With the one-two punch of the iPhone and the iPad, Apple had completely reshaped the business of making and selling consumer software. Where once upon a time developers had to price their software applications so that they might make a profit from the sale of a few thousand copies, they now could sell into a market of hundreds of millions of people. This tremendous opportunity has led to all kinds of developments that never would have even had a glimmer of a chance in a smaller market. Name what you want to do now, and there is probably an app (or two or three or ten) for that. That wasn’t true in the PC world, because the price points necessary to achieve profitability on a much smaller volume of sales were simply too high.
Looked at in the context of Steve’s career as a technologist, the iPad is not as significant a product as the iPhone. But in some ways, it is the most elegant evocation of some of his enduring goals: to create technology that is a window into the limitless world of information, and to create technology that is so simple and so powerful that it basically disappears. His sense of those essential goals is what distinguished him from the more tech-savvy hobbyists back at the start of his career. His restless desire to reach that goal had betrayed him more than once, causing him to try to leap before the technology was ready even to walk. But by the time he and his team got around to creating the iPad, he had learned enough, finally, to make the technology essentially invisible. A true artist, he’d finally hidden all evidence of his labor.
Steve’s sense of pleasure and satisfaction with this outcome was evident on January 27, 2010, when he introduced the iPad at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This time the stage was set with a small couch and a table, props that weren’t the standard for his product demos. When Steve walked onto the stage, looking gaunt, he received, as always, a standing ovation. He paced confidently and energetically as he proudly recounted some of the company’s achievements. A slide of him with Woz from the early days was projected above him as the statistics rolled out: 250 million iPods sold; 3 billion downloads from the App Store in a year and a half; revenues exceeding $50 billion annually. Apple, he explained, is now a mobile device company; in fact, by revenues it is the largest mobile device company in the world.
There was something elegiac about all this, even though Steve often used the first moments of a presentation to update the crowd on Apple. This, after all, was a recitation of the story of his professional life. And the sentimental nature of the event grew when, after a dozen or so minutes, Steve sat down in the leather love seat to demonstrate how easy it was to use an iPad. This was, of course, a concession to his weakened state of health. But it served the product, too. He leaned back, and navigated through a series of things you could do with your fingers on the iPad: send email, surf the Web, open up apps that let you listen to music, watch videos on YouTube, or even make “digital” finger paintings. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop,” he stated, with great satisfaction. His every move was projected on the big screen. Like every other presentation he had ever given, this one was staged with a clear intention: to show that this device was actually an invitation to a new kind of computing, something so natural and relaxed that it would slip right into your daily life with unimaginable ease.
While the iPad drew its fair share of initial criticism, the public instantly understood its appeal. The first-generation iPad was the fastest-selling debut product Apple had ever unleashed, racking up numbers that made the launches of the iPod and the iPhone pale by comparison: by the end of 2010, the company had sold nearly 15 million iPads.
IN 2009, STEVE had returned with vigor, just as he had after the initial operation back in 2004. But this time it was different. This time, everyone understood that his return would end, and they understood how it would end, even if they didn’t know when. There was no talk of being cured; instead, Steve was going to “live with it” as long as possible. Steve didn’t talk to many people about his medical woes, and he didn’t even spend much time discussing it overtly with his inner circle. But the real prospect of his death was there, and it was noticeable.
Bob Iger was aware of it. As Iger had expected, Steve had been a meaningful and yet unthreatening member of the Disney board ever since the Pixar sale in 2006. His relationship with Iger had become so strong that Steve had wanted Iger to join the Apple board, which Iger couldn’t do for fiduciary reasons. In fact, because of their friendship, Iger also turned down an invitation from Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt to be on Google’s board. “He told me he’d be jealous,” says Iger, with a wistful grin, although given how Apple’s relationship with Google eventually disintegrated, there was likely more to Steve’s reluctance than mere envy.
Before the liver transplant, Iger and Steve talked three or four times a week. They even saw each other over winter vacations in Hawaii. “I was at the Four Seasons, and he was at Kona Village. We’d walk together a lot. He had a daily walk that ended at the Four Seasons. We would walk and he’d try to convince me of stuff like, say, that white pineapple is better than yellow pineapple. And we’d sit on benches, and talk about music and the world. That’s where I told him the exciting news that we were looking to build a resort in Hawaii, a nine-hundred-million-dollar resort. I could tell he didn’t like the idea. I said, ‘Why not?’ He said it wasn’t a big enough idea. I said, ‘Nine hundred million dollars, Disney comes to Hawaii, that’s not a big idea? What’s a big idea in your mind?’ He said, ‘Buy Lanai’ [a small island in the state that was eventually purchased by Larry Ellison]. He thought we should build a theme park on the island, have all the visitors brought there by a special Disney transportation service. It was totally impractical.”
Most often, the two would meet in Burbank, when Steve came down to Disney headquarters for board meetings. Even though Iger was not on the Apple board (he would join it after Steve’s death), Steve would seek his advice about things going on at the company, and walk him through Jony Ive’s design lab whenever he came up to Cupertino. “We would stand at a whiteboard brainstorming,” remembers Iger. “We talked about buying companies. We talked about buying Yahoo! together.” By the time the Disney board meetings came around, Steve had usually been fully briefed by Iger. “We saw eye to eye on most things,” says Iger. “It wasn’t anything preplanned, but when Steve opined, the board generally listened.”
That wasn’t true on everything, but Steve voiced his disagreements in a forceful but civil fashion. Steve hated stock buybacks, when companies purchase their own shares on the public market—a move that is supposed to be both a good investment for the company and a signal of its confidence to big investors. He made a strong case against it at one board meeting, but the company proceeded nonetheless. On the other hand, when Disney was about to enter a joint venture with Carnival Cruise Lines because Iger didn’t think he could get the board’s support to build two new, billion-dollar cruise ships, Steve passionately urged him, and eventually the board, to have Disney build the ships itself. “If this is a good business,” he said, “why are you going to put your brand in someone else’s hands?” Disney built the two new ships on its own.
Steve also helped with Disney’s retail business. In 2008, the company had bought back its stores, after having licensed them to outside operators for years. When the new head of retail first pitched the board on his plans, Steve, who always sat next to Iger, grew restless and started rolling his eyes. At one point during the presentation he just burst out, muttering “Bullshit!” in a way that everyone could hear. Iger kicked him in the shins to try to get him to muzzle himself. Once the presentation had ended, Steve asked the executive two simple questions: “What message are you sending to your customer when they walk through the door? What statement are you making?”
“The guy couldn’t answer the questions,” remembers Iger. “There was silence in the room.” Afterward, Steve told Iger he should fire the executive immediately. But Iger didn’t. “Steve was quick to judge people. That was a fault,” says Iger. “If he got better
on that, it wasn’t something I saw. I always found that a shortcoming. I’d say to him, ‘First of all, I haven’t decided about the person, so you’ve got to give me a chance to form my own opinion.’ Or I’d tell him, ‘You’re just flat-out wrong about this person.’ In some cases he was proved right, and in others I was. Either way, I never got an ‘I told you so’ from him.”
A few weeks later, Iger brought the retail chief and a couple of others up to Cupertino for a daylong brainstorming session with Steve and Apple retail chief Ron Johnson. “He didn’t redesign our stores,” says Iger. “He didn’t even set foot in them, as far as I know. But he did give us a full day of his time, and they helped us come up with a guiding statement about the stores: This is going to be the best twenty or thirty minutes of your kid’s day.”
In the last couple of years it grew harder for Steve to travel, and he had to call in to some board meetings. But when he could make it down to Burbank for a meeting, he and Iger always tried to spend time together. Iger remembers the night when it really hit him that Steve was going to pass away, during a 2010 dinner at his home with his wife, Steve, and Laurene. “We all kind of knew there was an inevitability to him dying, not that any of us was willing to truly accept it, believe it, or articulate it,” Iger recalls. “But it was pretty evident. Steve made a toast that night. He said, ‘The two of us did an unbelievable thing, didn’t we? We saved Disney and we saved Pixar.’ He thought that being part of Disney had breathed a whole new life into Pixar. And clearly, Disney has never been the same since. Tears came to his eyes. Our wives had a hard time maintaining dry eyes. It was one of those moments: ‘Hey, look at what we did, my goodness! Wasn’t that cool, wasn’t that really special?’ ”
At Apple, Steve still did everything he could to have people treat him as if he were not sick. “He was working his ass off till the end, in pain,” remembers Eddy Cue. “You could see it in the meetings, he was taking morphine and you could see he was in pain, but he was still interested.”
He did make some adjustments upon his return, most of which were simply extensions of the shifts in priority he’d made after his 2004 operation. He focused on the parts of the ongoing business he cared about most—marketing, design, and the product introductions—and he started to take active steps to ensure that he would leave Apple in good shape after his death. This was a process that had started earlier—Tim Cook says that Steve started thinking of succession and the post-Steve era of the company back in 2004—but everything accelerated now.
He spent some of his time working with Joel Podolny, a professor he had hired away from the Yale School of Management, to develop the curriculum for an executive education program he wanted to create called Apple University. Unlike Pixar University, where all employees can choose from a range of eclectic courses that instruct them in creative arts and skills employed by others at the studio, Apple U. is designed as a place where future leaders of the company can review and dissect momentous decisions in the company’s history. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer, and then bottle, Steve’s decision-making process, and to pass on his aesthetics and marketing methodologies to Apple’s next generation. “Steve cared deeply about the why,” says Cook. “The why of the decision. In the younger days I would see him just do something. But as the days went on he would spend more time with me and with other people explaining why he thought or did something, or why he looked at something in a certain way. This was why he came up with Apple U., so we could train and educate the next generation of leaders by teaching them all we had been through, and how we had made the terrible decisions we made and also how we made the really good ones.”
Steve also focused on Apple’s new headquarters, which are now being built on the grounds of the old Hewlett-Packard campus in another neighborhood of Cupertino. He was very actively involved in the design, working with Norman Foster Architects. The building will reflect many of the same thoughts that went into the creation of Pixar’s headquarters, albeit with an Apple spin. It will be one huge circular structure, four stories tall and housing up to thirteen thousand employees. Some people compare it to a space station. Its design is intended to promote interaction among employees. A common hallway stretches around the entire circle of each floor. A single café area will seat three thousand people. Some 80 percent of the grounds will be covered in shrubs, bushes, and trees, including a huge area in the middle of the circular structure. And the building will be its own technological marvel; its exterior won’t have a single pane of flat or rectilinear glass. Instead, the “walls” of the building will consist of enormous panels of perfectly curved glass. The cafeteria will have sliding, curved-glass doors four stories tall to open up when the weather is nice. “I think we have a shot,” Steve told the Cupertino City Council, “at building the best office building in the world.”
Steve’s approach to the creation of the campus was driven by the same principles as always. What kind of design would make the new headquarters complex the ideal place for Apple to create its own future? The closer you could get to that ideal, the better for Apple. He wanted to do everything he could to ensure that Apple would remain what he believed it had become—the most important, most vital, and most creative industrial company in the world. “Steve wanted people to love Apple,” says Cook, “not just work for Apple, but really love Apple, and really understand at a very deep level what Apple was about, about the values of the company. He didn’t write them on the walls and make posters out of them anymore, but he wanted people to understand them. He wanted people to work for a greater cause.”
This belief in Apple as a special place—as a company as magical, perhaps, as an iPad—was something Steve shared with Cook, and was certainly part of the reason he urged the board of directors to sign off on Cook as his successor. “This was a significant common thread we had,” says Cook. “I really love Apple, and I do think Apple is here for a bigger reason. There are very few companies like that on the face of the earth anymore.”
THE PAIN FROM the cancer was relentless, and Steve spent more and more time at home. Lee Clow visited him there, to work on the ad campaign for the iPad 2, which would be launched in the spring of 2011. “We had to go to his house when he was sick, because he wasn’t coming in,” says Clow. “But he had the same kind of laser-intense focus. He wanted to talk about the ad or the product or whatever we were doing.” With Clow, Steve didn’t spend much time looking back, or looking into dark corners of the future. “To the end, he tried to will that it [his death] wasn’t going to happen, that he was going to somehow keep going. He really didn’t want to dwell on that.”
They worked hard on that introductory iPad 2 ad. Its stentorian tone and poetic language would bear a striking resemblance to the “Think Different” campaign that signaled the beginning of Apple’s miraculous turnaround after Steve had returned to Cupertino. “This is what we believe, that technology alone is not enough,” were the words they settled on. “Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things. But when technology gets out of the way everything becomes more delightful, even magical. That’s when you leap forward, that’s when you end up with something like this.” The words accompanied a video showing a single finger manipulating iPad apps with casual ease. “It was the last thing that he blessed as the message that should go out for that particular product,” remembers Clow, “and it came off of Steve’s vision very clearly. It summed up his vision from day one that somehow technology should change people’s lives and make them better. It should be something that everyone uses.”
There was considerable doubt as to whether he’d be well enough to introduce the product himself, but when he did make it onto the stage to introduce the iPad 2 on March 2, 2011, his words echoed the themes of the ad: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he told the crowd. “We believe that it is technology married with the humanities that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.” The iPad 2 was a significant improvement over the first version. It was li
ghter, it had two digital cameras—one on the screen side to facilitate videoconferencing and taking selfies, and another with a higher-resolution camera and flash, on the back side, courtesy of that crew of camera engineers that had been brought on board after the first iPhone.
Still, the obvious improvements in quality of the product came second, at least for that day, to the bigger news that Steve Jobs was, clearly, dying. His appearance was such that the stock dropped immediately after he stiffly walked onto the stage. This time, he relied even more on other Apple executives to fill out the program and demonstrate key features.
Steve had been living with illness for so long, with the bad times coming in unpredictable waves, that neither he nor his colleagues nor his doctors had any sense of when the end would come. When Steve presented his plans for the ambitious new Apple corporate campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7, he was visibly hurting, and his voice was weak. Steve seemed to know that it was his last big contribution to the company, and to the community it had always called home. So he steeled himself to spend fifteen minutes walking the council members through the proposal for the building, and about five minutes answering questions. When one councilwoman tried to joke with him that perhaps the city should get free Wi-Fi in return for approving the move, Steve said, “Well, you know, I’m kind of old-fashioned. I believe that we pay taxes, and that the city then gives us services.”
Over the last few months, a steady flow of visitors came by the house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton came to visit, as did President Obama, for dinner with a select group of Silicon Valley leaders. John Markoff, of the New York Times, and Steven Levy, who had written several books about Silicon Valley, including ones about the development of the Macintosh and the iPod, dropped by together to pay their respects. Bill Gates wound up spending four hours with Steve one afternoon. “Steve and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story’s too complicated,” Gates says. “I mean, yes, Steve did brilliant work, and if you had to say—you know, leave me out of it—one person who had the most impact on the personal computer industry, particularly from where we sit now, you’d pick Steve Jobs. That’s fair. But the difference between him and the next thousand isn’t like, you know, God was born and he came down from the hill with the tablet.” The two had developed a friendship and a sense of mutual respect despite their differences. “There was none of that need to put the other person down that afternoon,” says Gates. “We just talked about the things we’d done, and where we thought things were headed.” Gates wrote him a final, personal letter just weeks before his death.
Becoming Steve Jobs Page 44