THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 1 page

Playing by His Own Set of Rules

The original Mac team in 1984: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and Jerry

Manock

When Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team, he got a briefing from Bud Tribble, the other

software designer, about the huge amount of work that still needed to be done. Jobs wanted it

finished by January 1982, less than a year away. “That’s crazy,” Hertzfeld said. “There’s no way.”

Tribble said that Jobs would not accept any contrary facts. “The best way to describe the situation

is a term from Star Trek,” Tribble explained. “Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld

looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He

can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it

hard to have realistic schedules.”

Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from the “Menagerie” episodes of Star Trek, “in

which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force.” He meant the phrase to

be a compliment as well as a caution: “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field,

but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.”

At first Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of working with

Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The reality distortion field was a

confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend

any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” he said.

There was little that could shield you from the force, Hertzfeld discovered. “Amazingly, the

reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often

discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a

force of nature.” After Jobs decreed that the sodas in the office refrigerator be replaced by

Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices, someone on the team had T-shirts made. “Reality

Distortion Field,” they said on the front, and on the back, “It’s in the juice!”

To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended

to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling. He would assert something—be it a

fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without even

considering the truth. It came from willfully defying reality, not only to others but to himself. “He

can deceive himself,” said Bill Atkinson. “It allowed him to con people into believing his vision,

because he has personally embraced and internalized it.”

A lot of people distort reality, of course. When Jobs did so, it was often a tactic for

accomplishing something. Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest as Jobs was tactical,

marveled at how effective it could be. “His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of

the future, such as telling me that I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realize

that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.”

When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality

distortion field, they were almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi

Coleman. “He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving purple

Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was

empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a

fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You

did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him. He had

some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires.

Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was

special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. “He thinks there are a few people who are special—

people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India—and he’s one of them,” said

Hertzfeld. “He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost

like Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher’s concept of the will to power

and the special nature of the Überman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke

Zarathustra, “The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now

conquers the world.” If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done

with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in

small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in

handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him.

Another key aspect of Jobs’s worldview was his binary way of categorizing things. People were

either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.”

Bill Atkinson, the Mac designer who fell on the good side of these dichotomies, described what

it was like:

It was difficult working under Steve, because there was a great polarity between gods and shitheads. If

you were a god, you were up on a pedestal and could do no wrong. Those of us who were considered to

be gods, as I was, knew that we were actually mortal and made bad engineering decisions and farted

like any person, so we were always afraid that we would get knocked off our pedestal. The ones who

were shitheads, who were brilliant engineers working very hard, felt there was no way they could get

appreciated and rise above their status.

But these categories were not immutable, for Jobs could rapidly reverse himself. When briefing

Hertzfeld about the reality distortion field, Tribble specifically warned him about Jobs’s tendency

to resemble high-voltage alternating current. “Just because he tells you that something is awful or

great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow,” Tribble explained. “If you tell

him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it,

exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of

it.”

The audacity of this pirouette technique would have dazzled Diaghilev. “If one line of

argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another,” Hertzfeld said. “Sometimes, he

would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without

acknowledging that he ever thought differently.” That happened repeatedly to Bruce Horn, the

programmer who, with Tesler, had been lured from Xerox PARC. “One week I’d tell him about an

idea that I had, and he would say it was crazy,” recalled Horn. “The next week, he’d come and

say, ‘Hey I have this great idea’—and it would be my idea! You’d call him on it and say, ‘Steve, I

told you that a week ago,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ and just move right along.”

It was as if Jobs’s brain circuits were missing a device that would modulate the extreme spikes

of impulsive opinions that popped into his mind. So in dealing with him, the Mac team adopted an

audio concept called a “low pass filter.” In processing his input, they learned to reduce the

amplitude of his high-frequency signals. That served to smooth out the data set and provide a less

jittery moving average of his evolving attitudes. “After a few cycles of him taking alternating

extreme positions,” said Hertzfeld, “we would learn to low pass filter his signals and not react to

the extremes.”

Was Jobs’s unfiltered behavior caused by a lack of emotional sensitivity? No. Almost the

opposite. He was very emotionally attuned,

able to read people and know their psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. He could stun an

unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He intuitively knew when

someone was faking it or truly knew something. This made him masterful at cajoling, stroking,

persuading, flattering, and intimidating people. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly

what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” Joanna

Hoffman said. “It’s a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate

people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so

then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.”

Ann Bowers became an expert at dealing with Jobs’s perfectionism, petulance, and prickliness.

She had been the human resources director at Intel, but had stepped aside after she married its

cofounder Bob Noyce. She joined Apple in 1980 and served as a calming mother figure who

would step in after one of Jobs’s tantrums. She would go to his office, shut the door, and gently

lecture him. “I know, I know,” he would say. “Well, then, please stop doing it,” she would insist.

Bowers recalled, “He would be good for a while, and then a week or so later I would get a call

again.” She realized that he could barely contain himself. “He had these huge expectations, and if

people didn’t deliver, he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t control himself. I could understand why

Steve would get upset, and he was usually right, but it had a hurtful effect. It created a fear factor.

He was self-aware, but that didn’t always modify his behavior.”

Jobs became close to Bowers and her husband, and he would drop in at their Los Gatos Hills

home unannounced. She would hear his motorcycle in the distance and say, “I guess we have

Steve for dinner again.” For a while she and Noyce were like a surrogate family. “He was so

bright and also so needy. He needed a grown-up, a father figure, which Bob became, and I became

like a mother figure.”

There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not

crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an eagerness to

please. “His behavior can be emotionally draining, but if you survive, it works,” Hoffman said.

You could also push back—sometimes—and

not only survive but thrive. That didn’t always work; Raskin tried it, succeeded for a while, and

then was destroyed. But if you were calmly confident, if Jobs sized you up and decided that you

knew what you were doing, he would respect you. In both his personal and his professional life

over the years, his inner circle tended to include many more strong people than toadies.

The Mac team knew that. Every year, beginning in 1981, it gave out an award to the person

who did the best job of standing up to him. The award was partly a joke, but also partly real, and

Jobs knew about it and liked it. Joanna Hoffman won the first year. From an Eastern European

refugee family, she had a strong temper and will. One day, for example, she discovered that Jobs

had changed her marketing projections in a way she found totally reality-distorting. Furious, she

marched to his office. “As I’m climbing the stairs, I told his assistant I am going to take a knife

and stab it into his heart,” she recounted. Al Eisenstat, the corporate counsel, came running out to

restrain her. “But Steve heard me out and backed down.”

Hoffman won the award again in 1982. “I remember being envious of Joanna, because she

would stand up to Steve and I didn’t have the nerve yet,” said Debi Coleman, who joined the Mac

team that year. “Then, in 1983, I got the award. I had learned you had to stand up for what you

believe, which Steve respected. I started getting promoted by him after that.” Eventually she rose

to become head of manufacturing.

One day Jobs barged into the cubicle of one of Atkinson’s engineers and uttered his usual “This

is shit.” As Atkinson recalled, “The guy said, ‘No it’s not, it’s actually the best way,’ and he

explained to Steve the engineering trade-offs he’d made.” Jobs backed down. Atkinson taught his

team to put Jobs’s words through a translator. “We learned to interpret ‘This is shit’ to actually be

a question that means, ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do it.’” But the story had a coda, which

Atkinson also found instructive. Eventually the engineer found an even better way to perform the

function that Jobs had criticized. “He did it better because Steve had challenged him,” said

Atkinson, “which shows you can push back on him but should also listen, for he’s usually right.”

Jobs’s prickly behavior was partly driven by his perfectionism and

his impatience with those who made compromises in order to get a product out on time and on

budget. “He could not make trade-offs well,” said Atkinson. “If someone didn’t care to make their

product perfect, they were a bozo.” At the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981, for example,

Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. It was not great—it had a fiveinch

screen and not much memory—but it worked well enough. As Osborne famously declared,

“Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous.” Jobs found that approach to be morally

appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. “This guy just doesn’t get it,” Jobs

repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. “He’s not making art, he’s making shit.”

One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the

Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon

started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to

shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went

to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten

seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year

that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.

“Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight

seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger

picture.”

The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great

product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the

design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the

competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little

greater.” He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in

Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great

art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re

going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

Was all of his stormy and abusive behavior necessary?

Probably not, nor was it justified. There were other ways to have motivated his team. Even

though the Macintosh would turn out to be great, it was way behind schedule and way over budget

because of Jobs’s impetuous interventions. There was also a cost in brutalized human feelings,

which caused much of the team to burn out. “Steve’s contributions could have been made without

so many stories about him terrorizing folks,” Wozniak said. “I like being more patient and not

having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good family. If the Macintosh project had

been run my way, things probably would have been a mess. But I think if it had been a mix of

both our styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve did it.”

But even though Jobs’s style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It infused

Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they

could accomplish what seemed impossible. They had T-shirts made that read “90 hours a week

and loving it!” Out of a fear of Jobs mixed with an incredibly strong urge to impress him, they

exceeded their own expectations. “I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good

people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things,

you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to

work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team.

They will tell you it was worth the pain.”

Most of them agree. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything

right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the

absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE DESIGN

Real Artists Simplify

A Bauhaus Aesthetic

Unlike most kids who grew up in Eichler homes, Jobs knew what they were and why they were so

wonderful. He liked the notion of simple and clean modernism produced for the masses. He also

loved listening to his father describe the styling intricacies of various cars. So from the beginning

at Apple, he believed that great industrial design—a colorfully simple logo, a sleek case for the

Apple II—would set the company apart and make its products distinctive.

The company’s first office, after it moved out of his family garage, was in a small building it

shared with a Sony sales office. Sony was famous for its signature style and memorable product

designs, so Jobs would drop by to study the marketing material. “He would come in looking

scruffy and fondle the product brochures and point out design features,” said Dan’l Lewin, who

worked there. “Every now and then, he would ask, ‘Can I take this brochure?’” By 1980, he had

hired Lewin.

His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony receded around June 1981, when he began

attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen. The meeting that year focused on

Italian style, and it featured the architect-designer Mario Bellini, the filmmaker Bernardo

Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna Agnelli.

“I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like the kid in Breaking Away reveres the Italian

bikers,” recalled Jobs, “so it was an amazing inspiration.”

In Aspen he was exposed to the spare and functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus

movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in the buildings, living suites, sans serif font

typography, and furniture on the Aspen Institute campus. Like his mentors Walter Gropius and

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bayer believed that there should be no distinction between fine art

and applied industrial design. The modernist International Style championed by the Bauhaus

taught that design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit. It emphasized rationality and

functionality by employing clean lines and forms. Among the maxims preached by Mies and

Gropius were “God is in the details” and “Less is more.” As with Eichler homes, the artistic

sensibility was combined with the capability for mass production.

Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 design

conference, the theme of which was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be.” He predicted the

passing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. “The current wave of industrial design is

Sony’s high-tech look, which is gunmetal gray, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it,” he said.

“It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” He proposed an alternative, born of the Bauhaus, that was

more true to the function and nature of the products. “What we’re going to do is make the

products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech.

We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like

Braun does with its electronics.”

He repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products would be clean and simple. “We will make

them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of

black, black, black, black, like Sony,” he preached. “So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’

re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the

product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”

Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the

ultimate sophistication.”

Jobs felt that design simplicity should be linked to making products easy to use. Those goals do

not always go together. Sometimes a design can be so sleek and simple that a user finds it

intimidating or unfriendly to navigate. “The main thing in our design is that we have to make

things intuitively obvious,” Jobs told the crowd of design mavens. For example, he extolled the

desktop metaphor he was creating for the Macintosh. “People know how to deal with a desktop

intuitively. If you walk into an office, there are papers on the desk. The one on the top is the most

important. People know how to switch priority. Part of the reason we model our computers on

metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.”

Speaking at the same time as Jobs that Wednesday afternoon, but in a smaller seminar room,

was Maya Lin, twenty-three, who had been catapulted into fame the previous November when her

Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. They struck up a close

friendship, and Jobs invited her to visit Apple. “I came to work with Steve for a week,” Lin

recalled. “I asked him, ‘Why do computers look like clunky TV sets? Why don’t you make

something thin? Why not a flat laptop?’” Jobs replied that this was indeed his goal, as soon as the

technology was ready.

At that time there was not much exciting happening in the realm of industrial design, Jobs felt.

He had a Richard Sapper lamp, which he admired, and he also liked the furniture of Charles and

Ray Eames and the Braun products of Dieter Rams. But there were no towering figures energizing

the world of industrial design the way that Raymond Loewy and Herbert Bayer had done. “There

really wasn’t much going on in industrial design, particularly in Silicon Valley, and Steve was

very eager to change that,” said Lin. “His design sensibility is sleek but not slick, and it’s playful.

He embraced minimalism, which came from his Zen devotion to simplicity, but he avoided

allowing that to make his products cold. They stayed fun. He’s passionate and super-serious about

design, but at the same time there’s a sense of play.”

As Jobs’s design sensibilities evolved, he became particularly attracted to the Japanese style

and began hanging out with its stars, such

as Issey Miyake and I. M. Pei. His Buddhist training was a big influence. “I have always found

Buddhism, Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular, to be aesthetically sublime,” he said. “The most

sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto. I’m deeply moved by what that culture

has produced, and it’s directly from Zen Buddhism.”

Like a Porsche

Jef Raskin’s vision for the Macintosh was that it would be like a boxy carry-on suitcase, which

would be closed by flipping up the keyboard over the front screen. When Jobs took over the

project, he decided to sacrifice portability for a distinctive design that wouldn’t take up much

space on a desk. He plopped down a phone book and declared, to the horror of the engineers, that

it shouldn’t have a footprint larger than that. So his design team of Jerry Manock and Terry

Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen above the computer box, with a keyboard that

was detachable.

One day in March 1981, Andy Hertzfeld came back to the office from dinner to find Jobs

hovering over their one Mac prototype in intense discussion with the creative services director,

James Ferris. “We need it to have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the Volkswagen

Beetle,” Jobs said. From his father he had developed an appreciation for the contours of classic

cars.

“No, that’s not right,” Ferris replied. “The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.”

“Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs countered. “It should be more like a Porsche!” Jobs

owned a Porsche 928 at the time. When Bill Atkinson was over one weekend, Jobs brought him

outside to admire the car. “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes,” he told Atkinson.

He also admired the design of the Mercedes. “Over the years, they’ve made the lines softer but the

details starker,” he said one day as he walked around the parking lot. “That’s what we have to do

with the Macintosh.”

Oyama drafted a preliminary design and had a plaster model made. The Mac team gathered

around for the unveiling and expressed their thoughts. Hertzfeld called it “cute.” Others also

seemed satisfied. Then Jobs let loose a blistering burst of criticism. “It’s way too boxy, it’s got to

be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of

the bevel.” With his new fluency in industrial design lingo, Jobs was referring to the angular or

curved edge connecting the sides of the computer. But then he gave a resounding compliment. “It’

s a start,” he said.

Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs’s previous

criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts

would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design’s evolution, but it

prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored. “By the fourth model,

I could barely distinguish it from the third one,” said Hertzfeld, “but Steve was always critical and

decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that I could barely perceive.”

One weekend Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto and again spent time studying appliances,

especially the Cuisinart. He came bounding into the Mac office that Monday, asked the design

team to go buy one, and made a raft of new suggestions based on its lines, curves, and bevels.

Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look friendly. As a result, it evolved to resemble a

human face. With the disk drive built in below the screen, the unit was taller and narrower than

most computers, suggesting a head. The recess near the base evoked a gentle chin, and Jobs

narrowed the strip of plastic at the top so that it avoided the Neanderthal forehead that made the

Lisa subtly unattractive. The patent for the design of the Apple case was issued in the name of

Steve Jobs as well as Manock and Oyama. “Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the lines, his

ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” Oyama later said. “To be honest, we didn’t know

what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”

Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what would appear on the screen. One day

Bill Atkinson burst into Texaco Towers all excited. He had just come up with a brilliant algorithm

that could draw circles and ovals onscreen quickly. The math for making circles usually required

calculating square roots, which the 68000

microprocessor didn’t support. But Atkinson did a workaround based on the fact that the sum of

a sequence of odd numbers produces a sequence of perfect squares (for example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3

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