CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 4 page

evening he announced, “I could probably eat a little pumpkin pie,” and the even-tempered Brown

created a beautiful pie from scratch in an hour. Jobs ate only one bite, but Brown was thrilled.

Powell talked to eating disorder specialists and psychiatrists, but her husband tended to shun

them. He refused to take any medications, or be treated in any way, for his depression. “When you

have feelings,” he said, “like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to

lead an artificial life.” In fact he swung to the other extreme. He became morose, tearful, and

dramatic as he lamented to all around him that he was about to die. The depression became part of

the vicious cycle by making him even less likely to eat.

Pictures and videos of Jobs looking emaciated began to appear online, and soon rumors were

swirling about how sick he was. The problem, Powell realized, was that the rumors were true, and

they were not going to go away. Jobs had agreed only reluctantly to go on medical leave two years

earlier, when his liver was failing, and this time he also resisted the idea. It would be like leaving

his homeland, unsure that he would ever return. When he finally bowed to the inevitable, in

January 2011, the board members were expecting it; the telephone meeting in which he told them

that he wanted another leave took only three minutes. He had often discussed with the board, in

executive session, his thoughts about who could take over if anything happened to him, presenting

both short-term and longer-term combinations of options. But there was no doubt that, in this

current situation, Tim Cook would again take charge of day-to-day operations.

The following Saturday afternoon, Jobs allowed his wife to convene a meeting of his doctors.

He realized that he was facing the type of problem that he never permitted at Apple. His treatment

was fragmented rather than integrated. Each of his myriad maladies was being treated by different

specialists—oncologists, pain specialists, nutritionists, hepatologists, and hematologists—but they

were not being co-ordinated in a cohesive approach, the way James Eason had done in Memphis.

“One of the big issues in the health care industry is the lack of caseworkers or advocates that are

the quarterback of each team,” Powell said. This was particularly true at Stanford, where nobody

seemed in charge of figuring out how nutrition was related to pain care and to oncology. So

Powell asked the various Stanford specialists to come to their house for a meeting that also

included some outside doctors with a more aggressive and integrated approach, such as David

Agus of USC. They agreed on a new regimen for dealing with the pain and for coordinating the

other treatments.

Thanks to some pioneering science, the team of doctors had been able to keep Jobs one step

ahead of the cancer. He had become one of the first twenty people in the world to have all of the

genes of his cancer tumor as well as of his normal DNA sequenced. It was a process that, at the

time, cost more than $100,000.

The gene sequencing and analysis were done collaboratively by teams at Stanford, Johns

Hopkins, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. By knowing the unique genetic and

molecular signature of Jobs’s tumors, his doctors had been able to pick specific drugs that directly

targeted the defective molecular pathways that caused his cancer cells to grow in an abnormal

manner. This approach, known as molecular targeted therapy, was more effective than traditional

chemotherapy, which attacks the process of division of all the body’s cells, cancerous or not. This

targeted therapy was not a silver bullet, but at times it seemed close to one: It allowed his doctors

to look at a large number of drugs—common and uncommon, already available or only in

development—to see which three or four might work best. Whenever his cancer mutated and

repaved around one of these drugs, the doctors had another drug lined up to go next.

Although Powell was diligent in overseeing her husband’s care, he was the one who made the

final decision on each new treatment regimen. A typical example occurred in May 2011, when he

held a meeting with George Fisher and other doctors from Stanford, the gene-sequencing analysts

from the Broad Institute, and his outside consultant David Agus. They all gathered around a table

at a suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Palo Alto. Powell did not come, but their son, Reed, did. For

three hours there were presentations from the Stanford and Broad researchers on the new

information they had learned about the genetic signatures of his cancer. Jobs was his usual feisty

self. At one point he stopped a Broad Institute analyst who had made the mistake of using

PowerPoint slides. Jobs chided him and explained why Apple’s Keynote presentation software

was better; he even offered to teach him how to use it. By the end of the meeting, Jobs and his

team had gone through all of the molecular data, assessed the rationales for each of the potential

therapies, and come up with a list of tests to help them better prioritize these.

One of his doctors told him that there was hope that his cancer, and others like it, would soon

be considered a manageable chronic disease, which could be kept at bay until the patient died of

something else. “I’m either going to be one of the first to be able to outrun a cancer like this, or I’

m going to be one of the last to die from it,” Jobs told me right after one of the meetings with his

doctors. “Either among the first to make it to shore, or the last to get dumped.”

Visitors

When his 2011 medical leave was announced, the situation seemed so dire that Lisa Brennan-Jobs

got back in touch after more than a year and arranged to fly from New York the following week.

Her relationship with her father had been built on layers of resentment. She was understandably

scarred by having been pretty much abandoned by him for her first ten years. Making matters

worse, she had inherited some of his prickliness and, he felt, some of her mother’s sense of

grievance. “I told her many times that I wished I’d been a better dad when she was five, but now

she should let things go rather than be angry the rest of her life,” he recalled just before Lisa

arrived.

The visit went well. Jobs was beginning to feel a little better, and he was in a mood to mend

fences and express his affection for those around him. At age thirty-two, Lisa was in a serious

relationship for one of the first times in her life. Her boyfriend was a struggling young filmmaker

from California, and Jobs went so far as to suggest she move back to Palo Alto if they got married.

“Look, I don’t know how long I am for this world,” he told her. “The doctors can’t really tell me.

If you want to see more of me, you’re going to have to move out here. Why don’t you consider

it?” Even though Lisa did not move west, Jobs was pleased at how the reconciliation had worked

out. “I hadn’t been sure I wanted her to visit, because I was sick and didn’t want other

complications. But I’m very glad she came. It helped settle a lot of things in me.”

Jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to repair fences. Google’s cofounder

Larry Page, who lived less than three blocks away, had just announced plans to retake the reins of

the company from Eric Schmidt. He knew how to flatter Jobs: He asked if he could come by and

get tips on how to be a good CEO. Jobs was still furious at Google. “My first thought was, ‘Fuck

you,’” he recounted. “But then I thought about it and realized that everybody helped me when I

was young, from Bill Hewlett to the guy down the block who worked for HP. So I called him back

and said sure.” Page came over, sat in Jobs’s living room, and listened to his ideas on building

great products and durable companies. Jobs recalled:

We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team

of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the

company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus.

Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five

products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning

you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. I tried to be

as helpful as I could. I will continue to do that with people like Mark Zuckerberg too. That’s how I’m

going to spend part of the time I have left. I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great

companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should

do my best to repay.

The announcement of Jobs’s 2011 medical leave prompted others to make a pilgrimage to the

house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton, for example, came by and talked about everything from the

Middle East to American politics. But the most poignant visit was from the other tech prodigy

born in 1955, the guy who, for more than three decades, had been Jobs’s rival and partner in

defining the age of personal computers.

Bill Gates had never lost his fascination with Jobs. In the spring of 2011 I was at a dinner with

him in Washington, where he had come to discuss his foundation’s global health endeavors. He

expressed amazement at the success of the iPad and how Jobs, even while sick, was focusing on

ways to improve it. “Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and

Steve is still coming up with amazing new products,” he said wistfully. “Maybe I should have

stayed in that game.” He smiled to make sure that I knew he was joking, or at least half joking.

Through their mutual friend Mike Slade, Gates made arrangements to visit Jobs in May. The

day before it was supposed to happen, Jobs’s assistant called to say he wasn’t feeling well enough.

But it was rescheduled, and early one afternoon Gates drove to Jobs’s house, walked through the

back gate to the open kitchen door, and saw Eve studying at the table. “Is Steve around?” he

asked. Eve pointed him to the living room.

They spent more than three hours together, just the two of them, reminiscing. “We were like the

old guys in the industry looking back,” Jobs recalled. “He was happier than I’ve ever seen him,

and I kept thinking how healthy he looked.” Gates was similarly struck by how Jobs, though

scarily gaunt, had more energy than he expected. He was open about his health problems and, at

least that day, feeling optimistic. His sequential regimens of targeted drug treatments, he told

Gates, were like “jumping from one lily pad to another,” trying to stay a step ahead of the cancer.

Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools

in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while

using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so

far, made surprisingly little impact on schools—far less than on other realms of society such as

media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said, computers and mobile devices would

have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback.

They also talked a lot about the joys of family, including how lucky they were to have good

kids and be married to the right women. “We laughed about how fortunate it was that he met

Laurene, and she’s kept him semi-sane, and I met Melinda, and she’s kept me semi-sane,” Gates

recalled. “We also discussed how it’s challenging to be one of our children, and how do we

mitigate that. It was pretty personal.” At one point Eve, who in the past had been in horse shows

with Gates’s daughter Jennifer, wandered in from the kitchen, and Gates asked her what jumping

routines she liked best.

As their hours together drew to a close, Gates complimented Jobs on “the incredible stuff” he

had created and for being able to save Apple in the late 1990s from the bozos who were about to

destroy it. He even made an interesting concession. Throughout their careers they had adhered to

competing philosophies on one of the most fundamental of all digital issues: whether hardware

and software should be tightly integrated or more open. “I used to believe that the open, horizontal

model would prevail,” Gates told him. “But you proved that the integrated, vertical model could

also be great.” Jobs responded with his own admission. “Your model worked too,” he said.

They were both right. Each model had worked in the realm of personal computers, where

Macintosh coexisted with a variety of Windows machines, and that was likely to be true in the

realm of mobile devices as well. But after recounting their discussion, Gates added a caveat: “The

integrated approach works well when Steve is at the helm. But it doesn’t mean it will win many

rounds in the future.” Jobs similarly felt compelled to add a caveat about Gates after describing

their meeting: “Of course, his fragmented model worked, but it didn’t make really great products.

It produced crappy products. That was the problem. The big problem. At least over time.”

“That Day Has Come”

Jobs had many other ideas and projects that he hoped to develop. He wanted to disrupt the

textbook industry and save the spines of spavined students bearing backpacks by creating

electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad. He was also working with Bill Atkinson, his

friend from the original Macintosh team, on devising new digital technologies that worked at the

pixel level to allow people to take great photographs using their iPhones even in situations without

much light. And he very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers,

music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an integrated

television set that is completely easy to use,” he told me. “It would be seamlessly synced with all

of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for

DVD players and cable channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I

finally cracked it.”

But by July 2011, his cancer had spread to his bones and other parts of his body, and his

doctors were having trouble finding targeted drugs that could beat it back. He was in pain,

sleeping erratically, had little energy, and stopped going to work. He and Powell had reserved a

sailboat for a family cruise scheduled for the end of that month, but those plans were scuttled. He

was eating almost no solid food, and he spent most of his days in his bedroom watching television.

In August, I got a message that he wanted me to come visit. When I arrived at his house, at mid

-morning on a Saturday, he was still asleep, so I sat with his wife and kids in the garden, filled

with a profusion of yellow roses and various types of daisies, until he sent word that I should

come in. I found him curled up on the bed, wearing khaki shorts and a white turtleneck. His legs

were shockingly sticklike, but his smile was easy and his mind quick. “We better hurry, because I

have very little energy,” he said.

He wanted to show me some of his personal pictures and let me pick a few to use in the book.

Because he was too weak to get out of bed, he pointed to various drawers in the room, and I

carefully brought him the photographs in each. As I sat on the side of the bed, I held them up, one

at a time, so he could see them. Some prompted stories; others merely elicited a grunt or a smile. I

had never seen a picture of his father, Paul Jobs, and I was startled when I came across a snapshot

of a handsome hardscrabble 1950s dad holding a toddler. “Yes, that’s him,” he said. “You can use

it.” He then pointed to a box near the window that contained a picture of his father looking at him

lovingly at his wedding. “He was a great man,” Jobs said quietly. I murmured something along the

lines of “He would have been proud of you.” Jobs corrected me: “He was proud of me.”

For a while, the pictures seemed to energize him. We discussed what various people from his

past, ranging from Tina Redse to Mike Markkula to Bill Gates, now thought of him. I recounted

what Gates had said after he described his last visit with Jobs, which was that Apple had shown

that the integrated approach could work, but only “when Steve is at the helm.” Jobs thought that

was silly. “Anyone could make better products that way, not just me,” he said. So I asked him to

name another company that made great products by insisting on end-to-end integration. He

thought for a while, trying to come up with an example. “The car companies,” he finally said, but

then he added, “Or at least they used to.”

When our discussion turned to the sorry state of the economy and politics, he offered a few

sharp opinions about the lack of strong leadership around the world. “I’m disappointed in

Obama,” he said. “He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss

them off.” He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s not a

problem I ever had.”

After two hours, he grew quiet, so I got off the bed and started to leave. “Wait,” he said, as he

waved to me to sit back down. It took a minute or two for him to regain enough energy to talk. “I

had a lot of trepidation about this project,” he finally said, referring to his decision to cooperate

with this book. “I was really worried.”

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to

know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write

about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make

sure someone heard what I had to say.”

He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what

conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your

book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a

response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then

it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad.

Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.” By then, his eyes were closed and his energy

gone, so I quietly took my leave.

As his health deteriorated throughout the summer, Jobs slowly began to face the inevitable: He

would not be returning to Apple as CEO. So it was time for him to resign. He wrestled with the

decision for weeks, discussing it with his wife, Bill Campbell, Jony Ive, and George Riley. “One

of the things I wanted to do for Apple was to set an example of how you do a transfer of power

right,” he told me. He joked about all the rough transitions that had occurred at the company over

the past thirty-five years. “It’s always been a drama, like a third-world country. Part of my goal

has been to make Apple the world’s best company, and having an orderly transition is key to that.”

The best time and place to make the transition, he decided, was at the company’s regularly

scheduled August 24 board meeting. He was eager to do it in person, rather than merely send in a

letter or attend by phone, so he had been pushing himself to eat and regain strength. The day

before the meeting, he decided he could make it, but he needed the help of a wheelchair.

Arrangements were made to have him driven to headquarters and wheeled to the boardroom as

secretly as possible.

He arrived just before 11 a.m., when the board members were finishing committee reports and

other routine business. Most knew what was about to happen. But instead of going right to the

topic on everyone’s mind, Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer, the chief financial officer, went

through the results for the quarter and the projections for the year ahead. Then Jobs said quietly

that he had something personal to say. Cook asked if he and the other top managers should leave,

and Jobs paused for more than thirty seconds before he decided they should. Once the room was

cleared of all but the six outside directors, he began to read aloud from a letter he had dictated and

revised over the previous weeks. “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no

longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,” it

began. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

The letter was simple, direct, and only eight sentences long. In it he suggested that Cook

replace him, and he offered to serve as chairman of the board. “I believe Apple’s brightest and

most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its

success in a new role.”

There was a long silence. Al Gore was the first to speak, and he listed Jobs’s accomplishments

during his tenure. Mickey Drexler added that watching Jobs transform Apple was “the most

incredible thing I’ve ever seen in business,” and Art Levinson praised Jobs’s diligence in ensuring

that there was a smooth transition. Campbell said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes as the

formal resolutions transferring power were passed.

Over lunch, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller came in to display mockups of some products that

Apple had in the pipeline. Jobs peppered them with questions and thoughts, especially about what

capacities the fourth-generation cellular networks might have and what features needed to be in

future phones. At one point Forstall showed off a voice recognition app. As he feared, Jobs

grabbed the phone in the middle of the demo and proceeded to see if he could confuse it. “What’s

the weather in Palo Alto?” he asked. The app answered. After a few more questions, Jobs

challenged it: “Are you a man or a woman?” Amazingly, the app answered in its robotic voice,

“They did not assign me a gender.” For a moment the mood lightened.

When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that HP had

suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber and declared

that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought

they had left it in good hands,” he said. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It’s

tragic. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple.” As he prepared to

leave, the board members gathered around to give him a hug.

After meeting with his executive team to explain the news, Jobs rode home with George Riley.

When they arrived at the house, Powell was in the backyard harvesting honey from her hives, with

help from Eve. They took off their screen helmets and brought the honey pot to the kitchen, where

Reed and Erin had gathered, so that they could all celebrate the graceful transition. Jobs took a

spoonful of the honey and pronounced it wonderfully sweet.

That evening, he stressed to me that his hope was to remain as active as his health allowed. “I’

m going to work on new products and marketing and the things that I like,” he said. But when I

asked how it really felt to be relinquishing control of the company he had built, his tone turned

wistful, and he shifted into the past tense. “I’ve had a very lucky career, a very lucky life,” he

replied. “I’ve done all that I can do.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

LEGACY

The Brightest Heaven of Invention

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

FireWire

His personality was reflected in the products he created. Just as the core of Apple’s philosophy,

from the original Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad a generation later, was the end-to-end integration

of hardware and software, so too was it the case with Steve Jobs: His passions, perfectionism,

demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his

approach to business and the products that resulted.

The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products begins with his most

salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to

stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he

was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan’s music or why whatever product he was unveiling at

that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be

terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping off Apple.

This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world. Colleagues referred to the hero/shithead

dichotomy. You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day. The same was true of

products, ideas, even food: Something was either “the best thing ever,” or it was shitty, braindead,

inedible. As a result, any perceived flaw could set off a rant. The finish on a piece of metal,

the curve of the head of a screw, the shade of blue on a box, the intuitiveness of a navigation

screen—he would declare them to “completely suck” until that moment when he suddenly

pronounced them “absolutely perfect.” He thought of himself as an artist, which he was, and he

indulged in the temperament of one.

His quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end control of every

product that it made. He got hives, or worse, when contemplating great Apple software running on

another company’s crappy hardware, and he likewise was allergic to the thought of unapproved

apps or content polluting the perfection of an Apple device. This ability to integrate hardware and

software and content into one unified system enabled him to impose simplicity. The astronomer

Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.

This instinct for integrated systems put him squarely on one side of the most fundamental

divide in the digital world: open versus closed. The hacker ethos handed down from the

Homebrew Computer Club favored the open approach, in which there was little centralized

control and people were free to modify hardware and software, share code, write to open

standards, shun proprietary systems, and have content and apps that were compatible with a

variety of devices and operating systems. The young Wozniak was in that camp: The Apple II he

designed was easily opened and sported plenty of slots and ports that people could jack into as

they pleased. With the Macintosh Jobs became a founding father of the other camp. The

Macintosh would be like an appliance, with the hardware and software tightly woven together and

closed to modifications. The hacker ethos would be sacrificed in order to create a seamless and

simple user experience.

This led Jobs to decree that the Macintosh operating system would not be available for any

other company’s hardware. Microsoft pursued the opposite strategy, allowing its Windows

operating system to be promiscuously licensed. That did not produce the most elegant computers,

but it did lead to Microsoft’s dominating the world of operating systems. After Apple’s market

share shrank to less than 5%, Microsoft’s approach was declared the winner in the personal

computer realm.

In the longer run, however, there proved to be some advantages to Jobs’s model. Even with a

small market share, Apple was able to maintain a huge profit margin while other computer makers

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