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CHAPTER ELEVEN  THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD
      Playing by His Own Set of Rules
      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 highvoltage 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 highfrequency 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 five-inch 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 + 5 = 9, etc.). Hertzfeld recalled that when Atkinson fired up his demo, everyone was impressed except Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good,” he said, “but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners?”      “I don’t think we really need it,” said Atkinson, who explained that it would be almost impossible to do. “I wanted to keep the graphics routines lean and limit them to the primitives that truly needed to be done,” he recalled.
     “Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!” Jobs said, jumping up and getting more intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out the whiteboard and the tabletop and other objects that were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!” He dragged Atkinson out for a walk, pointing out car windows and billboards and street signs. “Within three blocks, we found seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I started pointing them out everywhere until he was completely convinced.”
     “When he finally got to a No Parking sign, I said, ‘Okay, you’re right, I give up. We need to have a rounded-corner rectangle as a primitive!’” Hertzfeld recalled, “Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast.” The dialogue boxes and windows on the Lisa and the Mac, and almost every other subsequent computer, ended up being rendered with rounded corners.
     At the calligraphy class he had audited at Reed, Jobs learned to love typefaces, with all of their serif and sans serif variations, proportional spacing, and leading. “When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me,” he later said of that class. Because the Mac was bitmapped, it was possible to devise an endless array of fonts, ranging from the elegant to the wacky, and render them pixel by pixel on the screen.
     To design these fonts, Hertzfeld recruited a high school friend from suburban Philadelphia, Susan Kare. They named the fonts after the stops on Philadelphia’s Main Line commuter train: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. Jobs found the process fascinating. Late one afternoon he stopped by and started brooding about the font names. They were “little cities that nobody’s ever heard of,” he complained. “They ought to be world-class cities!” The fonts were renamed Chicago, New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco, Toronto, and Venice.
     Markkula and some others could never quite appreciate Jobs’s obsession with typography. “His knowledge of fonts was remarkable, and he kept insisting on having great ones,” Markkula recalled. “I kept saying, ‘Fonts?!? Don’t we have more important things to do?’” In fact the delightful assortment of Macintosh fonts, when combined with laser-writer printing and great graphics capabilities, would help launch the desktop publishing industry and be a boon for Apple’s bottom line. It also introduced all sorts of regular folks, ranging from high school journalists to moms who edited PTA newsletters, to the quirky joy of knowing about fonts, which was once reserved for printers, grizzled editors, and other ink-stained wretches.
     Kare also developed the icons, such as the trash can for discarding files, that helped define graphical interfaces. She and Jobs hit it off because they shared an instinct for simplicity along with a desire to make the Mac whimsical. “He usually came in at the end of every day,” she said. “He’d always want to know what was new, and he’s always had good taste and a good sense for visual details.” Sometimes he came in on Sunday morning, so Kare made it a point to be there working.
Every now and then, she would run into a problem. He rejected one of her renderings of a rabbit, an icon for speeding up the mouse-click rate, saying that the furry creature looked “too gay.”
     Jobs lavished similar attention on the title bars atop windows and documents. He had Atkinson and Kare do them over and over again as he agonized over their look. He did not like the ones on the Lisa because they were too black and harsh. He wanted the ones on the Mac to be smoother, to have pinstripes. “We must have gone through twenty different title bar designs before he was happy,” Atkinson recalled. At one point Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making them spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs erupted. “Can you imagine looking at that every day?” he shouted. “It’s not just a little thing, it’s something we have to do right.”
     Chris Espinosa found one way to satisfy Jobs’s design demands and control-freak tendencies. One of Wozniak’s youthful acolytes from the days in the garage, Espinosa had been convinced to drop out of Berkeley by Jobs, who argued that he would always have a chance to study, but only one chance to work on the Mac. On his own, he decided to design a calculator for the computer. “We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting for Steve’s reaction,” Hertzfeld recalled.      “Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.” Espinosa kept refining it in response to Jobs’s critiques, day after day, but with each iteration came new criticisms. So finally one afternoon, when Jobs came by, Espinosa unveiled his inspired solution: “The Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the user to tweak and personalize the look of the calculator by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the buttons, the shading, the background, and other attributes. Instead of just laughing, Jobs plunged in and started to play around with the look to suit his tastes. After about ten minutes he got it the way he liked. His design, not surprisingly, was the one that shipped on the Mac and remained the standard for fifteen years.      Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent design language for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a world-class designer who would be for Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was codenamed Snow White, not because of his preference for the color but because the products to be designed were code-named after the seven dwarfs. The winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was responsible for the look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs flew to the Black Forest region of Bavaria to meet him and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s passion but also his spirited way of driving his Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per hour.      Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-America gene for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global” look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion,” a play on the familiar maxim that form follows function. He produced forty models of products to demonstrate the concept, and when Jobs saw them he proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted immediately for the Apple IIc, featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin grooves for both ventilation and decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the condition that he move to California. They shook hands and, in Esslinger’s not-so-modest words, “that handshake launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the history of industrial design.”
2  opened in Palo Alto in
Esslinger’s firm, frogdesign, mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract to work for Apple, and from then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration “Designed in California.”      From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully. One of the most extreme—and telling— implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said. “But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.”
     One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”      Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
     From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of packaging and presentation. People do judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-color design and kept trying to make it look better. “He got the guys to redo it fifty times,” recalled Alain Rossmann, a member of the Mac team who married Joanna Hoffman. “It was going to be thrown in the trash as soon as the consumer opened it, but he was obsessed by how it looked.” To Rossmann, this showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on expensive packaging while they were trying to save money on the memory chips. But for Jobs, each detail was essential to making the Macintosh amazing.
     When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson.
 
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN  BUILDING THE MAC
      The Journey Is the Reward
      Com petition
     When IBM introduced its personal computer in August 1981, Jobs had his team buy one and dissect it. Their consensus was that it sucked. Chris Espinosa called it “a half-assed, hackneyed attempt,” and there was some truth to that. It used old-fashioned commandline prompts and didn’t support bitmapped graphical displays. Apple became cocky, not realizing that corporate technology managers might feel more comfortable buying from an established company like IBM rather than one named after a piece of fruit. Bill Gates happened to be visiting Apple headquarters for a meeting on the day the IBM PC was announced. “They didn’t seem to care,” he said. “It took them a year to realize what had happened.”
     Reflecting its cheeky confidence, Apple took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” It cleverly positioned the upcoming computer battle as a two-way contest between the spunky and rebellious Apple and the establishment Goliath IBM, conveniently relegating to irrelevance companies such as Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne that were doing just as well as Apple.      Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition, but as a spiritual struggle. “If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years,” he told an interviewer. “Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation.” Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.”      Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs also took aim at another perceived competitor to his Macintosh: the company’s own Lisa. Partly it was psychological. He had been ousted from that group, and now he wanted to beat it. He also saw healthy rivalry as a way to motivate his troops. That’s why he bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. The problem was that the rivalry became unhealthy. Jobs repeatedly portrayed his band of engineers as the cool kids on the block, in contrast to the plodding HP engineer types working on the Lisa.
     More substantively, when he moved away from Jef Raskin’s plan for an inexpensive and underpowered portable appliance and reconceived the Mac as a desktop machine with a graphical user interface, it became a scaled-down version of the Lisa that would likely undercut it in the marketplace.
     Larry Tesler, who managed application software for the Lisa, realized that it would be important to design both machines to use many of the same software programs. So to broker peace, he arranged for Smith and Hertzfeld to come to the Lisa work space and demonstrate the Mac prototype. Twenty-five engineers showed up and were listening politely when, halfway into the presentation, the door burst open. It was Rich Page, a volatile engineer who was responsible for much of the Lisa’s design. “The Macintosh is going to destroy the Lisa!” he shouted. “The Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!” Neither Smith nor Hertzfeld responded, so Page continued his rant. “Jobs wants to destroy Lisa because we wouldn’t let him control it,” he said, looking as if he were about to cry. “Nobody’s going to buy a Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you don’t care!” He stormed out of the room and slammed the door, but a moment later he barged back in briefly. “I know it’s not your fault,” he said to Smith and Hertzfeld. “Steve Jobs is the problem. Tell Steve that he’s destroying Apple!”
     Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a lowcost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.
     End-to-end Control
     Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible with the architecture of the Lisa was motivated by more than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical component, one that was related to his penchant for control. He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies.
     “Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers,” explained ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber. “It would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” In later years Jobs’s wholewidget approach would distinguish the iPhone, iPod, and iPad from their competitors. It resulted in awesome products. But it was not always the best strategy for dominating a market. “From the first Mac to the latest iPhone, Jobs’s systems have always been sealed shut to prevent consumers from meddling and modifying them,” noted Leander Kahney, author of Cult of the Mac.
     Jobs’s desire to control the user experience had been at the heart of his debate with Wozniak over whether the Apple II would have slots that allow a user to plug expansion cards into a computer’s motherboard and thus add some new functionality. Wozniak won that argument: The Apple II had eight slots. But this time around it would be Jobs’s machine, not Wozniak’s, and the Macintosh would have limited slots. You wouldn’t even be able to open the case and get to the motherboard. For a hobbyist or hacker, that was uncool. But for Jobs, the Macintosh was for the masses. He wanted to give them a controlled experience.
     “It reflects his personality, which is to want control,” said Berry Cash, who was hired by Jobs in 1982 to be a market strategist at Texaco Towers. “Steve would talk about the Apple II and complain, ‘We don’t have control, and look at all these crazy things people are trying to do to it. That’s a mistake I’ll never make again.’” He went so far as to design special tools so that the Macintosh case could not be opened with a regular screwdriver. “We’re going to design this thing so nobody but Apple employees can get inside this box,” he told Cash.      Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t want to. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.
     There was one other advantage, he believed, to eliminating the cursor keys: It forced outside software developers to write programs specially for the Mac operating system, rather than merely writing generic software that could be ported to a variety of computers. That made for the type of tight vertical integration between application software, operating systems, and hardware devices that Jobs liked.
     Jobs’s desire for end-to-end control also made him allergic to proposals that Apple license the Macintosh operating system to other office equipment manufacturers and allow them to make Macintosh clones. The new and energetic Macintosh marketing director Mike Murray proposed a licensing program in a confidential memo to Jobs in May 1982. “We would like the Macintosh user environment to become an industry standard,” he wrote. “The hitch, of course, is that now one must buy Mac hardware in order to get this user environment. Rarely (if ever) has one company been able to create and maintain an industry-wide standard that cannot be shared with other manufacturers.” His proposal was to license the Macintosh operating system to Tandy. Because Tandy’s Radio Shack stores went after a different type of customer, Murray argued, it would not severely cannibalize Apple sales. But Jobs was congenitally averse to such a plan. His approach meant that the Macintosh remained a controlled environment that met his standards, but it also meant that, as Murray feared, it would have trouble securing its place as an industry standard in a world of IBM clones.      Machines of the Year
     As 1982 drew to a close, Jobs came to believe that he was going to be Time’s Man of the Year. He arrived at Texaco Towers one day with the magazine’s San Francisco bureau chief, Michael Moritz, and encouraged colleagues to give Moritz interviews. But Jobs did not end up on the cover. Instead the magazine chose “the Computer” as the topic for the year-end issue and called it “the Machine of the Year.”
     Accompanying the main story was a profile of Jobs, which was based on the reporting done by Moritz and written by Jay Cocks, an editor who usually handled rock music for the magazine. “With his smooth sales pitch and a blind faith that would have been the envy of the early Christian martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more than anyone, who kicked open the door and let the personal computer move in,” the story proclaimed. It was a richly reported piece, but also harsh at times—so harsh that Moritz (after he wrote a book about Apple and went on to be a partner in the venture firm Sequoia Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated it by complaining that his reporting had been “siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with gossipy benzene by an editor in New York whose regular task was to chronicle the wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article quoted Bud Tribble on Jobs’s “reality distortion field” and noted that he “would occasionally burst into tears at meetings.” Perhaps the best quote came from Jef Raskin. Jobs, he declared, “would have made an
excellent King of France.”
     To Jobs’s dismay, the magazine made public the existence of the daughter he had forsaken, Lisa Brennan. He knew that Kottke had been the one to tell the magazine about Lisa, and he berated him in the Mac group work space in front of a half dozen people. “When the Time reporter asked me if Steve had a daughter named Lisa, I said ‘Of course,’” Kottke recalled. “Friends don’t let friends deny that they’re the father of a child. I’m not going to let my friend be a jerk and deny paternity. He was really angry and felt violated and told me in front of everyone that I had betrayed him.”
     But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was not, after all, chosen as the Man of the Year. As he later told me:
     Time decided they were going to make me Man of the Year, and I was twenty-seven, so I actually cared about stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool. They sent out Mike Moritz to write a story. We’re the same age, and I had been very successful, and I could tell he was jealous and there was an edge to him. He wrote this terrible hatchet job. So the editors in New York get this story and say, “We can’t make this guy Man of the Year.” That really hurt. But it was a good lesson. It taught me to never get too excited about things like that, since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me the magazine, and I remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this computer sculpture thing. I thought, “Huh?” And then I read the article, and it was so awful that I actually cried.
        In fact there’s no reason to believe that Moritz was jealous or that he intended his reporting to be unfair. Nor was Jobs ever slated to be Man of the Year, despite what he thought. That year the top editors (I was then a junior editor there) decided early on to go with the computer rather than a person, and they commissioned, months in advance, a piece of art from the famous sculptor George Segal to be a gatefold cover image. Ray Cave was then the magazine’s editor. “We never considered Jobs,” he said. “You couldn’t personify the computer, so that was the first time we decided to go with an inanimate object. We never searched around
for a face to be put on the cover.”
     Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983—a full year before the Mac was ready—and Jobs paid his $5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of the Lisa team, Jobs went to New York to do publicity for it in his role as Apple’s chairman and poster boy.      He had learned from his public relations consultant Regis McKenna how to dole out exclusive interviews in a dramatic manner. Reporters from anointed publications were ushered in sequentially for their hour with him in his Carlyle Hotel suite, where a Lisa computer was set on a table and surrounded by cut flowers. The publicity plan called for Jobs to focus on the Lisa and not mention the Macintosh, because speculation about it could undermine the Lisa. But Jobs couldn’t help himself. In most of the stories based on his interviews that day—in Time, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune—the Macintosh was mentioned. “Later this year Apple will introduce a less powerful, less expensive version of Lisa, the Macintosh,” Fortune reported. “Jobs himself has directed that project.” Business Week quoted him as saying, “When it comes out, Mac is going to be the most incredible computer in the world.” He also admitted that the Mac and the Lisa would not be compatible. It was like launching the Lisa with the kiss of death.      The Lisa did indeed die a slow death. Within two years it would be discontinued. “It was too expensive, and we were trying to sell it to big companies when our expertise was selling to consumers,” Jobs later said. But there was a silver lining for Jobs: Within months of Lisa’s launch, it became clear that Apple had to pin its hopes on the Macintosh instead.
     Let’s Be Pirates!
     As the Macintosh team grew, it moved from
Texaco Towers to the main Apple buildings on Bandley Drive, finally settling in mid-1983 into Bandley 3. It had a modern atrium lobby with video games, which Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld chose, and a Toshiba compact disc stereo system with MartinLogan speakers and a hundred CDs. The software team was visible from the lobby in a fishbowl-like glass enclosure, and the kitchen was stocked daily with Odwalla juices. Over time the atrium attracted even more toys, most notably a Bösendorfer piano and a BMW motorcycle that Jobs felt would inspire an obsession with lapidary craftsmanship.
     Jobs kept a tight rein on the hiring process. The goal was to get people who were creative, wickedly smart, and slightly rebellious. The software team would make applicants play Defender, Smith’s favorite video game. Jobs would ask his usual offbeat questions to see how well the applicant could think in unexpected situations. One day he, Hertzfeld, and Smith interviewed a candidate for software manager who, it became clear as soon as he walked in the room, was too uptight and conventional to manage the wizards in the fishbowl. Jobs began to toy with him mercilessly. “How old were you when you lost your virginity?” he asked.
     The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?”      “Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward technical question.” But when the candidate droned on in his response, Jobs broke in. “Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,” he said, cracking up Smith and Hertzfeld.
     “I guess I’m not the right guy,” the poor man said as he got up to leave.
     For all of his obnoxious behavior, Jobs also had
the ability to instill in his team an esprit de corps. After tearing people down, he would find ways to lift them up and make them feel that being part of the Macintosh project was an amazing mission. Every six months he would take most of his team on a two-day retreat at a nearby resort.
     The retreat in September 1982 was at the Pajaro Dunes near Monterey. Fifty or so members of the Mac division sat in the lodge facing a fireplace. Jobs sat on top of a table in front of them. He spoke quietly for a while, then walked to an easel and began posting his thoughts.
     The first was “Don’t compromise.” It was an injunction that would, over time, be both helpful and harmful. Most technology teams made trade-offs. The Mac, on the other hand, would end up being as “insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly make it—but it would not ship for another sixteen months, way behind schedule. After mentioning a scheduled completion date, he told them, “It would be better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.” A different type of project manager, willing to make some trade-offs, might try to lock in dates after which no changes could be made. Not Jobs. He displayed another maxim: “It’s not done until it ships.”
     Another chart contained a koōan-like phrase that he later told me was his favorite maxim: “The journey is the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was a special corps with an exalted mission. Someday they would all look back on their journey together and, forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would regard it as a magical high point in their lives.
     At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid-to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.
     For the next two days there were presentations by various team leaders and the influential computer industry analyst Ben Rosen, with a lot of time in the evenings for pool parties and dancing. At the end, Jobs stood in front of the assemblage and gave a soliloquy. “As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe,” he said. “I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I’ve done in my life.” Years later most of those in the audience would be able to laugh about the “little hard to get along with” episodes and agree with him that creating that giant ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.      The next retreat was at the end of January 1983, the same month the Lisa launched, and there was a shift in tone. Four months earlier Jobs had written on his flip chart: “Don’t compromise.” This time one of the maxims was “Real artists ship.” Nerves were frayed. Atkinson had been left out of the publicity interviews for the Lisa launch, and he marched into Jobs’s hotel room and threatened to quit. Jobs tried to minimize the slight, but Atkinson refused to be mollified. Jobs got annoyed. “I don’t have time to deal with this now,” he said. “I have sixty other people out there who are pouring their hearts into the Macintosh, and they’re waiting for me to start the meeting.” With that he brushed past Atkinson to go address the faithful.
     Jobs proceeded to give a rousing speech in which he claimed that he had resolved the dispute with McIntosh audio labs to use the Macintosh name. (In fact the issue was still being negotiated, but the moment called for a bit of the old reality distortion field.) He pulled out a bottle of mineral water and symbolically christened the prototype onstage. Down the hall, Atkinson heard the loud cheer, and with a sigh joined the group. The ensuing party featured skinny-dipping in the pool, a bonfire on the beach, and loud music that lasted all night, which caused the hotel, La Playa in Carmel, to ask them never to come back.
     Another of Jobs’s maxims at the retreat was “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them behave like swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing to commandeer from others. As Susan Kare put it, “He meant, ‘Let’s have a renegade feeling to our group. We can move fast. We can get things done.’” To celebrate Jobs’s birthday a few weeks later, the team paid for a billboard on the road to Apple headquarters. It read: “Happy 28th Steve. The Journey is the Reward.—The
Pirates.”
     One of the Mac team’s programmers, Steve
Capps, decided this new spirit warranted hoisting a Jolly Roger. He cut a patch of black cloth and had Kare paint a skull and crossbones on it. The eye patch she put on the skull was an Apple logo. Late one Sunday night Capps climbed to the roof of their newly built Bandley 3 building and hoisted the flag on a scaffolding pole that the construction workers had left behind. It waved proudly for a few weeks, until members of the Lisa team, in a late-night foray, stole the flag and sent their Mac rivals a ransom note. Capps led a raid to recover it and was able to wrestle it from a secretary who was guarding it for the Lisa team. Some of the grown-ups overseeing Apple worried that Jobs’s buccaneer spirit was getting out of hand. “Flying that flag was really stupid,” said Arthur Rock. “It was telling the rest of the company they were no good.” But Jobs loved it, and he made sure it waved proudly all the way through to the completion of the Mac project. “We were the renegades, and we wanted people to know it,” he recalled.
     Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they could stand up to Jobs. If they knew what they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire it. By 1983 those most familiar with his reality distortion field had discovered something further: They could, if necessary, just quietly disregard what he decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would appreciate their renegade attitude and willingness to ignore authority. After all, that’s what he did.
     By far the most important example of this involved the choice of a disk drive for the Macintosh. Apple had a corporate division that built mass-storage devices, and it had developed a disk-drive system, code-named Twiggy, that could read and write onto those thin, delicate 5¼-inch floppy disks that older readers (who also remember Twiggy the model) will recall. But by the time the Lisa was ready to ship in the spring of 1983, it was clear that the Twiggy was buggy. Because the Lisa also came with a hard-disk drive, this was not a complete disaster. But the Mac had no hard disk, so it faced a crisis. “The Mac team was beginning to panic,” said Hertzfeld. “We were using a single Twiggy drive, and we didn’t have a hard disk to fall back on.”
     The team discussed the problem at the January 1983 retreat, and Debi Coleman gave Jobs data about the Twiggy failure rate. A few days later he drove to Apple’s factory in San Jose to see the Twiggy being made. More than half were rejected. Jobs erupted. With his face flushed, he began shouting and sputtering about firing everyone who worked there. Bob Belleville, the head of the Mac engineering team, gently guided him to the parking lot, where they could take a walk and talk about alternatives.
     One possibility that Belleville had been exploring was to use a new 3½-inch disk drive that Sony had developed. The disk was cased in sturdier plastic and could fit into a shirt pocket. Another option was to have a clone of Sony’s 3½-inch disk drive manufactured by a smaller Japanese supplier, the Alps Electronics Co., which had been supplying disk drives for the Apple II. Alps had already licensed the technology from Sony, and if they could build their own version in time it would be much cheaper.
     Jobs and Belleville, along with Apple veteran Rod Holt (the guy Jobs enlisted to design the first power supply for the Apple II), flew to Japan to figure out what to do. They took the bullet train from Tokyo to visit the Alps facility. The engineers there didn’t even have a working prototype, just a crude model. Jobs thought it was great, but Belleville was appalled. There was no way, he thought, that Alps could have it ready for the Mac within a year.
     As they proceeded to visit other Japanese companies, Jobs was on his worst behavior. He wore jeans and sneakers to meetings with Japanese managers in dark suits. When they formally handed him little gifts, as was the custom, he often left them behind, and he never reciprocated with gifts of his own. He would sneer when rows of engineers lined up to greet him, bow, and politely offer their products for inspection. Jobs hated both the devices and the obsequiousness. “What are you showing me this for?” he snapped at one stop. “This is a piece of crap! Anybody could build a better drive than this.” Although most of his hosts were appalled, some seemed amused. They had heard tales of his obnoxious style and brash behavior, and now they were getting to see it in full display.
     The final stop was the Sony factory, located in a drab suburb of Tokyo. To Jobs, it looked messy and inelegant. A lot of the work was done by hand. He hated it. Back at the hotel, Belleville argued for going with the Sony disk drive. It was ready to use. Jobs disagreed. He decided that they would work with Alps to produce their own drive, and he ordered Belleville to cease all work with Sony.
     Belleville decided it was best to partially ignore Jobs, and he asked a Sony executive to get its disk drive ready for use in the Macintosh. If and when it became clear that Alps could not deliver on time, Apple would switch to Sony. So Sony sent over the engineer who had developed the drive, Hidetoshi Komoto, a Purdue graduate who fortunately possessed a good sense of humor about his clandestine task.
     Whenever Jobs would come from his corporate office to visit the Mac team’s engineers—which was almost every afternoon—they would hurriedly find somewhere for Komoto to hide. At one point Jobs ran into him at a newsstand in Cupertino and recognized him from the meeting in Japan, but he didn’t suspect anything. The closest call was when Jobs came bustling onto the Mac work space unexpectedly one day while Komoto was sitting in one of the cubicles. A Mac engineer grabbed him and pointed him to a janitorial closet. “Quick, hide in this closet. Please! Now!” Komoto looked confused, Hertzfeld recalled, but he jumped up and did as told. He had to stay in the closet for five minutes, until Jobs left. The Mac engineers apologized. “No problem,” he replied. “But American business practices, they are very strange.
Very strange.”
     Belleville’s prediction came true. In May 1983 the folks at Alps admitted it would take them at least eighteen more months to get their clone of the Sony drive into production. At a retreat in Pajaro Dunes, Markkula grilled Jobs on what he was going to do. Finally, Belleville interrupted and said that he might have an alternative to the Alps drive ready soon. Jobs looked baffled for just a moment, and then it became clear to him why he’d glimpsed Sony’s top disk designer in Cupertino. “You son of a bitch!” Jobs said. But it was not in anger. There was a big grin on his face. As soon as he realized what Belleville and the other engineers had done behind his back, said Hertzfeld, “Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right thing.” It was, after all, what he would have done in their situation.
  
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN  ENTER SCULLEY
      The Pepsi Challenge
      The Courtship
     Mike Markkula had never wanted to be Apple’s president. He liked designing his new houses, flying his private plane, and living high off his stock options; he did not relish adjudicating conflict or curating highmaintenance egos. He had stepped into the role reluctantly, after he felt compelled to ease out Mike Scott, and he promised his wife the gig would be temporary. By the end of 1982, after almost two years, she gave him an order: Find a replacement right away.      Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there was a part of him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told Jobs that he was still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s president. So they launched a search for someone from the outside.
     The person they most wanted was Don Estridge, who had built IBM’s personal computer division from scratch and launched a PC that, even though Jobs and his team disparaged it, was now outselling Apple’s. Estridge had sheltered his division in Boca Raton,
Florida, safely removed from the corporate mentality of Armonk, New York. Like Jobs, he was driven and inspiring, but unlike Jobs, he had the ability to allow others to think that his brilliant ideas were their own. Jobs flew to Boca Raton with the offer of a $1 million salary and a $1 million signing bonus, but Estridge turned him down. He was not the type who would jump ship to join the enemy. He also enjoyed being part of the establishment, a member of the Navy rather than a pirate. He was discomforted by Jobs’s tales of ripping off the phone company. When asked where he worked, he loved to be able to answer “IBM.”
     So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish that would play well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John Sculley, president of the Pepsi-Cola division of
PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had been an advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a talk to Stanford business students, he heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class earlier. So he told Roche he would be happy to meet him.
     Sculley’s background was very different from Jobs’s. His mother was an Upper East Side Manhattan matron who wore white gloves when she went out, and his father was a proper Wall Street lawyer. Sculley was sent off to St. Mark’s School, then got his undergraduate degree from Brown and a business degree from Wharton. He had risen through the ranks at PepsiCo as an innovative marketer and advertiser, with little passion for product development or information technology.
     Sculley flew to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his two teenage children from a previous marriage. He took them to visit a computer store, where he was struck by how poorly the products were marketed. When his kids asked why he was so interested, he said he was planning to go up to Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs. They were totally blown away. They had grown up among movie stars, but to them Jobs was a true celebrity. It made Sculley take more seriously the prospect of being hired as his boss.
     When he arrived at Apple headquarters, Sculley was startled by the unassuming offices and casual atmosphere. “Most people were less formally dressed than PepsiCo’s maintenance staff,” he noted. Over lunch Jobs picked quietly at his salad, but when Sculley declared that most executives found computers more trouble than they were worth, Jobs clicked into evangelical mode. “We want to change the way people use computers,” he said.
     On the flight home Sculley outlined his thoughts. The result was an eight-page memo on marketing computers to consumers and business executives. It was a bit sophomoric in parts, filled with underlined phrases, diagrams, and boxes, but it revealed his newfound enthusiasm for figuring out ways to sell something more interesting than soda. Among his recommendations: “Invest in in-store merchandizing that romances the consumer with Apple’s potential to enrich their life!” He was still reluctant to leave Pepsi, but Jobs intrigued him. “I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better,” he recalled.
     So Sculley agreed to meet again when Jobs next came to New York, which happened to be for the January 1983 Lisa introduction at the Carlyle Hotel. After the full day of press sessions, the Apple team was surprised to see an unscheduled visitor come into the suite. Jobs loosened his tie and introduced Sculley as the president of Pepsi and a potential big corporate customer. As John Couch demonstrated the Lisa, Jobs chimed in with bursts of commentary, sprinkled with his favorite words, “revolutionary” and “incredible,” claiming it would change the nature of human interaction with computers.
     They then headed off to the Four Seasons restaurant, a shimmering haven of elegance and power. As Jobs ate a special vegan meal, Sculley described Pepsi’s marketing successes. The Pepsi Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook. “I think Apple’s got a
chance to create an Apple Generation.” Jobs enthusiastically agreed. The Pepsi Challenge campaign, in contrast, focused on the product; it combined ads, events, and public relations to stir up buzz. The ability to turn the introduction of a new product into a moment of national excitement was, Jobs noted, what he and Regis McKenna wanted to do at Apple.
     When they finished talking, it was close to midnight. “This has been one of the most exciting evenings in my whole life,” Jobs said as Sculley walked him back to the Carlyle. “I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve had.” When he finally got home to Greenwich, Connecticut, that night, Sculley had trouble sleeping. Engaging with Jobs was a lot more fun than negotiating with bottlers. “It stimulated me, roused my long-held desire to be an architect of ideas,” he later noted. The next morning Roche called Sculley. “I don’t know what you guys did last night, but let me tell you, Steve Jobs is ecstatic,” he said.
     And so the courtship continued, with Sculley playing hard but not impossible to get. Jobs flew east for a visit one Saturday in February and took a limo up to Greenwich. He found Sculley’s newly built mansion ostentatious, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, but he admired the three hundred-pound custom-made oak doors that were so carefully hung and balanced that they swung open with the touch of a finger. “Steve was fascinated by that because he is, as I am, a perfectionist,” Sculley recalled. Thus began the somewhat unhealthy process of a star-struck Sculley perceiving in Jobs qualities that he fancied in himself.      Sculley usually drove a Cadillac, but, sensing his guest’s taste, he borrowed his wife’s Mercedes 450SL convertible to take Jobs to see Pepsi’s 144-acre corporate headquarters, which was as lavish as Apple’s was austere. To Jobs, it epitomized the difference between the feisty new digital economy and the Fortune 500 corporate establishment. A winding drive led through manicured fields and a sculpture garden
(including pieces by Rodin, Moore, Calder, and Giacometti) to a concrete-and-glass building designed by Edward Durell Stone. Sculley’s huge office had a Persian rug, nine windows, a small private garden, a hideaway study, and its own bathroom. When Jobs saw the corporate fitness center, he was astonished that executives had an area, with its own whirlpool, separate from that of the regular employees. “That’s weird,” he said. Sculley hastened to agree. “As a matter of fact, I was against it, and I go over and work out sometimes in the employees’ area,” he said.      Their next meeting was a few weeks later in Cupertino, when Sculley stopped on his way back from a Pepsi bottlers’ convention in Hawaii. Mike Murray, the Macintosh marketing manager, took charge of preparing the team for the visit, but he was not clued in on the real agenda. “PepsiCo could end up purchasing literally thousands of Macs over the next few years,” he exulted in a memo to the Macintosh staff. “During the past year, Mr. Sculley and a certain Mr. Jobs have become friends. Mr. Sculley is considered to be one of the best marketing heads in the big leagues; as such, let’s give him a good time here.”
     Jobs wanted Sculley to share his excitement about the Macintosh. “This product means more to me than anything I’ve done,” he said. “I want you to be the first person outside of Apple to see it.” He dramatically pulled the prototype out of a vinyl bag and gave a demonstration. Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. “He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.”      Jobs had asked Hertzfeld and the gang to prepare a special screen display for Sculley’s amusement. “He’s really smart,” Jobs said. “You wouldn’t believe how smart he is.” The explanation that Sculley might buy a lot of Macintoshes for Pepsi “sounded a little bit fishy to me,” Hertzfeld recalled, but he and Susan Kare created a screen of Pepsi caps and cans that danced around with the Apple logo. Hertzfeld was so excited he began waving his arms around during the demo, but Sculley seemed underwhelmed. “He asked a few questions, but he didn’t seem all that interested,” Hertzfeld recalled. He never ended up warming to Sculley. “He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur,” he later said. “He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn’t. He was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.”
     Matters came to a head when Jobs visited New York in March 1983 and was able to convert the courtship into a blind and blinding romance. “I really think you’re the guy,” Jobs said as they walked through Central Park. “I want you to come and work with me. I can learn so much from you.” Jobs, who had cultivated father figures in the past, knew just how to play to Sculley’s ego and insecurities. It worked. “I was smitten by him,” Sculley later admitted. “Steve was one of the brightest people I’d ever met. I shared with him a passion for ideas.”
     Sculley, who was interested in art history, steered them toward the Metropolitan Museum for a little test of whether Jobs was really willing to learn from others. “I wanted to see how well he could take coaching in a subject where he had no background,” he recalled. As they strolled through the Greek and Roman antiquities,
Sculley expounded on the difference between the
Archaic sculpture of the sixth century B.C. and the Periclean sculptures a century later. Jobs, who loved to pick up historical nuggets he never learned in college, seemed to soak it in. “I gained a sense that I could be a teacher to a brilliant student,” Sculley recalled. Once again he indulged the conceit that they were alike: “I saw in him a mirror image of my younger self. I, too, was impatient, stubborn, arrogant, impetuous. My mind exploded with ideas, often to the exclusion of everything else. I, too, was intolerant of those who couldn’t live up to my demands.”
     As they continued their long walk, Sculley confided that on vacations he went to the Left Bank in Paris to draw in his sketchbook; if he hadn’t become a businessman, he would be an artist. Jobs replied that if he weren’t working with computers, he could see himself as a poet in Paris. They continued down Broadway to Colony Records on Forty-ninth Street, where Jobs showed Sculley the music he liked, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Windham Hill jazz artists. Then they walked all the way back up to the San Remo on Central Park West and Seventy-fourth, where Jobs was planning to buy a two-story tower penthouse apartment.      The consummation occurred outside the penthouse on one of the terraces, with Sculley sticking close to the wall because he was afraid of heights. First they discussed money. “I told him I needed $1 million in salary, $1 million for a sign-up bonus,” said Sculley. Jobs claimed that would be doable. “Even if I have to pay for it out of my own pocket,” he said. “We’ll have to solve those problems, because you’re the best person I’ve ever met. I know you’re perfect for Apple, and Apple deserves the best.” He added that never before had he worked for someone he really respected, but he knew that Sculley was the person who could teach him the most. Jobs gave him his unblinking stare.      Sculley uttered one last demurral, a token suggestion that maybe they should just be friends and he could offer Jobs advice from the sidelines. “Any time you’re in New York, I’d love to spend time with you.” He later recounted the climactic moment: “Steve’s head dropped as he stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?’”
     Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other than to acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person,” Sculley recalled. “I realized for the first time in four months that I couldn’t say no.” The winter sun was beginning to set. They left the apartment and walked back across the park to the Carlyle.
     The Hone y moon
     Sculley arrived in California just in time for the May 1983 Apple management retreat at Pajaro Dunes. Even though he had left all but one of his dark suits back in Greenwich, he was still having trouble adjusting to the casual atmosphere. In the front of the meeting room, Jobs sat on the floor in the lotus position absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet. Sculley tried to impose an agenda; he wanted to discuss how to differentiate their products—the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize the company around product lines or markets or functions. But the discussion descended into a freefor-all of random ideas, complaints, and debates.      At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for producing an unsuccessful product. “Well,” someone shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why don’t you wait until you get a product out before you start being critical?” Sculley was astonished. At Pepsi no one would have challenged the chairman like that. “Yet here, everyone began pig-piling on Steve.” It reminded him of an old joke he had heard from one of the Apple ad salesmen: “What’s the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”
     In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake began to rumble the room. “Head for the beach,” someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to the water. Then someone else shouted that the previous earthquake had produced a tidal wave, so they all turned and ran the other way. “The indecision, the contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster, only foreshadowed what was to come,” Sculley later wrote.
     One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and his wife, Leezy, over for breakfast. He was then living in a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in Los Gatos with his girlfriend, Barbara Jasinski, a smart and reserved beauty who worked for Regis McKenna. Leezy had brought a pan and made vegetarian omelets. (Jobs had edged away from his strict vegan diet for the time being.) “I’m sorry I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.” It was one of his enduring quirks: His exacting standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he wasn’t passionate about. He had a Tiffany lamp, an antique dining table, and a laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam cushions on the floor rather than sofas and chairs. Sculley smiled and mistakenly thought that it was similar to his own “frantic and Spartan life in a cluttered New York City apartment” early in his own career.
     Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. “We all have a short period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculleys as they sat around the table that morning. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”      Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day in the early months of their relationship. “Steve and I became soul mates, near constant companions,” Sculley said. “We tended to speak in half sentences and phrases.” Jobs flattered Sculley. When he dropped by to hash something out, he would say something like “You’re the only one who will understand.” They would tell each other repeatedly, indeed so often that it should have been worrying, how happy they were to be with each other and working in tandem. And at every opportunity Sculley would find similarities with Jobs and point them out:
     We could complete each other’s sentences because we were on the same wavelength. Steve would rouse me from sleep at 2 a.m. with a phone call to chat about an idea that suddenly crossed his mind. “Hi! It’s me,” he’d harmlessly say to the dazed listener, totally unaware of the time. I curiously had done the same in my Pepsi days. Steve would rip apart a presentation he had to give the next morning, throwing out slides and text. So had I as I struggled to turn public speaking into an important management tool during my early days at Pepsi. As a young executive, I was always impatient to get things done and often felt I could do them better myself. So did Steve. Sometimes I felt as if I was watching Steve playing me in a movie. The similarities were uncanny, and they were behind the amazing symbiosis we developed.
        This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for disaster. Jobs began to sense it early on. “We had different ways of looking at the world, different views on people, different values,” Jobs recalled. “I began to realize this a few months after he arrived. He didn’t learn things very quickly, and the people he wanted to promote were usually bozos.”
     Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley by encouraging his belief that they were so alike. And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous of him he became. Canny observers in the Mac group, such as Joanna Hoffman, soon realized what was happening and knew that it would make the inevitable breakup more explosive. “Steve made Sculley feel like he was exceptional,” she said. “Sculley had never felt that. Sculley became infatuated, because Steve projected on him a whole bunch of attributes that he didn’t really have. When it became clear that Sculley didn’t match all of these projections, Steve’s distortion of reality had created an explosive situation.”
     The ardor eventually began to cool on Sculley’s side as well. Part of his weakness in trying to manage a dysfunctional company was his desire to please other people, one of many traits that he did not share with Jobs. He was a polite person; this caused him to recoil at Jobs’s rudeness to their fellow workers. “We would go to the Mac building at eleven at night,” he recalled, “and they would bring him code to show. In some cases he wouldn’t even look at it. He would just take it and throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can you turn it down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they can do better.’” Sculley tried to coach him. “You’ve got to learn to hold things back,” he told him at one point. Jobs would agree, but it was not in his nature to filter his feelings through a gauze.
     Sculley began to believe that Jobs’s mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity. There were big mood swings; sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times he was depressed. At times he would launch into brutal tirades without warning, and Sculley would have to calm him down. “Twenty minutes later, I would get another call and be told to come over because Steve is losing it again,” he said.
     Their first substantive disagreement was over how to price the Macintosh. It had been conceived as a $1,000 machine, but Jobs’s design changes had pushed up the cost so that the plan was to sell it at $1,995. However, when Jobs and Sculley began making plans for a huge launch and marketing push, Sculley decided that they needed to charge $500 more. To him, the marketing costs were like any other production cost and needed to be factored into the price. Jobs resisted, furiously. “It will destroy everything we stand for,” he said. “I want to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.” Sculley said it was a simple choice: He could have the $1,995 price or he could have the marketing budget for a big launch, but not both.
     “You’re not going to like this,” Jobs told Hertzfeld and the other engineers, “but Sculley is insisting that we charge $2,495 for the Mac instead of $1,995.” Indeed the engineers were horrified. Hertzfeld pointed out that they were designing the Mac for people like
themselves, and overpricing it would be a “betrayal” of what they stood for. So Jobs promised them, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let him get away with it!” But in the end, Sculley prevailed. Even twenty-five years later Jobs seethed when recalling the decision: “It’s the main reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the market.” The decision made him feel that he was losing control of his product and company, and this was as dangerous as making a tiger feel cornered.
  
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN  THE LAUNCH
      A Dent in the Universe
      Real Artists Ship
     The high point of the October 1983 Apple sales conference in Hawaii was a skit based on a TV show called The Dating Game. Jobs played emcee, and his three contestants, whom he had convinced to fly to Hawaii, were Bill Gates and two other software executives, Mitch Kapor and Fred Gibbons. As the show’s jingly theme song played, the three took their stools. Gates, looking like a high school sophomore, got wild applause from the 750 Apple salesmen when he said, “During 1984, Microsoft expects to get half of its revenues from software for the Macintosh.” Jobs, cleanshaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked if he thought that the Macintosh’s new operating system would become one of the industry’s new standards. Gates answered, “To create a new standard takes not just making something that’s a little bit different, it takes something that’s really new and captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”      But even as Gates was speaking, Microsoft was edging away from being primarily a collaborator with Apple to being more of a competitor. It would continue to make application software, like Microsoft Word, for Apple, but a rapidly increasing share of its revenue would come from the operating system it had written for the IBM personal computer. The year before, 279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs and its clones. But the figures for 1983 were coming in starkly different: 420,000 Apple IIs versus 1.3 million IBMs and its clones. And both the Apple III and the Lisa were dead in the water.
     Just when the Apple sales force was arriving in
Hawaii, this shift was hammered home on the cover of Business Week. Its headline: “Personal Computers: And the Winner Is . . . IBM.” The story inside detailed the rise of the IBM PC. “The battle for market supremacy is already over,” the magazine declared. “In a stunning blitz, IBM has taken more than 26% of the market in two years, and is expected to account for half the world market by 1985. An additional 25% of the market will be turning out IBM-compatible machines.”
     That put all the more pressure on the Macintosh, due out in January 1984, three months away, to save the day against IBM. At the sales conference Jobs decided to play the showdown to the hilt. He took the stage and chronicled all the missteps made by IBM since 1958, and then in ominous tones described how it was now trying to take over the market for personal computers: “Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?” At that moment a screen came down from the ceiling and showed a preview of an upcoming sixty-second television ad for the Macintosh. In a few months it was destined to make advertising history, but in the meantime it served its purpose of rallying Apple’s demoralized sales force. Jobs had always been able to draw energy by imagining himself as a rebel pitted against the forces of darkness. Now he was able to energize his troops with the same vision.
     There was one more hurdle: Hertzfeld and the other wizards had to finish writing the code for the Macintosh. It was due to start shipping on Monday, January 16. One week before that, the engineers concluded they could not make that deadline.
     Jobs was at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, preparing for the press previews, so a Sunday morning conference call was scheduled. The software manager calmly explained the situation to Jobs, while Hertzfeld and the others huddled around the speakerphone holding their breath. All they needed was an extra two weeks. The initial shipments to the dealers could have a version of the software labeled “demo,” and these could be replaced as soon as the new code was finished at the end of the month. There was a pause. Jobs did not get angry; instead he spoke in cold, somber tones. He told them they were really great. So great, in fact, that he knew they could get this done. “There’s no way we’re slipping!” he declared. There was a collective gasp in the Bandley building work space. “You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. I’m going to ship the code a week from Monday, with your names on it.”
     “Well, we’ve got to finish it,” Steve Capps said. And so they did. Once again, Jobs’s reality distortion field pushed them to do what they had thought impossible. On Friday Randy Wigginton brought in a huge bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans for the final three all-nighters. When Jobs arrived at work at 8:30 a.m. that Monday, he found Hertzfeld sprawled nearly comatose on the couch. They talked for a few minutes about a remaining tiny glitch, and Jobs decreed that it wasn’t a problem. Hertzfeld dragged himself to his blue Volkswagen Rabbit (license plate: MACWIZ) and drove home to bed. A short while later Apple’s Fremont factory began to roll out boxes emblazoned with the colorful line drawings of the Macintosh. Real artists ship, Jobs had declared, and now the Macintosh team had.      The “1984” Ad
     In the spring of 1983, when Jobs had begun to plan for the Macintosh launch, he asked for a commercial that was as revolutionary and astonishing as the product they had created. “I want something that will stop people in their tracks,” he said. “I want a thunderclap.” The task fell to the Chiat/Day advertising agency, which had acquired the Apple account when it bought the advertising side of Regis McKenna’s business. The person put in charge was a lanky beach bum with a bushy beard, wild hair, goofy grin, and twinkling eyes named Lee Clow, who was the creative director of the agency’s office in the Venice Beach section of Los Angeles. Clow was savvy and fun, in a laid-back yet focused way, and he forged a bond with Jobs that would last three decades.
     Clow and two of his team, the copywriter Steve Hayden and the art director Brent Thomas, had been toying with a tagline that played off the George Orwell novel: “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” Jobs loved it, and asked them to develop it for the Macintosh launch. So they put together a storyboard for a sixty-second ad that would look like a scene from a sci-fi movie. It featured a rebellious young woman outrunning the Orwellian thought police and throwing a sledgehammer into a screen showing a mind-controlling speech by Big Brother.
     The concept captured the zeitgeist of the personal computer revolution. Many young people, especially those in the counterculture, had viewed computers as instruments that could be used by Orwellian governments and giant corporations to sap individuality. But by the end of the 1970s, they were also being seen as potential tools for personal empowerment. The ad cast Macintosh as a warrior for the latter cause—a cool, rebellious, and heroic company that was the only thing standing in the way of the big evil corporation’s plan for world domination and total mind control.
     Jobs liked that. Indeed the concept for the ad had a special resonance for him. He fancied himself a rebel, and he liked to associate himself with the values of the ragtag band of hackers and pirates he recruited to the Macintosh group. Even though he had left the apple commune in Oregon to start the Apple corporation, he still wanted to be viewed as a denizen of the counterculture rather than the corporate culture.      But he also realized, deep inside, that he had increasingly abandoned the hacker spirit. Some might even accuse him of selling out. When Wozniak held true to the Homebrew ethic by sharing his design for the Apple I for free, it was Jobs who insisted that they sell the boards instead. He was also the one who, despite Wozniak’s reluctance, wanted to turn Apple into a corporation and not freely distribute stock options to the friends who had been in the garage with them. Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.
     So the “1984” ad was a way of reaffirming, to himself and to the world, his desired self-image. The heroine, with a drawing of a Macintosh emblazoned on her pure white tank top, was a renegade out to foil the establishment. By hiring Ridley Scott, fresh off the success of Blade Runner, as the director, Jobs could attach himself and Apple to the cyberpunk ethos of the time. With the ad, Apple could identify itself with the rebels and hackers who thought differently, and Jobs could reclaim his right to identify with them as well.      Sculley was initially skeptical when he saw the storyboards, but Jobs insisted that they needed something revolutionary. He was able to get an unprecedented budget of $750,000 just to film the ad, which they planned to premiere during the Super Bowl. Ridley Scott made it in London using dozens of real skinheads among the enthralled masses listening to Big Brother on the screen. A female discus thrower was chosen to play the heroine. Using a cold industrial setting dominated by metallic gray hues, Scott evoked the dystopian aura of Blade Runner. Just at the moment when Big Brother announces “We shall prevail!” the heroine’s hammer smashes the screen and it vaporizes in a flash of light and smoke.
     When Jobs previewed the ad for the Apple sales force at the meeting in Hawaii, they were thrilled. So he screened it for the board at its December 1983 meeting. When the lights came back on in the boardroom, everyone was mute. Philip Schlein, the CEO of Macy’s California, had his head on the table. Mike Markkula stared silently; at first it seemed he was overwhelmed by the power of the ad. Then he spoke: “Who wants to move to find a new agency?” Sculley recalled, “Most of them thought it was the worst commercial they had ever seen.” Sculley himself got cold feet. He asked Chiat/ Day to sell off the two commercial spots—one sixty seconds, the other thirty—that they had purchased.      Jobs was beside himself. One evening Wozniak, who had been floating into and out of Apple for the previous two years, wandered into the Macintosh building. Jobs grabbed him and said, “Come over here and look at this.” He pulled out a VCR and played the ad. “I was astounded,” Woz recalled. “I thought it was the most incredible thing.” When Jobs said the board had decided not to run it during the Super Bowl, Wozniak asked what the cost of the time slot was. Jobs told him $800,000. With his usual impulsive goodness, Wozniak immediately offered, “Well, I’ll pay half if you will.”
 He ended up not needing to. The agency was able
to sell off the thirty-second time slot, but in an act of passive defiance it didn’t sell the longer one. “We told them that we couldn’t sell the sixty-second slot, though in truth we didn’t try,” recalled Lee Clow. Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. “I think we ought to go for it,” he told his team.
     Early in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, the dominant Raiders scored a touchdown against the Redskins and, instead of an instant replay, television screens across the nation went black for an ominous two full seconds. Then an eerie black-and-white image of drones marching to spooky music began to fill the screen. More than ninety-six million people watched an ad that was unlike any they’d seen before. At its end, as the drones watched in horror the vaporizing of Big Brother, an announcer calmly intoned, “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
     It was a sensation. That evening all three networks and fifty local stations aired news stories about the ad, giving it a viral life unprecedented in the pre–YouTube era. It would eventually be selected by both TV Guide and Advertising Age as the greatest commercial of all time.
     Publicit y  Blast
     Over the years Steve Jobs would become the grand master of product launches. In the case of the Macintosh, the astonishing Ridley Scott ad was just one of the ingredients. Another part of the recipe was media coverage. Jobs found ways to ignite blasts of publicity that were so powerful the frenzy would feed on itself, like a chain reaction. It was a phenomenon that he would be able to replicate whenever there was a big product launch, from the Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad in 2010. Like a conjurer, he could pull the trick off over and over again, even after journalists had seen it happen a dozen times and knew how it was done. Some of the moves he had learned from Regis McKenna, who was a pro at cultivating and stroking prideful reporters. But Jobs had his own intuitive sense of how to stoke the excitement, manipulate the competitive instincts of journalists, and trade exclusive access for lavish treatment.
     In December 1983 he took his elfin engineering wizards, Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith, to New York to visit Newsweek to pitch a story on “the kids who created the Mac.” After giving a demo of the Macintosh, they were taken upstairs to meet Katharine Graham, the legendary proprietor, who had an insatiable interest in whatever was new. Afterward the magazine sent its technology columnist and a photographer to spend time in Palo Alto with Hertzfeld and Smith. The result was a flattering and smart four-page profile of the two of them, with pictures that made them look like cherubim of a new age. The article quoted Smith saying what he wanted to do next: “I want to build the computer of the 90’s. Only I want to do it tomorrow.” The article also described the mix of volatility and charisma displayed by his boss: “Jobs sometimes defends his ideas with highly vocal displays of temper that aren’t always bluster; rumor has it that he has threatened to fire employees for insisting that his computers should have cursor keys, a feature that Jobs considers obsolete. But when he is on his best behavior, Jobs is a curious blend of charm and impatience, oscillating between shrewd reserve and his favorite expression of
enthusiasm: ‘Insanely great.’”
     The technology writer Steven Levy, who was then working for Rolling Stone, came to interview Jobs, who urged him to convince the magazine’s publisher to put the Macintosh team on the cover of the magazine. “The chances of Jann Wenner agreeing to displace Sting in favor of a bunch of computer nerds were approximately one in a googolplex,” Levy thought, correctly. Jobs took
Levy to a pizza joint and pressed the case: Rolling Stone was “on the ropes, running crummy articles, looking desperately for new topics and new audiences.
The Mac could be its salvation!” Levy pushed back.
Rolling Stone was actually good, he said, and he asked Jobs if he had read it recently. Jobs said that he had, an article about MTV that was “a piece of shit.” Levy replied that he had written that article. Jobs, to his credit, didn’t back away from the assessment. Instead he turned philosophical as he talked about the Macintosh. We are constantly benefiting from advances that went before us and taking things that people before us developed, he said. “It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human
experience and knowledge.”
     Levy’s story didn’t make it to the cover. But in the future, every major product launch that Jobs was involved in—at NeXT, at Pixar, and years later when he returned to Apple—would end up on the cover of either Time, Newsweek, or Business Week.
     Januar y  24, 1984
     On the morning that he and his teammates completed the software for the Macintosh, Andy Hertzfeld had gone home exhausted and expected to stay in bed for at least a day. But that afternoon, after only six hours of sleep, he drove back to the office. He wanted to check in to see if there had been any problems, and most of his colleagues had done the same. They were lounging around, dazed but excited, when Jobs walked in. “Hey, pick yourselves up off the floor, you’re not done yet!” he announced. “We need a demo for the intro!” His plan was to dramatically unveil the Macintosh in front of a large audience and have it show off some of its features to the inspirational theme from Chariots of Fire. “It needs to be done by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals,” he added. They all groaned, Hertzfeld recalled, “but as we talked we realized that it would be fun to cook up something impressive.”
     The launch event was scheduled for the Apple annual stockholders’ meeting on January 24—eight days away—at the Flint Auditorium of De Anza Community College. The television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what would become the Steve Jobs playbook for making the introduction of a new product seem like an epochal moment in world history. The third component was the public unveiling of the product itself, amid fanfare and flourishes, in front of an audience of adoring faithful mixed with journalists who were primed to be swept up in the excitement.
     Hertzfeld pulled off the remarkable feat of writing a music player in two days so that the computer could play the Chariots of Fire theme. But when Jobs heard it, he judged it lousy, so they decided to use a recording instead. At the same time, Jobs was thrilled with a speech generator that turned text into spoken words with a charming electronic accent, and he decided to make it part of the demo. “I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to introduce itself!” he insisted.
     At the rehearsal the night before the launch, nothing was working well. Jobs hated the way the animation scrolled across the Macintosh screen, and he kept ordering tweaks. He also was dissatisfied with the stage lighting, and he directed Sculley to move from seat to seat to give his opinion as various adjustments were made. Sculley had never thought much about variations of stage lighting and gave the type of tentative answers a patient might give an eye doctor when asked which lens made the letters clearer. The rehearsals and changes went on for five hours, well into the night. “He was driving people insane, getting mad at the stagehands for every glitch in the presentation,” Sculley recalled. “I thought there was no way we were going to get it done for the show the next morning.”      Most of all, Jobs fretted about his presentation. Sculley fancied himself a good writer, so he suggested changes in Jobs’s script. Jobs recalled being slightly annoyed, but their relationship was still in the phase when he was lathering on flattery and stroking Sculley’s ego. “I think of you just like Woz and Markkula,” he told Sculley. “You’re like one of the founders of the company. They founded the company, but you and I are founding the future.” Sculley lapped it up.
     The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was mobbed. Jobs arrived in a double-breasted blue blazer, a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie. “This is the most important moment in my entire life,” he told Sculley as they waited backstage for the program to begin. “I’m really nervous. You’re probably the only person who knows how I feel about this.” Sculley grasped his hand, held it for a moment, and whispered
“Good luck.”
     As chairman of the company, Jobs went onstage first to start the shareholders’ meeting. He did so with his own form of an invocation. “I’d like to open the meeting,” he said, “with a twenty-year-old poem by Dylan—that’s Bob Dylan.” He broke into a little smile, then looked down to read from the second verse of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” His voice was highpitched as he raced through the ten lines, ending with “For the loser now / Will be later to win / For the times they are a-changin’.” That song was the anthem that kept the multimillionaire board chairman in touch with his counterculture self-image. He had a bootleg copy of his favorite version, which was from the live concert Dylan performed, with Joan Baez, on Halloween 1964 at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall.
     Sculley came onstage to report on the company’s earnings, and the audience started to become restless as he droned on. Finally, he ended with a personal note. “The most important thing that has happened to me in the last nine months at Apple has been a chance to develop a friendship with Steve Jobs,” he said. “For me, the rapport we have developed means an awful lot.”
     The lights dimmed as Jobs reappeared onstage and launched into a dramatic version of the battle cry he had delivered at the Hawaii sales conference. “It is 1958,” he began. “IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.” The crowd laughed. Hertzfeld had heard versions of the speech both in Hawaii and elsewhere, but he was struck by how this time it was pulsing with more passion. After recounting other IBM missteps, Jobs picked up the pace and the emotion as he built toward the present:
     It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated andcontrolled future and are turning back to Apple as the only force who can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age?
Was George Orwell right?
        As he built to the climax, the audience went from murmuring to applauding to a frenzy of cheering and chanting. But before they could answer the Orwell question, the auditorium went black and the “1984” commercial appeared on the screen. When it was over, the entire audience was on its feet cheering.      With a flair for the dramatic, Jobs walked across the dark stage to a small table with a cloth bag on it. “Now I’d like to show you Macintosh in person,” he said. He took out the computer, keyboard, and mouse, hooked them together deftly, then pulled one of the new 3½-inch floppies from his shirt pocket. The theme from Chariots of Fire began to play. Jobs held his breath for a moment, because the demo had not worked well the night before. But this time it ran flawlessly. The word “MACINTOSH” scrolled horizontally onscreen, then underneath it the words “Insanely great” appeared in script, as if being slowly written by hand. Not used to such beautiful graphic displays, the audience quieted for a moment. A few gasps could be heard. And then, in rapid succession, came a series of screen shots: Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw graphics package followed by displays of different fonts, documents, charts, drawings, a chess game, a spreadsheet, and a rendering of Steve Jobs with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh.
     When it was over, Jobs smiled and offered a treat. “We’ve done a lot of talking about Macintosh recently,” he said. “But today, for the first time ever, I’d like to let Macintosh speak for itself.” With that, he strolled back over to the computer, pressed the button on the mouse, and in a vibrato but endearing electronic deep voice, Macintosh became the first computer to introduce itself. “Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag,” it began. The only thing it didn’t seem to know how to do was to wait for the wild cheering and shrieks that erupted. Instead of basking for a moment, it barreled ahead. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you can’t lift.” Once again the roar almost drowned out its final lines. “Obviously, I can talk. But right now I’d like to sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who’s been like a father to me, Steve Jobs.”
     Pandemonium erupted, with people in the crowd jumping up and down and pumping their fists in a frenzy. Jobs nodded slowly, a tight-lipped but broad smile on his face, then looked down and started to choke up. The ovation continued for five minutes.      After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3 that afternoon, a truck pulled into the parking lot and Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a hundred new Macintosh computers, each personalized with a plaque. “Steve presented them one at a time to each team member, with a handshake and a smile, as the rest of us stood around cheering,” Hertzfeld recalled. It had been a grueling ride, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus groups and committees.
On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research
 
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson    231
before he invented the telephone?”