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

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 inhouse

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 multitouch,

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 phonesize

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 ionexchange

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.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 741