CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 2 page

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.

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.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 593