson.

Jobs did his usual masterly job of putting a new device into context, as he had done for
the iPhone three years earlier. This time he put up a screen that showed an iPhone and a
laptop with a question mark in between. “The question is, is there room for something in
the middle?” he asked. That “something” would have to be good at web browsing, email,
photos, video, music, games, and ebooks. He drove a stake through the heart of the netbook
concept. “Netbooks aren’t better at anything!” he said. The invited guests and employees
cheered. “But we have something that is. We call it the iPad.”
To underscore the casual nature of the iPad, Jobs ambled over to a comfortable leather
chair and side table (actually, given his taste, it was a Le Corbusier chair and an Eero
Saarinen table) and scooped one up. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop,” he
enthused. He proceeded to surf to the New York Times website, send an email to Scott
Forstall and Phil Schiller (“Wow, we really are announcing the iPad”), flip through a photo
album, use a calendar, zoom in on the Eiffel Tower on Google Maps, watch some video
clips (Star Trek and Pixar’s Up), show off the iBook shelf, and play a song (Bob Dylan’s
“Like a Rolling Stone,” which he had played at the iPhone launch). “Isn’t that awesome?”
he asked.
With his final slide, Jobs emphasized one of the themes of his life, which was embodied
by the iPad: a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street. “The
reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the
intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he concluded. The iPad was the digital
reincarnation of the Whole Earth Catalog, the place where creativity met tools for living.
For once, the initial reaction was not a Hallelujah Chorus. The iPad was not yet available
(it would go on sale in April), and some who watched Jobs’s demo were not quite sure what
it was. An iPhone on steroids? “I haven’t been this let down since Snooki hooked up with
The Situation,” wrote Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons (who moonlighted as “The Fake Steve
Jobs” in an online parody). Gizmodo ran a contributor’s piece headlined “Eight Things
That Suck about the iPad” (no multitasking, no cameras, no Flash . . . ). Even the name
came in for ridicule in the blogosphere, with snarky comments about feminine hygiene
products and maxi pads. The hashtag “#iTampon” was the number-three trending topic on
Twitter that day.
There was also the requisite dismissal from Bill Gates. “I still think that some mixture of
voice, the pen and a real keyboard—in other words a netbook—will be the mainstream,” he
told Brent Schlender. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with the
iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but
there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” He
continued to insist that the Microsoft approach of using a stylus for input would prevail.
“I’ve been predicting a tablet with a stylus for many years,” he told me. “I will eventually
turn out to be right or be dead.”
The night after his announcement, Jobs was annoyed and depressed. As we gathered in
his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his
iPhone.

I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them
are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like,
“Fuck you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, “Your
parents would be so proud of how you turned out.” And some don’t like the iPad name, and
on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.

He did get one congratulatory call that day that he appreciated, from President Obama’s
chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. But he noted at dinner that the president had not called him
since taking office.

The public carping subsided when the iPad went on sale in April and people got their hands
on it. Both Time and Newsweek put it on the cover. “The tough thing about writing about
Apple products is that they come with a lot of hype wrapped around them,” Lev Grossman
wrote in Time. “The other tough thing about writing about Apple products is that sometimes
the hype is true.” His main reservation, a substantive one, was “that while it’s a lovely
device for consuming content, it doesn’t do much to facilitate its creation.” Computers,
especially the Macintosh, had become tools that allowed people to make music, videos,
websites, and blogs, which could be posted for the world to see. “The iPad shifts the
emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you,
turns you back into a passive consumer of other people’s masterpieces.” It was a criticism
Jobs took to heart. He set about making sure that the next version of the iPad would
emphasize ways to facilitate artistic creation by the user.
Newsweek’s cover line was “What’s So Great about the iPad? Everything.” Daniel
Lyons, who had zapped it with his “Snooki” comment at the launch, revised his opinion.
“My first thought, as I watched Jobs run through his demo, was that it seemed like no big
deal,” he wrote. “It’s a bigger version of the iPod Touch, right? Then I got a chance to use
an iPad, and it hit me: I want one.” Lyons, like others, realized that this was Jobs’s pet
project, and it embodied all that he stood for. “He has an uncanny ability to cook up
gadgets that we didn’t know we needed, but then suddenly can’t live without,” he wrote. “A
closed system may be the only way to deliver the kind of techno-Zen experience that Apple
has become known for.”
Most of the debate over the iPad centered on the issue of whether its closed end-to-end
integration was brilliant or doomed. Google was starting to play a role similar to the one
Microsoft had played in the 1980s, offering a mobile platform, Android, that was open and
could be used by all hardware makers. Fortune staged a debate on this issue in its pages.
“There’s no excuse to be closed,” wrote Michael Copeland. But his colleague Jon Fortt
rebutted, “Closed systems get a bad rap, but they work beautifully and users benefit.
Probably no one in tech has proved this more convincingly than Steve Jobs. By bundling
hardware, software, and services, and controlling them tightly, Apple is consistently able to
get the jump on its rivals and roll out polished products.” They agreed that the iPad would
be the clearest test of this question since the original Macintosh. “Apple has taken its
control-freak rep to a whole new level with the A4 chip that powers the thing,” wrote Fortt.

“Cupertino now has absolute say over the silicon, device, operating system, App Store, and
payment system.”
Jobs went to the Apple store in Palo Alto shortly before noon on April 5, the day the iPad
went on sale. Daniel Kottke—his acid-dropping soul mate from Reed and the early days at
Apple, who no longer harbored a grudge for not getting founders’ stock options—made a
point of being there. “It had been fifteen years, and I wanted to see him again,” Kottke
recounted. “I grabbed him and told him I was going to use the iPad for my song lyrics. He
was in a great mood and we had a nice chat after all these years.” Powell and their youngest
child, Eve, watched from a corner of the store.
Wozniak, who had once been a proponent of making hardware and software as open as
possible, continued to revise that opinion. As he often did, he stayed up all night with the
enthusiasts waiting in line for the store to open. This time he was at San Jose’s Valley Fair
Mall, riding a Segway. A reporter asked him about the closed nature of Apple’s ecosystem.
“Apple gets you into their playpen and keeps you there, but there are some advantages to
that,” he replied. “I like open systems, but I’m a hacker. But most people want things that
are easy to use. Steve’s genius is that he knows how to make things simple, and that
sometimes requires controlling everything.”
The question “What’s on your iPad?” replaced “What’s on your iPod?” Even President
Obama’s staffers, who embraced the iPad as a mark of their tech hipness, played the game.
Economic Advisor Larry Summers had the Bloomberg financial information app, Scrabble,
and The Federalist Papers. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had a slew of newspapers,
Communications Advisor Bill Burton had Vanity Fair and one entire season of the
television series Lost, and Political Director David Axelrod had Major League Baseball and
NPR.
Jobs was stirred by a story, which he forwarded to me, by Michael Noer on Forbes.com.
Noer was reading a science fiction novel on his iPad while staying at a dairy farm in a rural
area north of Bogotá, Colombia, when a poor six-year-old boy who cleaned the stables
came up to him. Curious, Noer handed him the device. With no instruction, and never
having seen a computer before, the boy started using it intuitively. He began swiping the
screen, launching apps, playing a pinball game. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful
computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that
isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.”
In less than a month Apple sold one million iPads. That was twice as fast as it took the
iPhone to reach that mark. By March 2011, nine months after its release, fifteen million had
been sold. By some measures it became the most successful consumer product launch in
history.

Advertising

Jobs was not happy with the original ads for the iPad. As usual, he threw himself into the
marketing, working with James Vincent and Duncan Milner at the ad agency (now called
TBWA/Media Arts Lab), with Lee Clow advising from a semiretired perch. The
commercial they first produced was a gentle scene of a guy in faded jeans and sweatshirt

reclining in a chair, looking at email, a photo album, the New York Times, books, and video
on an iPad propped on his lap. There were no words, just the background beat of “There
Goes My Love” by the Blue Van. “After he approved it, Steve decided he hated it,” Vincent
recalled. “He thought it looked like a Pottery Barn commercial.” Jobs later told me:

It had been easy to explain what the iPod was—a thousand songs in your pocket—
which allowed us to move quickly to the iconic silhouette ads. But it was hard to explain
what an iPad was. We didn’t want to show it as a computer, and yet we didn’t want to make
it so soft that it looked like a cute TV. The first set of ads showed we didn’t know what we
were doing. They had a cashmere and Hush Puppies feel to them.

James Vincent had not taken a break in months. So when the iPad finally went on sale
and the ads started airing, he drove with his family to the Coachella Music Festival in Palm
Springs, which featured some of his favorite bands, including Muse, Faith No More, and
Devo. Soon after he arrived, Jobs called. “Your commercials suck,” he said. “The iPad is
revolutionizing the world, and we need something big. You’ve given me small shit.”
“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you
want.”
“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown
me is even close.”
Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,”
Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.
When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve
got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Oh, great, let me write that on my brief for my creative people: I’ll know it when I see
it.”
Vincent got so frustrated that he slammed his fist into the wall of the house he was
renting and put a large dent in it. When he finally went outside to his family, sitting by the
pool, they looked at him nervously. “Are you okay?” his wife finally asked.
It took Vincent and his team two weeks to come up with an array of new options, and he
asked to present them at Jobs’s house rather than the office, hoping that it would be a more
relaxed environment. Laying storyboards on the coffee table, he and Milner offered twelve
approaches. One was inspirational and stirring. Another tried humor, with Michael Cera,
the comic actor, wandering through a fake house making funny comments about the way
people could use iPads. Others featured the iPad with celebrities, or set starkly on a white
background, or starring in a little sitcom, or in a straightforward product demonstration.
After mulling over the options, Jobs realized what he wanted. Not humor, nor a celebrity,
nor a demo. “It’s got to make a statement,” he said. “It needs to be a manifesto. This is
big.” He had announced that the iPad would change the world, and he wanted a campaign
that reinforced that declaration. Other companies would come out with copycat tablets in a
year or so, he said, and he wanted people to remember that the iPad was the real thing. “We
need ads that stand up and declare what we have done.”

He abruptly got out of his chair, looking a bit weak but smiling. “I’ve got to go have a
massage now,” he said. “Get to work.”
So Vincent and Milner, along with the copywriter Eric Grunbaum, began crafting what
they dubbed “The Manifesto.” It would be fast-paced, with vibrant pictures and a thumping
beat, and it would proclaim that the iPad was revolutionary. The music they chose was
Karen O’s pounding refrain from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’” Gold Lion.” As the iPad was
shown doing magical things, a strong voice declared, “iPad is thin. iPad is beautiful. . . . It’s
crazy powerful. It’s magical. . . . It’s video, photos. More books than you could read in a
lifetime. It’s already a revolution, and it’s only just begun.”
Once the Manifesto ads had run their course, the team again tried something softer, shot
as day-in-the-life documentaries by the young filmmaker Jessica Sanders. Jobs liked them
—for a little while. Then he turned against them for the same reason he had reacted against
the original Pottery Barn–style ads. “Dammit,” he shouted, “they look like a Visa
commercial, typical ad agency stuff.”
He had been asking for ads that were different and new, but eventually he realized he did
not want to stray from what he considered the Apple voice. For him, that voice had a
distinctive set of qualities: simple, declarative, clean. “We went down that lifestyle path,
and it seemed to be growing on Steve, and suddenly he said, ‘I hate that stuff, it’s not
Apple,’” recalled Lee Clow. “He told us to get back to the Apple voice. It’s a very simple,
honest voice.” And so they went back to a clean white background, with just a close-up
showing off all the things that “iPad is . . .” and could do.

Apps

The iPad commercials were not about the device, but about what you could do with it.
Indeed its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from the applications,
known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of delightful activities. There were
thousands—and soon hundreds of thousands—of apps that you could download for free or
for a few dollars. You could sling angry birds with the swipe of your finger, track your
stocks, watch movies, read books and magazines, catch up on the news, play games, and
waste glorious amounts of time. Once again the integration of the hardware, software, and
store made it easy. But the apps also allowed the platform to be sort of open, in a very
controlled way, to outside developers who wanted to create software and content for it—
open, that is, like a carefully curated and gated community garden.
The apps phenomenon began with the iPhone. When it first came out in early 2007, there
were no apps you could buy from outside developers, and Jobs initially resisted allowing
them. He didn’t want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up,
infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity.
Board member Art Levinson was among those pushing to allow iPhone apps. “I called
him a half dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” he recalled. If Apple didn’t
allow them, indeed encourage them, another smartphone maker would, giving itself a
competitive advantage. Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller agreed. “I couldn’t imagine
that we would create something as powerful as the iPhone and not empower developers to

make lots of apps,” he recalled. “I knew customers would love them.” From the outside, the
venture capitalist John Doerr argued that permitting apps would spawn a profusion of new
entrepreneurs who would create new services.
Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the
bandwidth to figure out all of the complexities that would be involved in policing third-
party app developers. He wanted focus. “So he didn’t want to talk about it,” said Schiller.
But as soon as the iPhone was launched, he was willing to hear the debate. “Every time the
conversation happened, Steve seemed a little more open,” said Levinson. There were
freewheeling discussions at four board meetings.
Jobs soon figured out that there was a way to have the best of both worlds. He would
permit outsiders to write apps, but they would have to meet strict standards, be tested and
approved by Apple, and be sold only through the iTunes Store. It was a way to reap the
advantage of empowering thousands of software developers while retaining enough control
to protect the integrity of the iPhone and the simplicity of the customer experience. “It was
an absolutely magical solution that hit the sweet spot,” said Levinson. “It gave us the
benefits of openness while retaining end-to-end control.”
The App Store for the iPhone opened on iTunes in July 2008; the billionth download
came nine months later. By the time the iPad went on sale in April 2010, there were
185,000 available iPhone apps. Most could also be used on the iPad, although they didn’t
take advantage of the bigger screen size. But in less than five months, developers had
written twenty-five thousand new apps that were specifically configured for the iPad. By
July 2011 there were 500,000 apps for both devices, and there had been more than fifteen
billion downloads of them.
The App Store created a new industry overnight. In dorm rooms and garages and at
major media companies, entrepreneurs invented new apps. John Doerr’s venture capital
firm created an iFund of $200 million to offer equity financing for the best ideas.
Magazines and newspapers that had been giving away their content for free saw one last
chance to put the genie of that dubious business model back into the bottle. Innovative
publishers created new magazines, books, and learning materials just for the iPad. For
example, the high-end publishing house Callaway, which had produced books ranging from
Madonna’s Sex to Miss Spider’s Tea Party, decided to “burn the boats” and give up print
altogether to focus on publishing books as interactive apps. By June 2011 Apple had paid
out $2.5 billion to app developers.
The iPad and other app-based digital devices heralded a fundamental shift in the digital
world. Back in the 1980s, going online usually meant dialing into a service like AOL,
CompuServe, or Prodigy that charged fees for access to a carefully curated walled garden
filled with content plus some exit gates that allowed braver users access to the Internet at
large. The second phase, beginning in the early 1990s, was the advent of browsers that
allowed everyone to freely surf the Internet using the hypertext transfer protocols of the
World Wide Web, which linked billions of sites. Search engines arose so that people could
easily find the websites they wanted. The release of the iPad portended a new model. Apps
resembled the walled gardens of old. The creators could charge fees and offer more
functions to the users who downloaded them. But the rise of apps also meant that the

openness and linked nature of the web were sacrificed. Apps were not as easily linked or
searchable. Because the iPad allowed the use of both apps and web browsing, it was not at
war with the web model. But it did offer an alternative, for both the consumers and the
creators of content.

Publishing and Journalism

With the iPod, Jobs had transformed the music business. With the iPad and its App Store,
he began to transform all media, from publishing to journalism to television and movies.
Books were an obvious target, since Amazon’s Kindle had shown there was an appetite
for electronic books. So Apple created an iBooks Store, which sold electronic books the
way the iTunes Store sold songs. There was, however, a slight difference in the business
model. For the iTunes Store, Jobs had insisted that all songs be sold at one inexpensive
price, initially 99 cents. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had tried to take a similar approach with
ebooks, insisting on selling them for at most $9.99. Jobs came in and offered publishers
what he had refused to offer record companies: They could set any price they wanted for
their wares in the iBooks Store, and Apple would take 30%. Initially that meant prices were
higher than on Amazon. Why would people pay Apple more? “That won’t be the case,”
Jobs answered, when Walt Mossberg asked him that question at the iPad launch event.
“The price will be the same.” He was right.
The day after the iPad launch, Jobs described to me his thinking on books:

Amazon screwed it up. It paid the wholesale price for some books, but started selling
them below cost at $9.99. The publishers hated that—they thought it would trash their
ability to sell hardcover books at $28. So before Apple even got on the scene, some
booksellers were starting to withhold books from Amazon. So we told the publishers,
“We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the
customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.” But we also asked for a
guarantee that if anybody else is selling the books cheaper than we are, then we can sell
them at the lower price too. So they went to Amazon and said, “You’re going to sign an
agency contract or we’re not going to give you the books.”

Jobs acknowledged that he was trying to have it both ways when it came to music and
books. He had refused to offer the music companies the agency model and allow them to
set their own prices. Why? Because he didn’t have to. But with books he did. “We were not
the first people in the books business,” he said. “Given the situation that existed, what was
best for us was to do this akido move and end up with the agency model. And we pulled it
off.”

Right after the iPad launch event, Jobs traveled to New York in February 2010 to meet with
executives in the journalism business. In two days he saw Rupert Murdoch, his son James,
and the management of their Wall Street Journal; Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the top
executives at the New York Times; and executives at Time, Fortune, and other Time Inc.

magazines. “I would love to help quality journalism,” he later said. “We can’t depend on
bloggers for our news. We need real reporting and editorial oversight more than ever. So
I’d love to find a way to help people create digital products where they actually can make
money.” Since he had gotten people to pay for music, he hoped he could do the same for
journalism.
Publishers, however, turned out to be leery of his lifeline. It meant that they would have
to give 30% of their revenue to Apple, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. More
important, the publishers feared that, under his system, they would no longer have a direct
relationship with their subscribers; they wouldn’t have their email address and credit card
number so they could bill them, communicate with them, and market new products to them.
Instead Apple would own the customers, bill them, and have their information in its own
database. And because of its privacy policy, Apple would not share this information unless
a customer gave explicit permission to do so.
Jobs was particularly interested in striking a deal with the New York Times, which he felt
was a great newspaper in danger of declining because it had not figured out how to charge
for digital content. “One of my personal projects this year, I’ve decided, is to try to help—
whether they want it or not—the Times,” he told me early in 2010. “I think it’s important to
the country for them to figure it out.”
During his New York trip, he went to dinner with fifty top Times executives in the cellar
private dining room at Pranna, an Asian restaurant. (He ordered a mango smoothie and a
plain vegan pasta, neither of which was on the menu.) There he showed off the iPad and
explained how important it was to find a modest price point for digital content that
consumers would accept. He drew a chart of possible prices and volume. How many
readers would they have if the Times were free? They already knew the answer to that
extreme on the chart, because they were giving it away for free on the web already and had
about twenty million regular visitors. And if they made it really expensive? They had data
on that too; they charged print subscribers more than $300 a year and had about a million
of them. “You should go after the midpoint, which is about ten million digital subscribers,”
he told them. “And that means your digital subs should be very cheap and simple, one click
and $5 a month at most.”
When one of the Times circulation executives insisted that the paper needed the email
and credit card information for all of its subscribers, even if they subscribed through the
App Store, Jobs said that Apple would not give it out. That angered the executive. It was
unthinkable, he said, for the Times not to have that information. “Well, you can ask them
for it, but if they won’t voluntarily give it to you, don’t blame me,” Jobs said. “If you don’t
like it, don’t use us. I’m not the one who got you in this jam. You’re the ones who’ve spent
the past five years giving away your paper online and not collecting anyone’s credit card
information.”
Jobs also met privately with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. “He’s a nice guy, and he’s really proud
of his new building, as he should be,” Jobs said later. “I talked to him about what I thought
he ought to do, but then nothing happened.” It took a year, but in April 2011 the Times
started charging for its digital edition and selling some subscriptions through Apple,

abiding by the policies that Jobs established. It did, however, decide to charge
approximately four times the $5 monthly charge that Jobs had suggested.
At the Time-Life Building, Time’s editor Rick Stengel played host. Jobs liked Stengel,
who had assigned a talented team led by Josh Quittner to make a robust iPad version of the
magazine each week. But he was upset to see Andy Serwer of Fortune there. Tearing up, he
told Serwer how angry he still was about Fortune’s story two years earlier revealing details
of his health and the stock options problems. “You kicked me when I was down,” he said.
The bigger problem at Time Inc. was the same as the one at the Times: The magazine
company did not want Apple to own its subscribers and prevent it from having a direct
billing relationship. Time Inc. wanted to create apps that would direct readers to its own
website in order to buy a subscription. Apple refused. When Time and other magazines
submitted apps that did this, they were denied the right to be in the App Store.
Jobs tried to negotiate personally with the CEO of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, a savvy
pragmatist with a no-bullshit charm to him. They had dealt with each other a few years
earlier over video rights for the iPod Touch; even though Jobs had not been able to
convince him to do a deal involving HBO’s exclusive rights to show movies soon after
their release, he admired Bewkes’s straight and decisive style. For his part, Bewkes
respected Jobs’s ability to be both a strategic thinker and a master of the tiniest details.
“Steve can go readily from the overarching principals into the details,” he said.
When Jobs called Bewkes about making a deal for Time Inc. magazines on the iPad, he
started off by warning that the print business “sucks,” that “nobody really wants your
magazines,” and that Apple was offering a great opportunity to sell digital subscriptions,
but “your guys don’t get it.” Bewkes didn’t agree with any of those premises. He said he
was happy for Apple to sell digital subscriptions for Time Inc. Apple’s 30% take was not
the problem. “I’m telling you right now, if you sell a sub for us, you can have 30%,”
Bewkes told him.
“Well, that’s more progress than I’ve made with anybody,” Jobs replied.
“I have only one question,” Bewkes continued. “If you sell a subscription to my
magazine, and I give you the 30%, who has the subscription—you or me?”
“I can’t give away all the subscriber info because of Apple’s privacy policy,” Jobs
replied.
“Well, then, we have to figure something else out, because I don’t want my whole
subscription base to become subscribers of yours, for you to then aggregate at the Apple
store,” said Bewkes. “And the next thing you’ll do, once you have a monopoly, is come
back and tell me that my magazine shouldn’t be $4 a copy but instead should be $1. If
someone subscribes to our magazine, we need to know who it is, we need to be able to
create online communities of those people, and we need the right to pitch them directly
about renewing.”
Jobs had an easier time with Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owned the Wall Street
Journal, New York Post, newspapers around the world, Fox Studios, and the Fox News
Channel. When Jobs met with Murdoch and his team, they also pressed the case that they
should share ownership of the subscribers that came in through the App Store. But when
Jobs refused, something interesting happened. Murdoch is not known as a pushover, but he

knew that he did not have the leverage on this issue, so he accepted Jobs’s terms. “We
would prefer to own the subscribers, and we pushed for that,” recalled Murdoch. “But
Steve wouldn’t do a deal on those terms, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s get on with it.’ We didn’t see
any reason to mess around. He wasn’t going to bend—and I wouldn’t have bent if I were in
his position—so I just said yes.”
Murdoch even launched a digital-only daily newspaper, The Daily, tailored specifically
for the iPad. It would be sold in the App Store, on the terms dictated by Jobs, at 99 cents a
week. Murdoch himself took a team to Cupertino to show the proposed design. Not
surprisingly, Jobs hated it. “Would you allow our designers to help?” he asked. Murdoch
accepted. “The Apple designers had a crack at it,” Murdoch recalled, “and our folks went
back and had another crack, and ten days later we went back and showed them both, and he
actually liked our team’s version better. It stunned us.”
The Daily, which was neither tabloidy nor serious, but instead a rather midmarket
product like USA Today, was not very successful. But it did help create an odd-couple
bonding between Jobs and Murdoch. When Murdoch asked him to speak at his June 2010
News Corp. annual management retreat, Jobs made an exception to his rule of never doing
such appearances. James Murdoch led him in an after-dinner interview that lasted almost
two hours. “He was very blunt and critical of what newspapers were doing in technology,”
Murdoch recalled. “He told us we were going to find it hard to get things right, because
you’re in New York, and anyone who’s any good at tech works in Silicon Valley.” This did
not go down very well with the president of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network,
Gordon McLeod, who pushed back a bit. At the end, McLeod came up to Jobs and said,
“Thanks, it was a wonderful evening, but you probably just cost me my job.” Murdoch
chuckled a bit when he described the scene to me. “It ended up being true,” he said.
McLeod was out within three months.
In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News,
which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s
reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today
is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot
with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society.
You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.” Jobs said he
thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-
downer,” he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can
just tell.”
Murdoch later said he was used to people like Jobs complaining about Fox. “He’s got
sort of a left-wing view on this,” he said. Jobs asked him to have his folks make a reel of a
week of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck shows—he thought that they were more destructive
than Bill O’Reilly—and Murdoch agreed to do so. Jobs later told me that he was going to
ask Jon Stewart’s team to put together a similar reel for Murdoch to watch. “I’d be happy to
see it,” Murdoch said, “but he hasn’t sent it to me.”
Murdoch and Jobs hit it off well enough that Murdoch went to his Palo Alto house for
dinner twice more during the next year. Jobs joked that he had to hide the dinner knives on
such occasions, because he was afraid that his liberal wife was going to eviscerate Murdoch

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:28

The Battles of 2008

By the beginning of 2008 it was clear to Jobs and his doctors that his cancer was spreading.
When they had taken out his pancreatic tumors in 2004, he had the cancer genome partially
sequenced. That helped his doctors determine which pathways were broken, and they were
treating him with targeted therapies that they thought were most likely to work.
He was also being treated for pain, usually with morphine-based analgesics. One day in
February 2008 when Powell’s close friend Kathryn Smith was staying with them in Palo
Alto, she and Jobs took a walk. “He told me that when he feels really bad, he just
concentrates on the pain, goes into the pain, and that seems to dissipate it,” she recalled.

That wasn’t exactly true, however. When Jobs was in pain, he let everyone around him
know it.
There was another health issue that became increasingly problematic, one that medical
researchers didn’t focus on as rigorously as they did cancer or pain. He was having eating
problems and losing weight. Partly this was because he had lost much of his pancreas,
which produces the enzymes needed to digest protein and other nutrients. It was also
because both the cancer and the morphine reduced his appetite. And then there was the
psychological component, which the doctors barely knew how to address: Since his early
teens, he had indulged his weird obsession with extremely restrictive diets and fasts.
Even after he married and had children, he retained his dubious eating habits. He would
spend weeks eating the same thing—carrot salad with lemon, or just apples—and then
suddenly spurn that food and declare that he had stopped eating it. He would go on fasts,
just as he did as a teenager, and he became sanctimonious as he lectured others at the table
on the virtues of whatever eating regimen he was following. Powell had been a vegan when
they were first married, but after her husband’s operation she began to diversify their
family meals with fish and other proteins. Their son, Reed, who had been a vegetarian,
became a “hearty omnivore.” They knew it was important for his father to get diverse
sources of protein.
The family hired a gentle and versatile cook, Bryar Brown, who once worked for Alice
Waters at Chez Panisse. He came each afternoon and made a panoply of healthy offerings
for dinner, which used the herbs and vegetables that Powell grew in their garden. When
Jobs expressed any whim—carrot salad, pasta with basil, lemongrass soup—Brown would
quietly and patiently find a way to make it. Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated
eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could
taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one
was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.
Beginning in early 2008 Jobs’s eating disorders got worse. On some nights he would
stare at the floor and ignore all of the dishes set out on the long kitchen table. When others
were halfway through their meal, he would abruptly get up and leave, saying nothing. It
was stressful for his family. They watched him lose forty pounds during the spring of 2008.
His health problems became public again in March 2008, when Fortune published a
piece called “The Trouble with Steve Jobs.” It revealed that he had tried to treat his cancer
with diets for nine months and also investigated his involvement in the backdating of Apple
stock options. As the story was being prepared, Jobs invited—summoned—Fortune’s
managing editor Andy Serwer to Cupertino to pressure him to spike it. He leaned into
Serwer’s face and asked, “So, you’ve uncovered the fact that I’m an asshole. Why is that
news?” Jobs made the same rather self-aware argument when he called Serwer’s boss at
Time Inc., John Huey, from a satellite phone he brought to Hawaii’s Kona Village. He
offered to convene a panel of fellow CEOs and be part of a discussion about what health
issues are proper to disclose, but only if Fortune killed its piece. The magazine didn’t.
When Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G in June 2008, he was so thin that it overshadowed
the product announcement. In Esquire Tom Junod described the “withered” figure onstage
as being “gaunt as a pirate, dressed in what had heretofore been the vestments of his

invulnerability.” Apple released a statement saying, untruthfully, that his weight loss was
the result of “a common bug.” The following month, as questions persisted, the company
released another statement saying that Jobs’s health was “a private matter.”
Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote a column denouncing the handling of Jobs’s
health issues. “Apple simply can’t be trusted to tell the truth about its chief executive,” he
wrote in late July. “Under Mr. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it
well in many ways—the speculation over which products Apple will unveil at the annual
Macworld conference has been one of the company’s best marketing tools. But that same
culture poisons its corporate governance.” As he was writing the column and getting the
standard “a private matter” comment from all at Apple, he got an unexpected call from Jobs
himself. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant asshole who thinks he’s
above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After
that rather arresting opening, Jobs offered up some information about his health, but only if
Nocera would keep it off the record. Nocera honored the request, but he was able to report
that, while Jobs’s health problems amounted to more than a common bug, “they weren’t
life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer.” Jobs had given Nocera more
information than he was willing to give his own board and shareholders, but it was not the
full truth.
Partly due to concern about Jobs’s weight loss, Apple’s stock price drifted from $188 at
the beginning of June 2008 down to $156 at the end of July. Matters were not helped in late
August when Bloomberg News mistakenly released its prepackaged obituary of Jobs, which
ended up on Gawker. Jobs was able to roll out Mark Twain’s famous quip a few days later
at his annual music event. “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” he said, as he
launched a line of new iPods. But his gaunt appearance was not reassuring. By early
October the stock price had sunk to $97.
That month Doug Morris of Universal Music was scheduled to meet with Jobs at Apple.
Instead Jobs invited him to his house. Morris was surprised to see him so ill and in pain.
Morris was about to be honored at a gala in Los Angeles for City of Hope, which raised
money to fight cancer, and he wanted Jobs to be there. Charitable events were something
Jobs avoided, but he decided to do it, both for Morris and for the cause. At the event, held
in a big tent on Santa Monica beach, Morris told the two thousand guests that Jobs was
giving the music industry a new lease on life. The performances—by Stevie Nicks, Lionel
Richie, Erykah Badu, and Akon—went on past midnight, and Jobs had severe chills. Jimmy
Iovine gave him a hooded sweatshirt to wear, and he kept the hood over his head all
evening. “He was so sick, so cold, so thin,” Morris recalled.
Fortune’s veteran technology writer Brent Schlender was leaving the magazine that
December, and his swan song was to be a joint interview with Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy
Grove, and Michael Dell. It had been hard to organize, and just a few days before it was to
happen, Jobs called to back out. “If they ask why, just tell them I’m an asshole,” he said.
Gates was annoyed, then discovered what the health situation was. “Of course, he had a
very, very good reason,” said Gates. “He just didn’t want to say.” That became more
apparent when Apple announced on December 16 that Jobs was canceling his scheduled

appearance at the January Macworld, the forum he had used for big product launches for
the past eleven years.
The blogosphere erupted with speculation about his health, much of which had the
odious smell of truth. Jobs was furious and felt violated. He was also annoyed that Apple
wasn’t being more active in pushing back. So on January 5, 2009, he wrote and released a
misleading open letter. He claimed that he was skipping Macworld because he wanted to
spend more time with his family. “As many of you know, I have been losing weight
throughout 2008,” he added. “My doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone
imbalance that has been robbing me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy.
Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis. The remedy for this nutritional
problem is relatively simple.”
There was a kernel of truth to this, albeit a small one. One of the hormones created by
the pancreas is glucagon, which is the flip side of insulin. Glucagon causes your liver to
release blood sugar. Jobs’s tumor had metastasized into his liver and was wreaking havoc.
In effect, his body was devouring itself, so his doctors gave him drugs to try to lower the
glucagon level. He did have a hormone imbalance, but it was because his cancer had spread
into his liver. He was in personal denial about this, and he also wanted to be in public
denial. Unfortunately that was legally problematic, because he ran a publicly traded
company. But Jobs was furious about the way the blogosphere was treating him, and he
wanted to strike back.
He was very sick at this point, despite his upbeat statement, and also in excruciating
pain. He had undertaken another round of cancer drug therapy, and it had grueling side
effects. His skin started drying out and cracking. In his quest for alternative approaches, he
flew to Basel, Switzerland, to try an experimental hormone-delivered radiotherapy. He also
underwent an experimental treatment developed in Rotterdam known as peptide receptor
radionuclide therapy.
After a week filled with increasingly insistent legal advice, Jobs finally agreed to go on
medical leave. He made the announcement on January 14, 2009, in another open letter to
the Apple staff. At first he blamed the decision on the prying of bloggers and the press.
“Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only
for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple,” he said. But then he admitted that the
remedy for his “hormone imbalance” was not as simple as he had claimed. “During the past
week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally
thought.” Tim Cook would again take over daily operations, but Jobs said that he would
remain CEO, continue to be involved in major decisions, and be back by June.
Jobs had been consulting with Bill Campbell and Art Levinson, who were juggling the
dual roles of being his personal health advisors and also the co-lead directors of the
company. But the rest of the board had not been as fully informed, and the shareholders had
initially been misinformed. That raised some legal issues, and the SEC opened an
investigation into whether the company had withheld “material information” from
shareholders. It would constitute security fraud, a felony, if the company had allowed the
dissemination of false information or withheld true information that was relevant to the
company’s financial prospects. Because Jobs and his magic were so closely identified with

Apple’s comeback, his health seemed to meet this standard. But it was a murky area of the
law; the privacy rights of the CEO had to be weighed. This balance was particularly
difficult in the case of Jobs, who both valued his privacy and embodied his company more
than most CEOs. He did not make the task easier. He became very emotional, both ranting
and crying at times, when railing against anyone who suggested that he should be less
secretive.
Campbell treasured his friendship with Jobs, and he didn’t want to have any fiduciary
duty to violate his privacy, so he offered to step down as a director. “The privacy side is so
important to me,” he later said. “He’s been my friend for about a million years.” The
lawyers eventually determined that Campbell didn’t need to resign from the board but that
he should step aside as co-lead director. He was replaced in that role by Andrea Jung of
Avon. The SEC investigation ended up going nowhere, and the board circled the wagons to
protect Jobs from calls that he release more information. “The press wanted us to blurt out
more personal details,” recalled Al Gore. “It was really up to Steve to go beyond what the
law requires, but he was adamant that he didn’t want his privacy invaded. His wishes
should be respected.” When I asked Gore whether the board should have been more
forthcoming at the beginning of 2009, when Jobs’s health issues were far worse than
shareholders were led to believe, he replied, “We hired outside counsel to do a review of
what the law required and what the best practices were, and we handled it all by the book. I
sound defensive, but the criticism really pissed me off.”
One board member disagreed. Jerry York, the former CFO at Chrysler and IBM, did not
say anything publicly, but he confided to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, off the
record, that he was “disgusted” when he learned that the company had concealed Jobs’s
health problems in late 2008. “Frankly, I wish I had resigned then.” When York died in
2010, the Journal put his comments on the record. York had also provided off-the-record
information to Fortune, which the magazine used when Jobs went on his third health leave,
in 2011.
Some at Apple didn’t believe the quotes attributed to York were accurate, since he had
not officially raised objections at the time. But Bill Campbell knew that the reports rang
true; York had complained to him in early 2009. “Jerry had a little more white wine than he
should have late at night, and he would call at two or three in the morning and say, ‘What
the fuck, I’m not buying that shit about his health, we’ve got to make sure.’ And then I’d
call him the next morning and he’d say, ‘Oh fine, no problem.’ So on some of those
evenings, I’m sure he got raggy and talked to reporters.”

Memphis

The head of Jobs’s oncology team was Stanford University’s George Fisher, a leading
researcher on gastrointestinal and colorectal cancers. He had been warning Jobs for months
that he might have to consider a liver transplant, but that was the type of information that
Jobs resisted processing. Powell was glad that Fisher kept raising the possibility, because
she knew it would take repeated proddings to get her husband to consider the idea.

He finally became convinced in January 2009, just after he claimed his “hormonal
imbalance” could be treated easily. But there was a problem. He was put on the wait list for
a liver transplant in California, but it became clear he would never get one there in time.
The number of available donors with his blood type was small. Also, the metrics used by
the United Network for Organ Sharing, which establishes policies in the United States,
favored those suffering from cirrhosis and hepatitis over cancer patients.
There is no legal way for a patient, even one as wealthy as Jobs, to jump the queue, and
he didn’t. Recipients are chosen based on their MELD score (Model for End-Stage Liver
Disease), which uses lab tests of hormone levels to determine how urgently a transplant is
needed, and on the length of time they have been waiting. Every donation is closely
audited, data are available on public websites (optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/), and you can
monitor your status on the wait list at any time.
Powell became the troller of the organ-donation websites, checking in every night to see
how many were on the wait lists, what their MELD scores were, and how long they had
been on. “You can do the math, which I did, and it would have been way past June before
he got a liver in California, and the doctors felt that his liver would give out in about
April,” she recalled. So she started asking questions and discovered that it was permissible
to be on the list in two different states at the same time, which is something that about 3%
of potential recipients do. Such multiple listing is not discouraged by policy, even though
critics say it favors the rich, but it is difficult. There were two major requirements: The
potential recipient had to be able to get to the chosen hospital within eight hours, which
Jobs could do thanks to his plane, and the doctors from that hospital had to evaluate the
patient in person before adding him or her to the list.
George Riley, the San Francisco lawyer who often served as Apple’s outside counsel,
was a caring Tennessee gentleman, and he had become close to Jobs. His parents had both
been doctors at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, he was born there, and he was a
friend of James Eason, who ran the transplant institute there. Eason’s unit was one of the
best and busiest in the nation; in 2008 he and his team did 121 liver transplants. He had no
problem allowing people from elsewhere to multiple-list in Memphis. “It’s not gaming the
system,” he said. “It’s people choosing where they want their health care. Some people
would leave Tennessee to go to California or somewhere else to seek treatment. Now we
have people coming from California to Tennessee.” Riley arranged for Eason to fly to Palo
Alto and conduct the required evaluation there.
By late February 2009 Jobs had secured a place on the Tennessee list (as well as the one
in California), and the nervous waiting began. He was declining rapidly by the first week in
March, and the waiting time was projected to be twenty-one days. “It was dreadful,”
Powell recalled. “It didn’t look like we would make it in time.” Every day became more
excruciating. He moved up to third on the list by mid-March, then second, and finally first.
But then days went by. The awful reality was that upcoming events like St. Patrick’s Day
and March Madness (Memphis was in the 2009 tournament and was a regional site) offered
a greater likelihood of getting a donor because the drinking causes a spike in car accidents.
Indeed, on the weekend of March 21, 2009, a young man in his midtwenties was killed
in a car crash, and his organs were made available. Jobs and his wife flew to Memphis,

where they landed just before 4 a.m. and were met by Eason. A car was waiting on the
tarmac, and everything was staged so that the admitting paperwork was done as they rushed
to the hospital.
The transplant was a success, but not reassuring. When the doctors took out his liver,
they found spots on the peritoneum, the thin membrane that surrounds internal organs. In
addition, there were tumors throughout the liver, which meant it was likely that the cancer
had migrated elsewhere as well. It had apparently mutated and grown quickly. They took
samples and did more genetic mapping.
A few days later they needed to perform another procedure. Jobs insisted against all
advice they not pump out his stomach, and when they sedated him, he aspirated some of
the contents into his lungs and developed pneumonia. At that point they thought he might
die. As he described it later:

I almost died because in this routine procedure they blew it. Laurene was there and they
flew my children in, because they did not think I would make it through the night. Reed
was looking at colleges with one of Laurene’s brothers. We had a private plane pick him up
near Dartmouth and tell them what was going on. A plane also picked up the girls. They
thought it might be the last chance they had to see me conscious. But I made it.

Powell took charge of overseeing the treatment, staying in the hospital room all day and
watching each of the monitors vigilantly. “Laurene was a beautiful tiger protecting him,”
recalled Jony Ive, who came as soon as Jobs could receive visitors. Her mother and three
brothers came down at various times to keep her company. Jobs’s sister Mona Simpson also
hovered protectively. She and George Riley were the only people Jobs would allow to fill
in for Powell at his bedside. “Laurene’s family helped us take care of the kids—her mom
and brothers were great,” Jobs later said. “I was very fragile and not cooperative. But an
experience like that binds you together in a deep way.”
Powell came every day at 7 a.m. and gathered the relevant data, which she put on a
spreadsheet. “It was very complicated because there were a lot of different things going
on,” she recalled. When James Eason and his team of doctors arrived at 9 a.m., she would
have a meeting with them to coordinate all aspects of Jobs’s treatment. At 9 p.m., before
she left, she would prepare a report on how each of the vital signs and other measurements
were trending, along with a set of questions she wanted answered the next day. “It allowed
me to engage my brain and stay focused,” she recalled.
Eason did what no one at Stanford had fully done: take charge of all aspects of the
medical care. Since he ran the facility, he could coordinate the transplant recovery, cancer
tests, pain treatments, nutrition, rehabilitation, and nursing. He would even stop at the
convenience store to get the energy drinks Jobs liked.
Two of the nurses were from tiny towns in Mississippi, and they became Jobs’s favorites.
They were solid family women and not intimidated by him. Eason arranged for them to be
assigned only to Jobs. “To manage Steve, you have to be persistent,” recalled Tim Cook.
“Eason managed Steve and forced him to do things that no one else could, things that were
good for him that may not have been pleasant.”

Despite all the coddling, Jobs at times almost went crazy. He chafed at not being in
control, and he sometimes hallucinated or became angry. Even when he was barely
conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put
a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he
hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to
bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. The doctors
looked at Powell, puzzled. She was finally able to distract him so they could put on the
mask. He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly
and too complex. He suggested ways it could be designed more simply. “He was very
attuned to every nuance of the environment and objects around him, and that drained him,”
Powell recalled.
One day, when he was still floating in and out of consciousness, Powell’s close friend
Kathryn Smith came to visit. Her relationship with Jobs had not always been the best, but
Powell insisted that she come by the bedside. He motioned her over, signaled for a pad and
pen, and wrote, “I want my iPhone.” Smith took it off the dresser and brought it to him.
Taking her hand, he showed her the “swipe to open” function and made her play with the
menus.
Jobs’s relationship with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his daughter with Chrisann, had frayed. She
had graduated from Harvard, moved to New York City, and rarely communicated with her
father. But she flew down to Memphis twice, and he appreciated it. “It meant a lot to me
that she would do that,” he recalled. Unfortunately he didn’t tell her at the time. Many of
the people around Jobs found Lisa could be as demanding as her father, but Powell
welcomed her and tried to get her involved. It was a relationship she wanted to restore.
As Jobs got better, much of his feisty personality returned. He still had his bile ducts.
“When he started to recover, he passed quickly through the phase of gratitude, and went
right back into the mode of being grumpy and in charge,” Kat Smith recalled. “We were all
wondering if he was going to come out of this with a kinder perspective, but he didn’t.”
He also remained a finicky eater, which was more of a problem than ever. He would eat
only fruit smoothies, and he would demand that seven or eight of them be lined up so he
could find an option that might satisfy him. He would touch the spoon to his mouth for a
tiny taste and pronounce, “That’s no good. That one’s no good either.” Finally Eason
pushed back. “You know, this isn’t a matter of taste,” he lectured. “Stop thinking of this as
food. Start thinking of it as medicine.”
Jobs’s mood buoyed when he was able to have visitors from Apple. Tim Cook came
down regularly and filled him in on the progress of new products. “You could see him
brighten every time the talk turned to Apple,” Cook said. “It was like the light turned on.”
He loved the company deeply, and he seemed to live for the prospect of returning. Details
would energize him. When Cook described a new model of the iPhone, Jobs spent the next
hour discussing not only what to call it—they agreed on iPhone 3GS—but also the size and
font of the “GS,” including whether the letters should be capitalized (yes) and italicized
(no).
One day Riley arranged a surprise after-hours visit to Sun Studio, the redbrick shrine
where Elvis, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, and many other rock-and-roll pioneers recorded.

They were given a private tour and a history lecture by one of the young staffers, who sat
with Jobs on the cigarette-scarred bench that Jerry Lee Lewis used. Jobs was arguably the
most influential person in the music industry at the time, but the kid didn’t recognize him in
his emaciated state. As they were leaving, Jobs told Riley, “That kid was really smart. We
should hire him for iTunes.” So Riley called Eddy Cue, who flew the boy out to California
for an interview and ended up hiring him to help build the early R&B and rock-and-roll
sections of iTunes. When Riley went back to see his friends at Sun Studio later, they said
that it proved, as their slogan said, that your dreams can still come true at Sun Studio.

Return

At the end of May 2009 Jobs flew back from Memphis on his jet with his wife and sister.
They were met at the San Jose airfield by Tim Cook and Jony Ive, who came aboard as
soon as the plane landed. “You could see in his eyes his excitement at being back,” Cook
recalled. “He had fight in him and was raring to go.” Powell pulled out a bottle of sparkling
apple cider and toasted her husband, and everyone embraced.
Ive was emotionally drained. He drove to Jobs’s house from the airport and told him how
hard it had been to keep things going while he was away. He also complained about the
stories saying that Apple’s innovation depended on Jobs and would disappear if he didn’t
return. “I’m really hurt,” Ive told him. He felt “devastated,” he said, and underappreciated.
Jobs was likewise in a dark mental state after his return to Palo Alto. He was coming to
grips with the thought that he might not be indispensable to the company. Apple stock had
fared well while he was away, going from $82 when he announced his leave in January
2009 to $140 when he returned at the end of May. On one conference call with analysts
shortly after Jobs went on leave, Cook departed from his unemotional style to give a
rousing declaration of why Apple would continue to soar even with Jobs absent:

We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not
changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the
complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the
products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant
contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus
on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration
and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.
And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the
company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to
change. And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this
company that Apple will do extremely well.

It sounded like something Jobs would say (and had said), but the press dubbed it “the Cook
doctrine.” Jobs was rankled and deeply depressed, especially about the last line. He didn’t
know whether to be proud or hurt that it might be true. There was talk that he might step

aside and become chairman rather than CEO. That made him all the more motivated to get
out of his bed, overcome the pain, and start taking his restorative long walks again.
A board meeting was scheduled a few days after he returned, and Jobs surprised
everyone by making an appearance. He ambled in and was able to stay for most of the
meeting. By early June he was holding daily meetings at his house, and by the end of the
month he was back at work.
Would he now, after facing death, be more mellow? His colleagues quickly got an
answer. On his first day back, he startled his top team by throwing a series of tantrums. He
ripped apart people he had not seen for six months, tore up some marketing plans, and
chewed out a couple of people whose work he found shoddy. But what was truly telling
was the pronouncement he made to a couple of friends late that afternoon. “I had the
greatest time being back today,” he said. “I can’t believe how creative I’m feeling, and how
the whole team is.” Tim Cook took it in stride. “I’ve never seen Steve hold back from
expressing his view or passion,” he later said. “But that was good.”
Friends noted that Jobs had retained his feistiness. During his recuperation he signed up
for Comcast’s high-definition cable service, and one day he called Brian Roberts, who ran
the company. “I thought he was calling to say something nice about it,” Roberts recalled.
“Instead, he told me ‘It sucks.’” But Andy Hertzfeld noticed that, beneath the gruffness,
Jobs had become more honest. “Before, if you asked Steve for a favor, he might do the
exact opposite,” Hertzfeld said. “That was the perversity in his nature. Now he actually
tries to be helpful.”
His public return came on September 9, when he took the stage at the company’s regular
fall music event. He got a standing ovation that lasted almost a minute, then he opened on
an unusually personal note by mentioning that he was the recipient of a liver donation. “I
wouldn’t be here without such generosity,” he said, “so I hope all of us can be as generous
and elect to become organ donors.” After a moment of exultation—“I’m vertical, I’m back
at Apple, and I’m loving every day of it”—he unveiled the new line of iPod Nanos, with
video cameras, in nine different colors of anodized aluminum.
By the beginning of 2010 he had recovered most of his strength, and he threw himself
back into work for what would be one of his, and Apple’s, most productive years. He had
hit two consecutive home runs since launching Apple’s digital hub strategy: the iPod and
the iPhone. Now he was going to swing for another.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:27

For his thirtieth and fortieth birthdays, Jobs had celebrated with the stars of Silicon Valley
and other assorted celebrities. But when he turned fifty in 2005, after coming back from his
cancer surgery, the surprise party that his wife arranged featured mainly his closest friends
and professional colleagues. It was at the comfortable San Francisco home of some friends,
and the great chef Alice Waters prepared salmon from Scotland along with couscous and a
variety of garden-raised vegetables. “It was beautifully warm and intimate, with everyone
and the kids all able to sit in one room,” Waters recalled. The entertainment was comedy
improvisation done by the cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway? Jobs’s close friend Mike Slade
was there, along with colleagues from Apple and Pixar, including Lasseter, Cook, Schiller,
Clow, Rubinstein, and Tevanian.
Cook had done a good job running the company during Jobs’s absence. He kept Apple’s
temperamental actors performing well, and he avoided stepping into the limelight. Jobs
liked strong personalities, up to a point, but he had never truly empowered a deputy or
shared the stage. It was hard to be his understudy. You were damned if you shone, and
damned if you didn’t. Cook had managed to navigate those shoals. He was calm and
decisive when in command, but he didn’t seek any notice or acclaim for himself. “Some
people resent the fact that Steve gets credit for everything, but I’ve never given a rat’s ass
about that,” said Cook. “Frankly speaking, I’d prefer my name never be in the paper.”
When Jobs returned from his medical leave, Cook resumed his role as the person who
kept the moving parts at Apple tightly meshed and remained unfazed by Jobs’s tantrums.
“What I learned about Steve was that people mistook some of his comments as ranting or
negativism, but it was really just the way he showed passion. So that’s how I processed it,
and I never took issues personally.” In many ways he was Jobs’s mirror image:
unflappable, steady in his moods, and (as the thesaurus in the NeXT would have noted)
saturnine rather than mercurial. “I’m a good negotiator, but he’s probably better than me
because he’s a cool customer,” Jobs later said. After adding a bit more praise, he quietly
added a reservation, one that was serious but rarely spoken: “But Tim’s not a product
person, per se.”
In the fall of 2005, after returning from his medical leave, Jobs tapped Cook to become
Apple’s chief operating officer. They were flying together to Japan. Jobs didn’t really ask
Cook; he simply turned to him and said, “I’ve decided to make you COO.”
Around that time, Jobs’s old friends Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian, the hardware and
software lieutenants who had been recruited during the 1997 restoration, decided to leave.
In Tevanian’s case, he had made a lot of money and was ready to quit working. “Avie is a
brilliant guy and a nice guy, much more grounded than Ruby and doesn’t carry the big
ego,” said Jobs. “It was a huge loss for us when Avie left. He’s a one-of-a-kind person—a
genius.”
Rubinstein’s case was a little more contentious. He was upset by Cook’s ascendency and
frazzled after working for nine years under Jobs. Their shouting matches became more
frequent. There was also a substantive issue: Rubinstein was repeatedly clashing with Jony
Ive, who used to work for him and now reported directly to Jobs. Ive was always pushing
the envelope with designs that dazzled but were difficult to engineer. It was Rubinstein’s
job to get the hardware built in a practical way, so he often balked. He was by nature

cautious. “In the end, Ruby’s from HP,” said Jobs. “And he never delved deep, he wasn’t
aggressive.”
There was, for example, the case of the screws that held the handles on the Power Mac
G4. Ive decided that they should have a certain polish and shape. But Rubinstein thought
that would be “astronomically” costly and delay the project for weeks, so he vetoed the
idea. His job was to deliver products, which meant making trade-offs. Ive viewed that
approach as inimical to innovation, so he would go both above him to Jobs and also around
him to the midlevel engineers. “Ruby would say, ‘You can’t do this, it will delay,’ and I
would say, ‘I think we can,’” Ive recalled. “And I would know, because I had worked
behind his back with the product teams.” In this and other cases, Jobs came down on Ive’s
side.
At times Ive and Rubinstein got into arguments that almost led to blows. Finally Ive told
Jobs, “It’s him or me.” Jobs chose Ive. By that point Rubinstein was ready to leave. He and
his wife had bought property in Mexico, and he wanted time off to build a home there. He
eventually went to work for Palm, which was trying to match Apple’s iPhone. Jobs was so
furious that Palm was hiring some of his former employees that he complained to Bono,
who was a cofounder of a private equity group, led by the former Apple CFO Fred
Anderson, that had bought a controlling stake in Palm. Bono sent Jobs a note back saying,
“You should chill out about this. This is like the Beatles ringing up because Herman and the
Hermits have taken one of their road crew.” Jobs later admitted that he had overreacted.
“The fact that they completely failed salves that wound,” he said.
Jobs was able to build a new management team that was less contentious and a bit more
subdued. Its main players, in addition to Cook and Ive, were Scott Forstall running iPhone
software, Phil Schiller in charge of marketing, Bob Mansfield doing Mac hardware, Eddy
Cue handling Internet services, and Peter Oppenheimer as the chief financial officer. Even
though there was a surface sameness to his top team—all were middle-aged white males—
there was a range of styles. Ive was emotional and expressive; Cook was as cool as steel.
They all knew they were expected to be deferential to Jobs while also pushing back on his
ideas and being willing to argue—a tricky balance to maintain, but each did it well. “I
realized very early that if you didn’t voice your opinion, he would mow you down,” said
Cook. “He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a
better result. So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”
The key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team
gathering, which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was always on the
future: What should each product do next? What new things should be developed? Jobs
used the meeting to enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. This served to centralize
control, which made the company seem as tightly integrated as a good Apple product, and
prevented the struggles between divisions that plagued decentralized companies.
Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland’s farm, his job had
been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor
for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate
based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted
that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning

off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few
things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”
In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an
in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale
School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions
the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to
open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so
that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture.

In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that
he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him, “Memento mori”:
Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in
perspective, instill some humility. Jobs’s memento mori had been delivered by his doctors,
but it did not instill humility. Instead he roared back after his recovery with even more
passion. The illness reminded him that he had nothing to lose, so he should forge ahead full
speed. “He came back on a mission,” said Cook. “Even though he was now running a large
company, he kept making bold moves that I don’t think anybody else would have done.”
For a while there was some evidence, or at least hope, that he had tempered his personal
style, that facing cancer and turning fifty had caused him to be a bit less brutish when he
was upset. “Right after he came back from his operation, he didn’t do the humiliation bit as
much,” Tevanian recalled. “If he was displeased, he might scream and get hopping mad and
use expletives, but he wouldn’t do it in a way that would totally destroy the person he was
talking to. It was just his way to get the person to do a better job.” Tevanian reflected for a
moment as he said this, then added a caveat: “Unless he thought someone was really bad
and had to go, which happened every once in a while.”
Eventually, however, the rough edges returned. Because most of his colleagues were
used to it by then and had learned to cope, what upset them most was when his ire turned
on strangers. “Once we went to a Whole Foods market to get a smoothie,” Ive recalled.
“And this older woman was making it, and he really got on her about how she was doing it.
Then later, he sympathized. ‘She’s an older woman and doesn’t want to be doing this job.’
He didn’t connect the two. He was being a purist in both cases.”
On a trip to London with Jobs, Ive had the thankless task of choosing the hotel. He
picked the Hempel, a tranquil five-star boutique hotel with a sophisticated minimalism that
he thought Jobs would love. But as soon as they checked in, he braced himself, and sure
enough his phone rang a minute later. “I hate my room,” Jobs declared. “It’s a piece of shit,
let’s go.” So Ive gathered his luggage and went to the front desk, where Jobs bluntly told
the shocked clerk what he thought. Ive realized that most people, himself among them, tend
not to be direct when they feel something is shoddy because they want to be liked, “which
is actually a vain trait.” That was an overly kind explanation. In any case, it was not a trait
Jobs had.
Because Ive was so instinctively nice, he puzzled over why Jobs, whom he deeply liked,
behaved as he did. One evening, in a San Francisco bar, he leaned forward with an earnest
intensity and tried to analyze it:

He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that makes his antisocial
behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable. I can understand why people who are thick-
skinned and unfeeling can be rude, but not sensitive people. I once asked him why he gets
so mad about stuff. He said, “But I don’t stay mad.” He has this very childish ability to get
really worked up about something, and it doesn’t stay with him at all. But there are other
times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt
somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of
social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he
knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.

Every now and then a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to settle
down. Lee Clow was a master. “Steve, can I talk to you?” he would quietly say when Jobs
had belittled someone publicly. He would go into Jobs’s office and explain how hard
everyone was working. “When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating,”
he said in one such session. Jobs would apologize and say he understood. But then he
would lapse again. “It’s simply who I am,” he would say.

One thing that did mellow was his attitude toward Bill Gates. Microsoft had kept its end of
the bargain it made in 1997, when it agreed to continue developing great software for the
Macintosh. Also, it was becoming less relevant as a competitor, having failed thus far to
replicate Apple’s digital hub strategy. Gates and Jobs had very different approaches to
products and innovation, but their rivalry had produced in each a surprising self-awareness.
For their All Things Digital conference in May 2007, the Wall Street Journal columnists
Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher worked to get them together for a joint interview.
Mossberg first invited Jobs, who didn’t go to many such conferences, and was surprised
when he said he would do it if Gates would. On hearing that, Gates accepted as well.
Mossberg wanted the evening joint appearance to be a cordial discussion, not a debate,
but that seemed less likely when Jobs unleashed a swipe at Microsoft during a solo
interview earlier that day. Asked about the fact that Apple’s iTunes software for Windows
computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to
somebody in hell.”
So when it was time for Gates and Jobs to meet in the green room before their joint
session that evening, Mossberg was worried. Gates got there first, with his aide Larry
Cohen, who had briefed him about Jobs’s remark earlier that day. When Jobs ambled in a
few minutes later, he grabbed a bottle of water from the ice bucket and sat down. After a
moment or two of silence, Gates said, “So I guess I’m the representative from hell.” He
wasn’t smiling. Jobs paused, gave him one of his impish grins, and handed him the ice
water. Gates relaxed, and the tension dissipated.
The result was a fascinating duet, in which each wunderkind of the digital age spoke
warily, and then warmly, about the other. Most memorably they gave candid answers when
the technology strategist Lise Buyer, who was in the audience, asked what each had learned
from observing the other. “Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste,” Gates answered.
There was a bit of nervous laughter; Jobs had famously said, ten years earlier, that his

problem with Microsoft was that it had absolutely no taste. But Gates insisted he was
serious. Jobs was a “natural in terms of intuitive taste.” He recalled how he and Jobs used
to sit together reviewing the software that Microsoft was making for the Macintosh. “I’d
see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that, you know, is hard
for me to explain. The way he does things is just different and I think it’s magical. And in
that case, wow.”
Jobs stared at the floor. Later he told me that he was blown away by how honest and
gracious Gates had just been. Jobs was equally honest, though not quite as gracious, when
his turn came. He described the great divide between the Apple theology of building end-
to-end integrated products and Microsoft’s openness to licensing its software to competing
hardware makers. In the music market, the integrated approach, as manifested in his
iTunes-iPod package, was proving to be the better, he noted, but Microsoft’s decoupled
approach was faring better in the personal computer market. One question he raised in an
offhand way was: Which approach might work better for mobile phones?
Then he went on to make an insightful point: This difference in design philosophy, he
said, led him and Apple to be less good at collaborating with other companies. “Because
Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at
partnering with people,” he said. “And I think if Apple could have had a little more of that
in its DNA, it would have served it extremely well.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

THE iPHONE

Three Revolutionary Products in One

An iPod That Makes Calls

By 2005 iPod sales were skyrocketing. An astonishing twenty million were sold that year,
quadruple the number of the year before. The product was becoming more important to the
company’s bottom line, accounting for 45% of the revenue that year, and it was also
burnishing the hipness of the company’s image in a way that drove sales of Macs.

That is why Jobs was worried. “He was always obsessing about what could mess us up,”
board member Art Levinson recalled. The conclusion he had come to: “The device that can
eat our lunch is the cell phone.” As he explained to the board, the digital camera market
was being decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras. The same could
happen to the iPod, if phone manufacturers started to build music players into them.
“Everyone carries a phone, so that could render the iPod unnecessary.”
His first strategy was to do something that he had admitted in front of Bill Gates was not
in his DNA: to partner with another company. He began talking to Ed Zander, the new
CEO of Motorola, about making a companion to Motorola’s popular RAZR, which was a
cell phone and digital camera, that would have an iPod built in. Thus was born the ROKR.
It ended up having neither the enticing minimalism of an iPod nor the convenient slimness
of a RAZR. Ugly, difficult to load, and with an arbitrary hundred-song limit, it had all the
hallmarks of a product that had been negotiated by a committee, which was counter to the
way Jobs liked to work. Instead of hardware, software, and content all being controlled by
one company, they were cobbled together by Motorola, Apple, and the wireless carrier
Cingular. “You call this the phone of the future?” Wired scoffed on its November 2005
cover.
Jobs was furious. “I’m sick of dealing with these stupid companies like Motorola,” he
told Tony Fadell and others at one of the iPod product review meetings. “Let’s do it
ourselves.” He had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all
stank, just like portable music players used to. “We would sit around talking about how
much we hated our phones,” he recalled. “They were way too complicated. They had
features nobody could figure out, including the address book. It was just Byzantine.”
George Riley, an outside lawyer for Apple, remembers sitting at meetings to go over legal
issues, and Jobs would get bored, grab Riley’s mobile phone, and start pointing out all the
ways it was “brain-dead.” So Jobs and his team became excited about the prospect of
building a phone that they would want to use. “That’s the best motivator of all,” Jobs later
said.
Another motivator was the potential market. More than 825 million mobile phones were
sold in 2005, to everyone from grammar schoolers to grandmothers. Since most were
junky, there was room for a premium and hip product, just as there had been in the portable
music-player market. At first he gave the project to the Apple group that was making the
AirPort wireless base station, on the theory that it was a wireless product. But he soon
realized that it was basically a consumer device, like the iPod, so he reassigned it to Fadell
and his teammates.
Their initial approach was to modify the iPod. They tried to use the trackwheel as a way
for a user to scroll through phone options and, without a keyboard, try to enter numbers. It
was not a natural fit. “We were having a lot of problems using the wheel, especially in
getting it to dial phone numbers,” Fadell recalled. “It was cumbersome.” It was fine for
scrolling through an address book, but horrible at inputting anything. The team kept trying
to convince themselves that users would mainly be calling people who were already in their
address book, but they knew that it wouldn’t really work.

At that time there was a second project under way at Apple: a secret effort to build a
tablet computer. In 2005 these narratives intersected, and the ideas for the tablet flowed
into the planning for the phone. In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before,
and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone.

Multi-touch

One of the engineers developing a tablet PC at Microsoft was married to a friend of
Laurene and Steve Jobs, and for his fiftieth birthday he wanted to have a dinner party that
included them along with Bill and Melinda Gates. Jobs went, a bit reluctantly. “Steve was
actually quite friendly to me at the dinner,” Gates recalled, but he “wasn’t particularly
friendly” to the birthday guy.
Gates was annoyed that the guy kept revealing information about the tablet PC he had
developed for Microsoft. “He’s our employee and he’s revealing our intellectual property,”
Gates recounted. Jobs was also annoyed, and it had just the consequence that Gates feared.
As Jobs recalled:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world
with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to
license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As
soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me
about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what
a tablet can really be.”

Jobs went into the office the next day, gathered his team, and said, “I want to make a
tablet, and it can’t have a keyboard or a stylus.” Users would be able to type by touching
the screen with their fingers. That meant the screen needed to have a feature that became
known as multi-touch, the ability to process multiple inputs at the same time. “So could
you guys come up with a multi-touch, touch-sensitive display for me?” he asked. It took
them about six months, but they came up with a crude but workable prototype.
Jony Ive had a different memory of how multi-touch was developed. He said his design
team had already been working on a multi-touch input that was developed for the trackpads
of Apple’s MacBook Pro, and they were experimenting with ways to transfer that capability
to a computer screen. They used a projector to show on a wall what it would look like.
“This is going to change everything,” Ive told his team. But he was careful not to show it to
Jobs right away, especially since his people were working on it in their spare time and he
didn’t want to quash their enthusiasm. “Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I
don’t show him stuff in front of other people,” Ive recalled. “He might say, ‘This is shit,’
and snuff the idea. I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are
in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad, because I knew it
was so important.”

Ive set up the demonstration in his conference room and showed it to Jobs privately,
knowing that he was less likely to make a snap judgment if there was no audience.
Fortunately he loved it. “This is the future,” he exulted.
It was in fact such a good idea that Jobs realized that it could solve the problem they
were having creating an interface for the proposed cell phone. That project was far more
important, so he put the tablet development on hold while the multi-touch interface was
adopted for a phone-size screen. “If it worked on a phone,” he recalled, “I knew we could
go back and use it on a tablet.”
Jobs called Fadell, Rubinstein, and Schiller to a secret meeting in the design studio
conference room, where Ive gave a demonstration of multi-touch. “Wow!” said Fadell.
Everyone liked it, but they were not sure that they would be able to make it work on a
mobile phone. They decided to proceed on two paths: P1 was the code name for the phone
being developed using an iPod trackwheel, and P2 was the new alternative using a multi-
touch screen.
A small company in Delaware called FingerWorks was already making a line of multi-
touch trackpads. Founded by two academics at the University of Delaware, John Elias and
Wayne Westerman, FingerWorks had developed some tablets with multi-touch sensing
capabilities and taken out patents on ways to translate various finger gestures, such as
pinches and swipes, into useful functions. In early 2005 Apple quietly acquired the
company, all of its patents, and the services of its two founders. FingerWorks quit selling its
products to others, and it began filing its new patents in Apple’s name.
After six months of work on the trackwheel P1 and the multi-touch P2 phone options,
Jobs called his inner circle into his conference room to make a decision. Fadell had been
trying hard to develop the trackwheel model, but he admitted they had not cracked the
problem of figuring out a simple way to dial calls. The multi-touch approach was riskier,
because they were unsure whether they could execute the engineering, but it was also more
exciting and promising. “We all know this is the one we want to do,” said Jobs, pointing to
the touchscreen. “So let’s make it work.” It was what he liked to call a bet-the-company
moment, high risk and high reward if it succeeded.
A couple of members of the team argued for having a keyboard as well, given the
popularity of the BlackBerry, but Jobs vetoed the idea. A physical keyboard would take
away space from the screen, and it would not be as flexible and adaptable as a touchscreen
keyboard. “A hardware keyboard seems like an easy solution, but it’s constraining,” he
said. “Think of all the innovations we’d be able to adapt if we did the keyboard onscreen
with software. Let’s bet on it, and then we’ll find a way to make it work.” The result was a
device that displays a numerical pad when you want to dial a phone number, a typewriter
keyboard when you want to write, and whatever buttons you might need for each particular
activity. And then they all disappear when you’re watching a video. By having software
replace hardware, the interface became fluid and flexible.
Jobs spent part of every day for six months helping to refine the display. “It was the most
complex fun I’ve ever had,” he recalled. “It was like being the one evolving the variations
on ‘Sgt. Pepper.’” A lot of features that seem simple now were the result of creative
brainstorms. For example, the team worried about how to prevent the device from playing

music or making a call accidentally when it was jangling in your pocket. Jobs was
congenitally averse to having on-off switches, which he deemed “inelegant.” The solution
was “Swipe to Open,” the simple and fun on-screen slider that activated the device when it
had gone dormant. Another breakthrough was the sensor that figured out when you put the
phone to your ear, so that your lobes didn’t accidentally activate some function. And of
course the icons came in his favorite shape, the primitive he made Bill Atkinson design into
the software of the first Macintosh: rounded rectangles. In session after session, with Jobs
immersed in every detail, the team members figured out ways to simplify what other
phones made complicated. They added a big bar to guide you in putting calls on hold or
making conference calls, found easy ways to navigate through email, and created icons you
could scroll through horizontally to get to different apps—all of which were easier because
they could be used visually on the screen rather than by using a keyboard built into the
hardware.

Gorilla Glass

Jobs became infatuated with different materials the way he did with certain foods. When he
went back to Apple in 1997 and started work on the iMac, he had embraced what could be
done with translucent and colored plastic. The next phase was metal. He and Ive replaced
the curvy plastic PowerBook G3 with the sleek titanium PowerBook G4, which they
redesigned two years later in aluminum, as if just to demonstrate how much they liked
different metals. Then they did an iMac and an iPod Nano in anodized aluminum, which
meant that the metal had been put in an acid bath and electrified so that its surface
oxidized. Jobs was told it could not be done in the quantities they needed, so he had a
factory built in China to handle it. Ive went there, during the SARS epidemic, to oversee
the process. “I stayed for three months in a dormitory to work on the process,” he recalled.
“Ruby and others said it would be impossible, but I wanted to do it because Steve and I felt
that the anodized aluminum had a real integrity to it.”
Next was glass. “After we did metal, I looked at Jony and said that we had to master
glass,” said Jobs. For the Apple stores, they had created huge windowpanes and glass stairs.
For the iPhone, the original plan was for it to have a plastic screen, like the iPod. But Jobs
decided it would feel much more elegant and substantive if the screens were glass. So he
set about finding a glass that would be strong and resistant to scratches.
The natural place to look was Asia, where the glass for the stores was being made. But
Jobs’s friend John Seeley Brown, who was on the board of Corning Glass in Upstate New
York, told him that he should talk to that company’s young and dynamic CEO, Wendell
Weeks. So he dialed the main Corning switchboard number and asked to be put through to
Weeks. He got an assistant, who offered to pass along the message. “No, I’m Steve Jobs,”
he replied. “Put me through.” The assistant refused. Jobs called Brown and complained that
he had been subjected to “typical East Coast bullshit.” When Weeks heard that, he called
the main Apple switchboard and asked to speak to Jobs. He was told to put his request in
writing and send it in by fax. When Jobs was told what happened, he took a liking to Weeks
and invited him to Cupertino.

Jobs described the type of glass Apple wanted for the iPhone, and Weeks told him that
Corning had developed a chemical exchange process in the 1960s that led to what they
dubbed “gorilla glass.” It was incredibly strong, but it had never found a market, so
Corning quit making it. Jobs said he doubted it was good enough, and he started explaining
to Weeks how glass was made. This amused Weeks, who of course knew more than Jobs
about that topic. “Can you shut up,” Weeks interjected, “and let me teach you some
science?” Jobs was taken aback and fell silent. Weeks went to the whiteboard and gave a
tutorial on the chemistry, which involved an ion-exchange process that produced a
compression layer on the surface of the glass. This turned Jobs around, and he said he
wanted as much gorilla glass as Corning could make within six months. “We don’t have the
capacity,” Weeks replied. “None of our plants make the glass now.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was good-humored and
confident but not used to Jobs’s reality distortion field. He tried to explain that a false sense
of confidence would not overcome engineering challenges, but that was a premise that Jobs
had repeatedly shown he didn’t accept. He stared at Weeks unblinking. “Yes, you can do
it,” he said. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.”
As Weeks retold this story, he shook his head in astonishment. “We did it in under six
months,” he said. “We produced a glass that had never been made.” Corning’s facility in
Harrisburg, Kentucky, which had been making LCD displays, was converted almost
overnight to make gorilla glass full-time. “We put our best scientists and engineers on it,
and we just made it work.” In his airy office, Weeks has just one framed memento on
display. It’s a message Jobs sent the day the iPhone came out: “We couldn’t have done it
without you.”

The Design

On many of his major projects, such as the first Toy Story and the Apple store, Jobs pressed
“pause” as they neared completion and decided to make major revisions. That happened
with the design of the iPhone as well. The initial design had the glass screen set into an
aluminum case. One Monday morning Jobs went over to see Ive. “I didn’t sleep last night,”
he said, “because I realized that I just don’t love it.” It was the most important product he
had made since the first Macintosh, and it just didn’t look right to him. Ive, to his dismay,
instantly realized that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he
had to make the observation.”
The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in their
current design the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way. The
whole device felt too masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves
over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s
team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want we can hand
out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of
my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled.
The new design ended up with just a thin stainless steel bezel that allowed the gorilla
glass display to go right to the edge. Every part of the device seemed to defer to the screen.

The new look was austere, yet also friendly. You could fondle it. It meant they had to redo
the circuit boards, antenna, and processor placement inside, but Jobs ordered the change.
“Other companies may have shipped,” said Fadell, “but we pressed the reset button and
started over.”
One aspect of the design, which reflected not only Jobs’s perfectionism but also his
desire to control, was that the device was tightly sealed. The case could not be opened,
even to change the battery. As with the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs did not want
people fiddling inside. In fact when Apple discovered in 2011 that third-party repair shops
were opening up the iPhone 4, it replaced the tiny screws with a tamper-resistant Pentalobe
screw that was impossible to open with a commercially available screwdriver. By not
having a replaceable battery, it was possible to make the iPhone much thinner. For Jobs,
thinner was always better. “He’s always believed that thin is beautiful,” said Tim Cook.
“You can see that in all of the work. We have the thinnest notebook, the thinnest
smartphone, and we made the iPad thin and then even thinner.”

The Launch

When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a
special sneak preview. He called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and began
with his typical superlative: “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” He wanted to give
Time the exclusive, “but there’s nobody smart enough at Time to write it, so I’m going to
give it to someone else.” Huey introduced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer
(and novelist) at Time. In his piece Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really
invent many new features, it just made these features a lot more usable. “But that’s
important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or
not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. . . . When our tools are broken, we feel
broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.”
For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited back
Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team, as he had
done when he launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling product presentations, this may
have been his best. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that
changes everything,” he began. He referred to two earlier examples: the original
Macintosh, which “changed the whole computer industry,” and the first iPod, which
“changed the entire music industry.” Then he carefully built up to the product he was about
to launch: “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first
one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone.
And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” He repeated the list for
emphasis, then asked, “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one
device, and we are calling it iPhone.”
When the iPhone went on sale five months later, at the end of June 2007, Jobs and his
wife walked to the Apple store in Palo Alto to take in the excitement. Since he often did
that on the day new products went on sale, there were some fans hanging out in
anticipation, and they greeted him as they would have Moses if he had walked in to buy the

Bible. Among the faithful were Hertzfeld and Atkinson. “Bill stayed in line all night,”
Hertzfeld said. Jobs waved his arms and started laughing. “I sent him one,” he said.
Hertzfeld replied, “He needs six.”
The iPhone was immediately dubbed “the Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s
competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s the most
expensive phone in the world,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC interview. “And
it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” Once again
Microsoft had underestimated Jobs’s product. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety
million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cell
phone market.
“Steve understands desire,” said Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC pioneer who had envisioned
a “Dynabook” tablet computer forty years earlier. Kay was good at making prophetic
assessments, so Jobs asked him what he thought of the iPhone. “Make the screen five
inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world,” Kay said. He did not know that the
design of the iPhone had started with, and would someday lead to, ideas for a tablet
computer that would fulfill—indeed exceed—his vision for the Dynabook.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

ROUND TWO

The Cancer Recurs

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:27

Iger asked Jobs to bring Lasseter and Catmull to a secret meeting of the Disney board in
Century City, Los Angeles, on a Sunday morning. The goal was to make them feel
comfortable with what would be a radical and expensive deal. As they prepared to take the
elevator from the parking garage, Lasseter said to Jobs, “If I start getting too excited or go
on too long, just touch my leg.” Jobs ended up having to do it once, but otherwise Lasseter
made the perfect sales pitch. “I talked about how we make films, what our philosophies are,
the honesty we have with each other, and how we nurture the creative talent,” he recalled.
The board asked a lot of questions, and Jobs let Lasseter answer most. But Jobs did talk
about how exciting it was to connect art with technology. “That’s what our culture is all
about, just like at Apple,” he said.
Before the Disney board got a chance to approve the merger, however, Michael Eisner
arose from the departed to try to derail it. He called Iger and said it was far too expensive.
“You can fix animation yourself,” Eisner told him. “How?” asked Iger. “I know you can,”
said Eisner. Iger got a bit annoyed. “Michael, how come you say I can fix it, when you
couldn’t fix it yourself?” he asked.
Eisner said he wanted to come to a board meeting, even though he was no longer a
member or an officer, and speak against the acquisition. Iger resisted, but Eisner called
Warren Buffett, a big shareholder, and George Mitchell, who was the lead director. The
former senator convinced Iger to let Eisner have his say. “I told the board that they didn’t
need to buy Pixar because they already owned 85% of the movies Pixar had already made,”
Eisner recounted. He was referring to the fact that for the movies already made, Disney was
getting that percentage of the gross, plus it had the rights to make all the sequels and
exploit the characters. “I made a presentation that said, here’s the 15% of Pixar that Disney
does not already own. So that’s what you’re getting. The rest is a bet on future Pixar films.”
Eisner admitted that Pixar had been enjoying a good run, but he said it could not continue.
“I showed the history of producers and directors who had X number of hits in a row and
then failed. It happened to Spielberg, Walt Disney, all of them.” To make the deal worth it,
he calculated, each new Pixar movie would have to gross $1.3 billion. “It drove Steve crazy
that I knew that,” Eisner later said.
After he left the room, Iger refuted his argument point by point. “Let me tell you what
was wrong with that presentation,” he began. When the board had finished hearing them
both, it approved the deal Iger proposed.
Iger flew up to Emeryville to meet Jobs and jointly announce the deal to the Pixar
workers. But before they did, Jobs sat down alone with Lasseter and Catmull. “If either of
you have doubts,” he said, “I will just tell them no thanks and blow off this deal.” He
wasn’t totally sincere. It would have been almost impossible to do so at that point. But it
was a welcome gesture. “I’m good,” said Lasseter. “Let’s do it.” Catmull agreed. They all
hugged, and Jobs wept.
Everyone then gathered in the atrium. “Disney is buying Pixar,” Jobs announced. There
were a few tears, but as he explained the deal, the staffers began to realize that in some
ways it was a reverse acquisition. Catmull would be the head of Disney animation, Lasseter
its chief creative officer. By the end they were cheering. Iger had been standing on the side,

and Jobs invited him to center stage. As he talked about the special culture of Pixar and
how badly Disney needed to nurture it and learn from it, the crowd broke into applause.

“My goal has always been not only to make great products, but to build great companies,”
Jobs later said. “Walt Disney did that. And the way we did the merger, we kept Pixar as a
great company and helped Disney remain one as well.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MACS

Setting Apple Apart

With the iBook, 1999

Clams, Ice Cubes, and Sunflowers

Ever since the introduction of the iMac in 1998, Jobs and Jony Ive had made beguiling
design a signature of Apple’s computers. There was a consumer laptop that looked like a
tangerine clam, and a professional desktop computer that suggested a Zen ice cube. Like

bell-bottoms that turn up in the back of a closet, some of these models looked better at the
time than they do in retrospect, and they show a love of design that was, on occasion, a bit
too exuberant. But they set Apple apart and provided the publicity bursts it needed to
survive in a Windows world.
The Power Mac G4 Cube, released in 2000, was so alluring that one ended up on display
in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. An eight-inch perfect cube the size of a Kleenex
box, it was the pure expression of Jobs’s aesthetic. The sophistication came from
minimalism. No buttons marred the surface. There was no CD tray, just a subtle slot. And
as with the original Macintosh, there was no fan. Pure Zen. “When you see something
that’s so thoughtful on the outside you say, ‘Oh, wow, it must be really thoughtful on the
inside,’” he told Newsweek. “We make progress by eliminating things, by removing the
superfluous.”
The G4 Cube was almost ostentatious in its lack of ostentation, and it was powerful. But
it was not a success. It had been designed as a high-end desktop, but Jobs wanted to turn it,
as he did almost every product, into something that could be mass-marketed to consumers.
The Cube ended up not serving either market well. Workaday professionals weren’t seeking
a jewel-like sculpture for their desks, and mass-market consumers were not eager to spend
twice what they’d pay for a plain vanilla desktop. Jobs predicted that Apple would sell
200,000 Cubes per quarter. In its first quarter it sold half that. The next quarter it sold fewer
than thirty thousand units. Jobs later admitted that he had overdesigned and overpriced the
Cube, just as he had the NeXT computer. But gradually he was learning his lesson. In
building devices like the iPod, he would control costs and make the trade-offs necessary to
get them launched on time and on budget.
Partly because of the poor sales of the Cube, Apple produced disappointing revenue
numbers in September 2000. That was just when the tech bubble was deflating and Apple’s
education market was declining. The company’s stock price, which had been above $60,
fell 50% in one day, and by early December it was below $15.
None of this deterred Jobs from continuing to push for distinctive, even distracting, new
design. When flat-screen displays became commercially viable, he decided it was time to
replace the iMac, the translucent consumer desktop computer that looked as if it were from
a Jetsons cartoon. Ive came up with a model that was somewhat conventional, with the guts
of the computer attached to the back of the flat screen. Jobs didn’t like it. As he often did,
both at Pixar and at Apple, he slammed on the brakes to rethink things. There was
something about the design that lacked purity, he felt. “Why have this flat display if you’re
going to glom all this stuff on its back?” he asked Ive. “We should let each element be true
to itself.”
Jobs went home early that day to mull over the problem, then called Ive to come by.
They wandered into the garden, which Jobs’s wife had planted with a profusion of
sunflowers. “Every year I do something wild with the garden, and that time it involved
masses of sunflowers, with a sunflower house for the kids,” she recalled. “Jony and Steve
were riffing on their design problem, then Jony asked, ‘What if the screen was separated
from the base like a sunflower?’ He got excited and started sketching.” Ive liked his designs

to suggest a narrative, and he realized that a sunflower shape would convey that the flat
screen was so fluid and responsive that it could reach for the sun.
In Ive’s new design, the Mac’s screen was attached to a movable chrome neck, so that it
looked not only like a sunflower but also like a cheeky Luxo lamp. Indeed it evoked the
playful personality of Luxo Jr. in the first short film that John Lasseter had made at Pixar.
Apple took out many patents for the design, most crediting Ive, but on one of them, for “a
computer system having a movable assembly attached to a flat panel display,” Jobs listed
himself as the primary inventor.
In hindsight, some of Apple’s Macintosh designs may seem a bit too cute. But other
computer makers were at the other extreme. It was an industry that you’d expect to be
innovative, but instead it was dominated by cheaply designed generic boxes. After a few
ill-conceived stabs at painting on blue colors and trying new shapes, companies such as
Dell, Compaq, and HP commoditized computers by outsourcing manufacturing and
competing on price. With its spunky designs and its pathbreaking applications like iTunes
and iMovie, Apple was about the only place innovating.

Intel Inside

Apple’s innovations were more than skin-deep. Since 1994 it had been using a
microprocessor, called the PowerPC, that was made by a partnership of IBM and Motorola.
For a few years it was faster than Intel’s chips, an advantage that Apple touted in humorous
commercials. By the time of Jobs’s return, however, Motorola had fallen behind in
producing new versions of the chip. This provoked a fight between Jobs and Motorola’s
CEO Chris Galvin. When Jobs decided to stop licensing the Macintosh operating system to
clone makers, right after his return to Apple in 1997, he suggested to Galvin that he might
consider making an exception for Motorola’s clone, the StarMax Mac, but only if Motorola
sped up development of new PowerPC chips for laptops. The call got heated. Jobs offered
his opinion that Motorola chips sucked. Galvin, who also had a temper, pushed back. Jobs
hung up on him. The Motorola StarMax was canceled, and Jobs secretly began planning to
move Apple off the Motorola-IBM PowerPC chip and to adopt, instead, Intel’s. This would
not be a simple task. It was akin to writing a new operating system.
Jobs did not cede any real power to his board, but he did use its meetings to kick around
ideas and think through strategies in confidence, while he stood at a whiteboard and led
freewheeling discussions. For eighteen months the directors discussed whether to move to
an Intel architecture. “We debated it, we asked a lot of questions, and finally we all decided
it needed to be done,” board member Art Levinson recalled.
Paul Otellini, who was then president and later became CEO of Intel, began huddling
with Jobs. They had gotten to know each other when Jobs was struggling to keep NeXT
alive and, as Otellini later put it, “his arrogance had been temporarily tempered.” Otellini
has a calm and wry take on people, and he was amused rather than put off when he
discovered, upon dealing with Jobs at Apple in the early 2000s, “that his juices were going
again, and he wasn’t nearly as humble anymore.” Intel had deals with other computer
makers, and Jobs wanted a better price than they had. “We had to find creative ways to

bridge the numbers,” said Otellini. Most of the negotiating was done, as Jobs preferred, on
long walks, sometimes on the trails up to the radio telescope known as the Dish above the
Stanford campus. Jobs would start the walk by telling a story and explaining how he saw
the history of computers evolving. By the end he would be haggling over price.
“Intel had a reputation for being a tough partner, coming out of the days when it was run
by Andy Grove and Craig Barrett,” Otellini said. “I wanted to show that Intel was a
company you could work with.” So a crack team from Intel worked with Apple, and they
were able to beat the conversion deadline by six months. Jobs invited Otellini to Apple’s
Top 100 management retreat, where he donned one of the famous Intel lab coats that
looked like a bunny suit and gave Jobs a big hug. At the public announcement in 2005, the
usually reserved Otellini repeated the act. “Apple and Intel, together at last,” flashed on the
big screen.
Bill Gates was amazed. Designing crazy-colored cases did not impress him, but a secret
program to switch the CPU in a computer, completed seamlessly and on time, was a feat he
truly admired. “If you’d said, ‘Okay, we’re going to change our microprocessor chip, and
we’re not going to lose a beat,’ that sounds impossible,” he told me years later, when I
asked him about Jobs’s accomplishments. “They basically did that.”

Options

Among Jobs’s quirks was his attitude toward money. When he returned to Apple in 1997,
he portrayed himself as a person working for $1 a year, doing it for the benefit of the
company rather than himself. Nevertheless he embraced the idea of option megagrants—
granting huge bundles of options to buy Apple stock at a preset price—that were not
subject to the usual good compensation practices of board committee reviews and
performance criteria.
When he dropped the “interim” in his title and officially became CEO, he was offered (in
addition to the airplane) a megagrant by Ed Woolard and the board at the beginning of
2000; defying the image he cultivated of not being interested in money, he had stunned
Woolard by asking for even more options than the board had proposed. But soon after he
got them, it turned out that it was for naught. Apple stock cratered in September 2000—due
to disappointing sales of the Cube plus the bursting of the Internet bubble—which made the
options worthless.
Making matters worse was a June 2001 cover story in Fortune about overcompensated
CEOs, “The Great CEO Pay Heist.” A mug of Jobs, smiling smugly, filled the cover. Even
though his options were underwater at the time, the technical method of valuing them when
granted (known as a Black-Scholes valuation) set their worth at $872 million. Fortune
proclaimed it “by far” the largest compensation package ever granted a CEO. It was the
worst of all worlds: Jobs had almost no money that he could put in his pocket for his four
years of hard and successful turnaround work at Apple, yet he had become the poster child
of greedy CEOs, making him look hypocritical and undermining his self-image. He wrote a
scathing letter to the editor, declaring that his options actually “are worth zero” and offering
to sell them to Fortune for half of the supposed $872 million the magazine had reported.

In the meantime Jobs wanted the board to give him another big grant of options, since
his old ones seemed worthless. He insisted, both to the board and probably to himself, that
it was more about getting proper recognition than getting rich. “It wasn’t so much about the
money,” he later said in a deposition in an SEC lawsuit over the options. “Everybody likes
to be recognized by his peers. . . . I felt that the board wasn’t really doing the same with
me.” He felt that the board should have come to him offering a new grant, without his
having to suggest it. “I thought I was doing a pretty good job. It would have made me feel
better at the time.”
His handpicked board in fact doted on him. So they decided to give him another huge
grant in August 2001, when the stock price was just under $18. The problem was that he
worried about his image, especially after the Fortune article. He did not want to accept the
new grant unless the board canceled his old options at the same time. But to do so would
have adverse accounting implications, because it would be effectively repricing the old
options. That would require taking a charge against current earnings. The only way to avoid
this “variable accounting” problem was to cancel his old options at least six months after
his new options were granted. In addition, Jobs started haggling with the board over how
quickly the new options would vest.
It was not until mid-December 2001 that Jobs finally agreed to take the new options and,
braving the optics, wait six months before his old ones were canceled. But by then the
stock price (adjusting for a split) had gone up $3, to about $21. If the strike price of the new
options was set at that new level, each would have thus been $3 less valuable. So Apple’s
legal counsel, Nancy Heinen, looked over the recent stock prices and helped to choose an
October date, when the stock was $18.30. She also approved a set of minutes that purported
to show that the board had approved the grant on that date. The backdating was potentially
worth $20 million to Jobs.
Once again Jobs would end up suffering bad publicity without making a penny. Apple’s
stock price kept dropping, and by March 2003 even the new options were so low that Jobs
traded in all of them for an outright grant of $75 million worth of shares, which amounted
to about $8.3 million for each year he had worked since coming back in 1997 through the
end of the vesting in 2006.
None of this would have mattered much if the Wall Street Journal had not run a powerful
series in 2006 about backdated stock options. Apple wasn’t mentioned, but its board
appointed a committee of three members—Al Gore, Eric Schmidt of Google, and Jerry
York, formerly of IBM and Chrysler—to investigate its own practices. “We decided at the
outset that if Steve was at fault we would let the chips fall where they may,” Gore recalled.
The committee uncovered some irregularities with Jobs’s grants and those of other top
officers, and it immediately turned the findings over to the SEC. Jobs was aware of the
backdating, the report said, but he ended up not benefiting financially. (A board committee
at Disney also found that similar backdating had occurred at Pixar when Jobs was in
charge.)
The laws governing such backdating practices were murky, especially since no one at
Apple ended up benefiting from the dubiously dated grants. The SEC took eight months to
do its own investigation, and in April 2007 it announced that it would not bring action

against Apple “based in part on its swift, extensive, and extraordinary cooperation in the
Commission’s investigation [and its] prompt self-reporting.” Although the SEC found that
Jobs had been aware of the backdating, it cleared him of any misconduct because he “was
unaware of the accounting implications.”
The SEC did file complaints against Apple’s former chief financial officer Fred
Anderson, who was on the board, and general counsel Nancy Heinen. Anderson, a retired
Air Force captain with a square jaw and deep integrity, had been a wise and calming
influence at Apple, where he was known for his ability to control Jobs’s tantrums. He was
cited by the SEC only for “negligence” regarding the paperwork for one set of the grants
(not the ones that went to Jobs), and the SEC allowed him to continue to serve on corporate
boards. Nevertheless he ended up resigning from the Apple board.
Anderson thought he had been made a scapegoat. When he settled with the SEC, his
lawyer issued a statement that cast some of the blame on Jobs. It said that Anderson had
“cautioned Mr. Jobs that the executive team grant would have to be priced on the date of
the actual board agreement or there could be an accounting charge,” and that Jobs replied
“that the board had given its prior approval.”
Heinen, who initially fought the charges against her, ended up settling and paying a $2.2
million fine, without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. Likewise the company itself
settled a shareholders’ lawsuit by agreeing to pay $14 million in damages.
“Rarely have so many avoidable problems been created by one man’s obsession with his
own image,” Joe Nocera wrote in the New York Times. “Then again, this is Steve Jobs
we’re talking about.” Contemptuous of rules and regulations, he created a climate that
made it hard for someone like Heinen to buck his wishes. At times, great creativity
occurred. But people around him could pay a price. On compensation issues in particular,
the difficulty of defying his whims drove some good people to make some bad mistakes.
The compensation issue in some ways echoed Jobs’s parking quirk. He refused such
trappings as having a “Reserved for CEO” spot, but he assumed for himself the right to
park in the handicapped spaces. He wanted to be seen (both by himself and by others) as
someone willing to work for $1 a year, but he also wanted to have huge stock grants
bestowed upon him. Jangling inside him were the contradictions of a counterculture rebel
turned business entrepreneur, someone who wanted to believe that he had turned on and
tuned in without having sold out and cashed in.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

ROUND ONE

Memento Mori

At fifty (in center), with Eve and Laurene (behind cake), Eddy Cue (by window), John Lasseter (with camera), and
Lee Clow (with beard)

Cancer

Jobs would later speculate that his cancer was caused by the grueling year that he spent,
starting in 1997, running both Apple and Pixar. As he drove back and forth, he had
developed kidney stones and other ailments, and he would come home so exhausted that he
could barely speak. “That’s probably when this cancer started growing, because my
immune system was pretty weak at that time,” he said.
There is no evidence that exhaustion or a weak immune system causes cancer. However,
his kidney problems did indirectly lead to the detection of his cancer. In October 2003 he
happened to run into the urologist who had treated him, and she asked him to get a CAT
scan of his kidneys and ureter. It had been five years since his last scan. The new scan
revealed nothing wrong with his kidneys, but it did show a shadow on his pancreas, so she
asked him to schedule a pancreatic study. He didn’t. As usual, he was good at willfully
ignoring inputs that he did not want to process. But she persisted. “Steve, this is really
important,” she said a few days later. “You need to do this.”
Her tone of voice was urgent enough that he complied. He went in early one morning,
and after studying the scan, the doctors met with him to deliver the bad news that it was a
tumor. One of them even suggested that he should make sure his affairs were in order, a

polite way of saying that he might have only months to live. That evening they performed a
biopsy by sticking an endoscope down his throat and into his intestines so they could put a
needle into his pancreas and get a few cells from the tumor. Powell remembers her
husband’s doctors tearing up with joy. It turned out to be an islet cell or pancreatic
neuroendocrine tumor, which is rare but slower growing and thus more likely to be treated
successfully. He was lucky that it was detected so early—as the by-product of a routine
kidney screening—and thus could be surgically removed before it had definitely spread.
One of his first calls was to Larry Brilliant, whom he first met at the ashram in India.
“Do you still believe in God?” Jobs asked him. Brilliant said that he did, and they discussed
the many paths to God that had been taught by the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba. Then
Brilliant asked Jobs what was wrong. “I have cancer,” Jobs replied.
Art Levinson, who was on Apple’s board, was chairing the board meeting of his own
company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs’s name appeared on the screen. As
soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He
had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he
became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer.
Jobs called him that Sunday, and he drove right over to Jobs’s house and stayed for two
hours.
To the horror of his friends and wife, Jobs decided not to have surgery to remove the
tumor, which was the only accepted medical approach. “I really didn’t want them to open
up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,” he told me years later with
a hint of regret. Specifically, he kept to a strict vegan diet, with large quantities of fresh
carrot and fruit juices. To that regimen he added acupuncture, a variety of herbal remedies,
and occasionally a few other treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting people
around the country, including a psychic. For a while he was under the sway of a doctor who
operated a natural healing clinic in southern California that stressed the use of organic
herbs, juice fasts, frequent bowel cleansings, hydrotherapy, and the expression of all
negative feelings.
“The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” Powell recalled. “It’s
hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however. “The body exists to serve the
spirit,” she argued. His friends repeatedly urged him to have surgery and chemotherapy.
“Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit
roots, and I told him he was crazy,” Grove recalled. Levinson said that he “pleaded every
day” with Jobs and found it “enormously frustrating that I just couldn’t connect with him.”
The fights almost ruined their friendship. “That’s not how cancer works,” Levinson insisted
when Jobs discussed his diet treatments. “You cannot solve this without surgery and
blasting it with toxic chemicals.” Even the diet doctor Dean Ornish, a pioneer in alternative
and nutritional methods of treating diseases, took a long walk with Jobs and insisted that
sometimes traditional methods were the right option. “You really need surgery,” Ornish
told him.
Jobs’s obstinacy lasted for nine months after his October 2003 diagnosis. Part of it was
the product of the dark side of his reality distortion field. “I think Steve has such a strong
desire for the world to be a certain way that he wills it to be that way,” Levinson

speculated. “Sometimes it doesn’t work. Reality is unforgiving.” The flip side of his
wondrous ability to focus was his fearsome willingness to filter out things he did not wish
to deal with. This led to many of his great breakthroughs, but it could also backfire. “He
has that ability to ignore stuff he doesn’t want to confront,” Powell explained. “It’s just the
way he’s wired.” Whether it involved personal topics relating to his family and marriage, or
professional issues relating to engineering or business challenges, or health and cancer
issues, Jobs sometimes simply didn’t engage.
In the past he had been rewarded for what his wife called his “magical thinking”—his
assumption that he could will things to be as he wanted. But cancer does not work that way.
Powell enlisted everyone close to him, including his sister Mona Simpson, to try to bring
him around. In July 2004 a CAT scan showed that the tumor had grown and possibly
spread. It forced him to face reality.
Jobs underwent surgery on Saturday, July 31, 2004, at Stanford University Medical
Center. He did not have a full “Whipple procedure,” which removes a large part of the
stomach and intestine as well as the pancreas. The doctors considered it, but decided
instead on a less radical approach, a modified Whipple that removed only part of the
pancreas.
Jobs sent employees an email the next day, using his PowerBook hooked up to an
AirPort Express in his hospital room, announcing his surgery. He assured them that the type
of pancreatic cancer he had “represents about 1% of the total cases of pancreatic cancer
diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine
was).” He said he would not require chemotherapy or radiation treatment, and he planned
to return to work in September. “While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for
Apple’s day to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of
you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.”
One side effect of the operation would become a problem for Jobs because of his
obsessive diets and the weird routines of purging and fasting that he had practiced since he
was a teenager. Because the pancreas provides the enzymes that allow the stomach to digest
food and absorb nutrients, removing part of the organ makes it hard to get enough protein.
Patients are advised to make sure that they eat frequent meals and maintain a nutritious
diet, with a wide variety of meat and fish proteins as well as full-fat milk products. Jobs
had never done this, and he never would.
He stayed in the hospital for two weeks and then struggled to regain his strength. “I
remember coming back and sitting in that rocking chair,” he told me, pointing to one in his
living room. “I didn’t have the energy to walk. It took me a week before I could walk
around the block. I pushed myself to walk to the gardens a few blocks away, then further,
and within six months I had my energy almost back.”
Unfortunately the cancer had spread. During the operation the doctors found three liver
metastases. Had they operated nine months earlier, they might have caught it before it
spread, though they would never know for sure. Jobs began chemotherapy treatments,
which further complicated his eating challenges.

The Stanford Commencement

Jobs kept his continuing battle with the cancer secret—he told everyone that he had been
“cured”—just as he had kept quiet about his diagnosis in October 2003. Such secrecy was
not surprising; it was part of his nature. What was more surprising was his decision to
speak very personally and publicly about his cancer diagnosis. Although he rarely gave
speeches other than his staged product demonstrations, he accepted Stanford’s invitation to
give its June 2005 commencement address. He was in a reflective mood after his health
scare and turning fifty.
For help with the speech, he called the brilliant scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good
Men, The West Wing). Jobs sent him some thoughts. “That was in February, and I heard
nothing, so I ping him again in April, and he says, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and I send him a few more
thoughts,” Jobs recounted. “I finally get him on the phone, and he keeps saying ‘Yeah,’ but
finally it’s the beginning of June, and he never sent me anything.”
Jobs got panicky. He had always written his own presentations, but he had never done a
commencement address. One night he sat down and wrote the speech himself, with no help
other than bouncing ideas off his wife. As a result, it turned out to be a very intimate and
simple talk, with the unadorned and personal feel of a perfect Steve Jobs product.
Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a story.”
Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story. And that was the approach Jobs
chose. “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he began. “That’s it. No big
deal. Just three stories.”
The first was about dropping out of Reed College. “I could stop taking the required
classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more
interesting.” The second was about how getting fired from Apple turned out to be good for
him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything.” The students were unusually attentive, despite a plane
circling overhead with a banner that exhorted “recycle all e-waste,” and it was his third tale
that enthralled them. It was about being diagnosed with cancer and the awareness it
brought:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to
help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations,
all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the
best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already
naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

The artful minimalism of the speech gave it simplicity, purity, and charm. Search where
you will, from anthologies to YouTube, and you won’t find a better commencement
address. Others may have been more important, such as George Marshall’s at Harvard in
1947 announcing a plan to rebuild Europe, but none has had more grace.

A Lion at Fifty

		自动登录	找回密码
密码			立即注册