“The main reason we were close and worked in the way we did was that it was a collaboration that was based on more than just the traditional view of design,” Ive says. “We both perceived objects in our environment, and people, and organizational structures intuitively in the same way. Beauty can be conceptual, it can be symbolic, it can stand as testament to progress and what humankind has managed to achieve in the last fifteen years. In that sense, it could represent progress, or it could be something as trivial as the machined face on a screw. That’s why we got on well, ’cause we both thought that way. If my contribution was simply to the shapes of things, we wouldn’t have spent so much time together. It makes no sense that the CEO of a company this size would spend nearly every lunchtime and big chunks of the afternoon with somebody who just was preoccupied with form.
“Honestly, some of the loveliest, strongest, most precious memories are those of talking at a level that was very abstract. He and I could talk philosophically about aspects of design in ways we wouldn’t with other people. I would get self-conscious if I had to talk in such philosophical terms before a group of engineers, who are brilliantly creative, but when you go on and on about the integrity and meaning of what they are building, well, that’s just not their focus. There were times when Steve and I would talk about these things and I could see in people’s eyes that they’re thinking, Oh, there they go again.
“But then we also talked about the very particular. I would say to him ‘Look. This is how we’re designing this bracket.’ Then I’d watch him take his glasses off, because he couldn’t see for shit, and I’d watch him just enjoy the beauty of all that’s inside. Even things like those special screws.”
The screws were the flattened ones used on the inside of an iPhone. When it finally debuted in 2007, the iPhone was a thing of beauty, its look almost more that of a piece of jewelry than a gadget. Even now, it still stands as perhaps the greatest physical manifestation of Steve and Jony’s remarkable creative friendship.
The iPhone was the product of the efforts of thousands of people, from Tony Fadell and Greg Christie to the workers in the Foxconn factories in China. The inventions and engineering breakthroughs necessary to make it work are too numerous to count. But it could never have been even imagined, much less made, without these two kindred spirits—Steve and Jony—working so closely together.
THE IPHONE WAS introduced on January 9, 2007, at the annual MacWorld conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It was a high-wire act. The handset was nowhere near ready to ship. There were serious software shortcomings and hardware glitches. Its individual components had been put through the wringer, but the device had hardly been tested “in the wild,” when Apple treats its prototypes the way it expects consumers to use them, shifting back and forth from phone to music player to computer quickly and indiscriminately.
Steve had never liked to “pre-introduce” a product in this way (with the exception of major operating system upgrades). There was always the possibility that the software or the screen or something else might wig out during the demo, and he also worried about tipping his hand too early in a highly competitive business. But Steve had three good reasons for pre-announcing the iPhone. The first was that he had to finally show AT&T something. The company had seen nothing for years—no mock-ups, no prototypes—and it had a clause in its deal that allowed it to pull out if Apple failed to meet certain development milestones. That was unlikely to happen, but he couldn’t take any chances. Second, as Lee Clow observed, Steve was P. T. Barnum incarnate. He loved the element of surprise when he debuted a product. While Apple had remained poker-faced on the subject of a phone for nearly three years, he wasn’t sure he could preserve a cone of silence for another few months. The iPhone would need to be tested by employees out in the real world, and sooner or later one would be spotted. He preferred to control the message. Finally, the January MacWorld confab was by far the best showcase for Steve; not only did he own the forum, but his announcement would upstage anything coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where other handset makers would be showing off their wares. He wanted to steal their headlines.
There was one other reason to make the announcement early, on the very best stage available: Steve and his team knew, in their bones, that the iPhone was something truly special. They were eager to show the world. Eddy Cue recalls: “iPhone was the culmination of everything for Steve, and of everything I had learned. It was the only event I took my wife and kids to because, as I told them, ‘In your lifetime, this might be the biggest thing ever.’ Because you could feel it. You just knew that this was huge.”
Despite all the worries, the demo went off without a hitch. The multi-touch user interface seemed almost magical as Steve showed off the little nips and tucks that made it truly engaging. Scrolling through lists had an almost liquid smoothness. A double tap on a website column would make it fill the screen. The Google Maps application that came built in was already far more useful and versatile than most dedicated GPS devices, which had only recently shrunk down to pocket size. It was a delightful presentation of a delightful device. There was just one problem, and it was obvious to everyone except Steve.
PETER LEWIS, FORTUNE magazine’s technology critic, had arranged for one of the handful of short, private interviews that Steve granted after the keynote that day, so I tagged along. It was the first time I’d seen him in the flesh since shortly after I had started a sabbatical from the magazine to start work on a book project eighteen months earlier. This was the longest stretch of time that we hadn’t spoken in the entire time I knew him, so I was looking forward to the visit. Steve was visibly relieved that the demo had gone so well, but he bristled a little when Pete and I kept trying to steer him back to one particular subject: Why wasn’t Apple allowing software developers to build applications for the iPhone? After all, it was as powerful a computing device as an early Mac or PC, wasn’t it? I mentioned that Google Maps and the YouTube video-viewing app both demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to “open up” the iPhone to third-party software developers. “We had to help them build those apps, you know,” Steve said. “So we know what went into them.” Then he said he was concerned about how third-party apps could be vetted and policed, to make sure there would be no chance of software viruses infecting the phones. “We want to understand better how apps affect the network, too, before we throw things wide open,” he added. “We don’t want to create a monster.” He also suggested that if developers really wanted to create custom applications for the device, they could always design special websites that would perform the computing tasks on Web servers, with the phone acting simply as a terminal.
Steve had already heard from a slew of people, inside and outside the company, that he had whiffed by not opening up the iPhone to outsiders’ applications from the get-go. John Doerr, the managing partner of the most prominent venture capital firm of them all—Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers—had become neighborhood friends with Steve after their daughters had met at Palo Alto’s Castilleja School and started having sleepovers. Doerr had never had direct business dealings with Apple, but he knew all the main players there and was tapped into everything in Silicon Valley. Steve had first showed him an iPhone several months before they shipped. Doerr immediately asked Steve the very same question: Why wasn’t he allowing third-party applications? “At the end of that conversation, I said, ‘Look, I disagree with you,’ ” Doerr recalls. “ ‘And if you ever do decide you want to put applications on it, I’d like to form a fund to encourage people to build them. I think there’s a big opportunity there.’ He said, ‘Okay, I’ll call you back if we change our mind.’ ”
When the iPhone finally shipped on June 29, 2007, the biggest problem customers encountered wasn’t the lack of applications—it was the fact that AT&T’s network coverage was so spotty. To cite just one high-profile case, Mike Slade couldn’t get any reception at his house in Seattle on either of the two phones Steve had sent him. When Sla
de teased Steve about this in an email, Steve called the CEO of AT&T. The next day, a service rep visited Slade’s home. But there was no solution, and Slade wasn’t able to try out the phones until he traveled out of Seattle.
Worse yet, AT&T’s network was weaker than Verizon’s in the San Francisco Bay Area, so the early-adopter techies who’d bought their units on day one found their calls being dropped regularly as they commuted up and down I-280, which connects San Francisco and San Jose. In those areas where AT&T had sporadic voice coverage, Internet connectivity was even more of a hassle.
Apple and AT&T sold about 1.5 million units in the first quarter the iPhone was on sale, but they probably could have sold many more. Between its cellular woes and the absence of more applications like the ones supplied by Apple and Google, the iPhone proved to be a tougher sell than many would have imagined. People had expected something that would support video games and reference books and fancy calculators and word processors and financial spreadsheets right out of the box. The phone they got couldn’t yet do that. Jean-Louis Gassée, Steve’s former Apple nemesis who had segued into venture capital, puts it bluntly: “The iPhone was crippled when it first came out.”
This time Steve turned around even faster than he had when his team had convinced him to go for iTunes rather than pursue iMovie any further. He didn’t do so gracefully—“Oh, hell, just go for it and leave me alone,” is how Eddy Cue recalls his edict—but he did so quickly. In the fall of 2007, Doerr got a phone call. “From out of the blue, Steve said, ‘I think we should talk. Come on down to Cupertino and tell me about this fund idea that you have.’ So I went to work, and we hastily pulled some materials together and proposed something we called the iFund. I told him we’d commit fifty million dollars to it. Scott Forstall, the Apple guy then in charge of the iPhone operating system, was in the meeting. He said, ‘Come on, John, fifty million dollars? Surely, you could do a hundred.’ So we bumped it up to one hundred million.”
In November, just over four months after shipping its first iPhone, Apple revealed that it would make available a software development kit for anyone who wanted to develop apps. “That’s when we knew Steve had finally come to see the light,” Gassée says. “Suddenly, that was all anyone was talking about in the Valley and in the VC community. Hundreds of little guys signed up, and the race was on. Then they announced the App Store. And then they released the iPhone 3G [the second version, which shipped in July 2008, and had better wireless and a faster microprocessor]. It was only then that the iPhone was truly finished, that it had all its basics, all its organs. It needed to grow, to muscle up, but it was complete as a child is complete.”
IN THE EIGHT years since that January 2007 MacWorld, Apple has sold more than a half billion iPhones. It is the most successful, most profitable consumer electronics product ever, by just about any measure—units sold, dollars of profit generated, number of global carriers that sell it, the number of apps written for it. When you think of it, who sells a half billion of anything costing hundreds of dollars? Sure, Procter & Gamble sells billions of tubes of toothpaste and Gillette sells billions of razor blades. But those don’t come with two-year service contracts that can effectively drive the price of ownership to nearly $1,000 over the life of the product.
When it first appeared in the summer of 2007, there were other devices on the market that described themselves as smartphones. Palm had been selling its Treo for several years, and a Canadian company, Research In Motion, had done well with its BlackBerry. All of these models had pint-sized keyboards and squarish screens. They were all adequate for checking email, looking at your calendar, or finding contacts in your address book. And their businesses were basically doomed, although BlackBerry would hang on for years. The iPhone changed the category forever. Google understood this, and within eighteen months developed Android, a free knockoff of the iPhone’s operating system software that powered phones made by the likes of Samsung, LG, HTC, and later an upstart Chinese handset maker named Xiaomi. A new race was on, and Apple had the lead. Android handsets would eventually outsell iPhones, but this has not been a redux of the Macintosh experience. At least not yet.
Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape who has become a highly successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, calls the introduction of the iPhone a seminal event that “flipped the polarity” of what makes Silicon Valley go. Once upon a time, wealthy entities like the military and big corporations drove technological change. They were the only ones who could afford machines with leading-edge components. No more. Now it’s consumers like you and me who lead the way. “The scale economics are gigantic, since these are being sold in such volume,” says Andreessen, whose shaved head looks like an artillery shell, and who talks like a machine gun spraying clipped, staccato bursts of forward-thinking analysis. “We’re talking eventually billions of these things. As a result of that, the smartphone supply chain is becoming the supply chain for the entire computing industry. So the components going into the iPhone [like Corning’s Gorilla Glass, and especially the cellular microprocessors based on a design by ARM Holdings, a British firm] are going to take over computing. By end of decade, even servers will be ARM-based, because the scale economics will be so great that anything else will not be able to compete.”
In other words, Steve had just turned the computer industry on its head. The iPhone marked the emergence of a new form of computing that was more intimate than what had been called personal computing. “My theory about the turnaround of Apple is that what they have accomplished is relatively underappreciated,” says Andreessen. “Mac, iPhone, and iPad are all Unix supercomputers packaged into a consumer form factor. That’s basically what they did. That’s the part that nobody talks about, because everybody’s so design-obsessed.” He leans forward to drive home his point. “That iPhone sitting in your pocket is the exact equivalent of a Cray XMP supercomputer from twenty years ago that used to cost ten million dollars. It’s got the same operating system software, the same processing speed, the same data storage, compressed down to a six-hundred-dollar device. That is the breakthrough Steve achieved. That’s what these phones really are!”
Chapter 16
Blind Spots, Grudges, and Sharp Elbows
A few weeks after the debut of the second iPhone, I got a call from John Nowland, the head engineer at Neil Young’s recording studio at his ranch near La Honda, California. John and Neil’s publicist and I had spoken for a year or so about possibly working on a Fortune profile about the rock star’s serious technological forays into audiophile-quality digital recording and biofuels for cars. Like me, Neil has a hearing disability, so during our initial meeting he and I spent some time comparing notes about what it’s like for a musical person to live with damaged ears.
Nowland told me that Neil wanted to send Steve a set of new, remastered vinyl editions of every album he had ever recorded. It was intended as a peace offering of sorts, and as a reminder of the peerless sound quality of old-style analog recorded music. Neil contends, with some justification, that the demonstrably inferior recorded sound quality of digital music, which was introduced with CDs, only got worse with the shift to compressed digital audio files. Half a decade earlier, shortly after the iPod hit the market, Neil had complained publicly about the fact that the digital format Apple used for the music sold on the iTunes Music Store compressed sound files so much as to render the music unbearably “compromised,” in his words.
Steve could be pretty thin-skinned when someone prominent criticized the aesthetics of his products. He took great umbrage that Neil would, as Steve put it, “pop off in public like that without coming to talk to us about his technical concerns first.” From that point on he had rebuffed all of Neil’s attempts to smoke the peace pipe.
Still, I knew that Steve enjoyed listening to records on vinyl from time to time, so I agreed to call him to see if he’d like to get the LPs. Steve answered the phone on the second ring, and I explained what I was calling about. We had talked ab
out Neil’s criticisms a year or so before, and I thought this might soften his grudge.
Fat chance. “Fuck Neil Young,” he snapped, “and fuck his records. You keep them.” End of conversation.
Yes, Steve Jobs had grown and changed enormously over the course of his lifetime. If personal evolution is the long process of making more of our strengths and learning to moderate our weaknesses, Steve can be said to have succeeded brilliantly at the first, but not always so well at the latter. He had blind spots, grating behavioral habits, and a tendency to give in to emotional impulse that persisted his entire life. These characteristics are often used to make the case that Steve was an “asshole” or a “jerk,” or perhaps simply “binary”—that odd adjective often used to convey the sense that he was half asshole/half genius from birth to death. These aren’t useful, interesting, or enlightening descriptions. What’s more illuminating is to take a look at the specific ways in which Steve failed to do an effective job of tempering some of his weaknesses and antisocial traits, and to consider how, when, and why some of them continued to flare up even during the years of his greatest effectiveness as a leader.
DURING THE LAST decade of his life, the issue of Steve’s character would come up periodically. With all his heady success at Apple since the turn of the century, there seemed something incongruous about the occasional, stubborn persistence of certain problematic behaviors. They didn’t resonate with the image of Apple as a company all about creativity, potential, and the good that came to humanity when imaginative people used ingenious technological tools to amplify their own potential.
Apple’s cool, creative reputation wasn’t just a veneer, even though the company did work hard and masterfully to propagate that image with Lee Clow’s brilliant ad campaigns, Jony Ive’s minimalist designs, and Steve’s exacting product introductions, where music players and cellphones were associated with words like magical and phenomenal. It was also deserved and hard-earned, especially after the iPhone became the most popular consumer electronics device ever. Apple now was bigger and more influential than Sony had ever been. But Steve’s own actions could sometimes undermine the vision. How did that sleek, clean, and austere façade square with, for example, the moment in 2008 when Steve called Joe Nocera, the New York Times columnist who had once profiled him for Esquire, “a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong”? How could a company with Apple’s cherubic marketing glow make its devices in Foxconn factories where the drudgery and difficult working conditions resulted in more than a dozen assembly-line workers committing suicide? What about those deals encouraging book publishers to switch en masse to the agency model Apple preferred, where publishers set (and raised) ebook prices in a concerted effort to pressure Amazon to raise the prices it charged? What was the justification for the mutual under-the-table agreement with other Silicon Valley powerhouses not to hire one another’s engineering talent? And how “nice and cuddly” could a company or CEO be that let former top executives take the fall when the Securities and Exchange Commission took exception to the way the company doled out stock options worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
Becoming Steve Jobs Page 40