They were joined by Katie Cotton, the steady public relations chief at Apple, and seven other top executives. The meeting lasted all afternoon. “It was one of the greatest meetings of my life,” Jobs later said. He began by laying out all the data they had gathered. “Here are the facts. So what should we do about it?”
McKenna was the most calm and straightforward. “Just lay out the truth, the data,” he said. “Don’t appear arrogant, but appear firm and confident.” Others, including Vincent, pushed Jobs to be more apologetic, but McKenna said no. “Don’t go into the press conference with your tail between your legs,” he advised. “You should just say: ‘Phones aren’t perfect, and we’re not perfect. We’re human and doing the best we can, and here’s the data.’” That became the strategy. When the topic turned to the perception of arrogance, McKenna urged him not to worry too much. “I don’t think it would work to try to make Steve look humble,” McKenna explained later. “As Steve says about himself, ‘What you see is what you get.’”
At the press event that Friday, held in Apple’s auditorium, Jobs followed McKenna’s advice. He did not grovel or apologize, yet he was able to defuse the problem by showing that Apple understood it and would try to make it right. Then he changed the framework of the discussion, saying that all cell phones had some problems. Later he told me that he had sounded a bit “too annoyed” at the event, but in fact he was able to strike a tone that was unemotional and straightforward. He captured it in four short, declarative sentences: “We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.”
If anyone was unhappy, he said, they could return the phone (the return rate turned out to be 1.7%, less than a third of the return rate for the iPhone 3GS or most other phones) or get a free bumper case from Apple. He went on to report data showing that other mobile phones had similar problems. That was not totally true. Apple’s antenna design made it slightly worse than most other phones, including earlier versions of the iPhone. But it was true that the media frenzy over the iPhone 4’s dropped calls was overblown. “This is blown so out of proportion that it’s incredible,” he said. Instead of being appalled that he didn’t grovel or order a recall, most customers realized that he was right.
The wait list for the phone, which was already sold out, went from two weeks to three. It remained the company’s fastest-selling product ever. The media debate shifted to the issue of whether Jobs was right to assert that other smartphones had the same antenna problems. Even if the answer was no, that was a better story to face than one about whether the iPhone 4 was a defective dud.
Some media observers were incredulous. “In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers,” Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote. “This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?” Wolff attributed it to Jobs’s mesmerizing effect as “the last charismatic individual.” Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive recalls, but Jobs didn’t have to. “The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial.”
Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert, was also incredulous, but far more admiring. He wrote a blog entry a few days later (which Jobs proudly emailed around) that marveled at how Jobs’s “high ground maneuver” was destined to be studied as a new public relations standard. “Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations playbook, because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook,” Adams wrote. “If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words.” By proclaiming up front that phones are not perfect, Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable assertion. “If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But as soon as the context is changed to ‘all smartphones have problems,’ the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.”
Here Comes the Sun
There were a few things that needed to be resolved for the career of Steve Jobs to be complete. Among them was an end to the Thirty Years’ War with the band he loved, the Beatles. In 2007 Apple had settled its trademark battle with Apple Corps, the holding company of the Beatles, which had first sued the fledgling computer company over use of the name in 1978. But that still did not get the Beatles into the iTunes Store. The band was the last major holdout, primarily because it had not resolved with EMI music, which owned most of its songs, how to handle the digital rights.
By the summer of 2010 the Beatles and EMI had sorted things out, and a four-person summit was held in the boardroom in Cupertino. Jobs and his vice president for the iTunes Store, Eddy Cue, played host to Jeff Jones, who managed the Beatles’ interests, and Roger Faxon, the chief of EMI music. Now that the Beatles were ready to go digital, what could Apple offer to make that milestone special? Jobs had been anticipating this day for a long time. In fact he and his advertising team, Lee Clow and James Vincent, had mocked up some ads and commercials three years earlier when strategizing on how to lure the Beatles on board.
“Steve and I thought about all the things that we could possibly do,” Cue recalled. That included taking over the front page of the iTunes Store, buying billboards featuring the best photographs of the band, and running a series of television ads in classic Apple style. The topper was offering a $149 box set that included all thirteen Beatles studio albums, the two-volume “Past Masters” collection, and a nostalgia-inducing video of the 1964 Washington Coliseum concert.
Once they reached an agreement in principle, Jobs personally helped choose the photographs for the ads. Each commercial ended with a still black-and-white shot of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, young and smiling, in a recording studio looking down at a piece of music. It evoked the old photographs of Jobs and Wozniak looking at an Apple circuit board. “Getting the Beatles on iTunes was the culmination of why we got into the music business,” said Cue.
CHAPTER FORTY
TO INFINITY
The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond
The iPad 2
Even before the iPad went on sale, Jobs was thinking about what should be in the iPad 2. It needed front and back cameras—everyone knew that was coming—and he definitely wanted it to be thinner. But there was a peripheral issue that he focused on that most people hadn’t thought about: The cases that people used covered the beautiful lines of the iPad and detracted from the screen. They made fatter what should be thinner. They put a pedestrian cloak on a device that should be magical in all of its aspects.
Around that time he read an article about magnets, cut it out, and handed it to Jony Ive. The magnets had a cone of attraction that could be precisely focused. Perhaps they could be used to align a detachable cover. That way, it could snap onto the front of an iPad but not have to engulf the entire device. One of the guys in Ive’s group worked out how to make a detachable cover that could connect with a magnetic hinge. When you began to open it, the screen would pop to life like the face of a tickled baby, and then the cover could fold into a stand.
It was not high-tech; it was purely mechanical. But it was enchanting. It also was another example of Jobs’s desire for end-to-end integration: The cover and the iPad had been designed together so that the magnets and hinge all connected seamlessly. The iPad 2 would have many improvements, but this cheeky little cover, which most other CEOs would never have bothered with, was the one that would elicit the most smiles.
Becau
se Jobs was on another medical leave, he was not expected to be at the launch of the iPad 2, scheduled for March 2, 2011, in San Francisco. But when the invitations were sent out, he told me that I should try to be there. It was the usual scene: top Apple executives in the front row, Tim Cook eating energy bars, and the sound system blaring the appropriate Beatles songs, building up to “You Say You Want a Revolution” and “Here Comes the Sun.” Reed Jobs arrived at the last minute with two rather wide-eyed freshman dorm mates.
“We’ve been working on this product for a while, and I just didn’t want to miss today,” Jobs said as he ambled onstage looking scarily gaunt but with a jaunty smile. The crowd erupted in whoops, hollers, and a standing ovation.
He began his demo of the iPad 2 by showing off the new cover. “This time, the case and the product were designed together,” he explained. Then he moved on to address a criticism that had been rankling him because it had some merit: The original iPad had been better at consuming content than at creating it. So Apple had adapted its two best creative applications for the Macintosh, GarageBand and iMovie, and made powerful versions available for the iPad. Jobs showed how easy it was to compose and orchestrate a song, or put music and special effects into your home videos, and post or share such creations using the new iPad.
Once again he ended his presentation with the slide showing the intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. And this time he gave one of the clearest expressions of his credo, that true creativity and simplicity come from integrating the whole widget—hardware and software, and for that matter content and covers and salesclerks—rather than allowing things to be open and fragmented, as happened in the world of Windows PCs and was now happening with Android devices:
It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing. Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. Folks are rushing into this tablet market, and they’re looking at it as the next PC, in which the hardware and the software are done by different companies. Our experience, and every bone in our body, says that is not the right approach. These are post-PC devices that need to be even more intuitive and easier to use than a PC, and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to be intertwined in an even more seamless way than they are on a PC. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build these kinds of products.
It was an architecture that was bred not just into the organization he had built, but into his own soul.
After the launch event, Jobs was energized. He came to the Four Seasons hotel to join me, his wife, and Reed, plus Reed’s two Stanford pals, for lunch. For a change he was eating, though still with some pickiness. He ordered fresh-squeezed juice, which he sent back three times, declaring that each new offering was from a bottle, and a pasta primavera, which he shoved away as inedible after one taste. But then he ate half of my crab Louie salad and ordered a full one for himself, followed by a bowl of ice cream. The indulgent hotel was even able to produce a glass of juice that finally met his standards.
At his house the following day he was still on a high. He was planning to fly to Kona Village the next day, alone, and I asked to see what he had put on his iPad 2 for the trip. There were three movies: Chinatown, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Toy Story 3. More revealingly, there was just one book that he had downloaded: The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since.
Midway through the morning he decided he wanted to eat something. He was still too weak to drive, so I drove him to a café in a shopping mall. It was closed, but the owner was used to Jobs knocking on the door at off-hours, and he happily let us in. “He’s taken on a mission to try to fatten me up,” Jobs joked. His doctors had pushed him to eat eggs as a source of high-quality protein, and he ordered an omelet. “Living with a disease like this, and all the pain, constantly reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to your brain if you’re not careful,” he said. “You don’t make plans more than a year out, and that’s bad. You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.”
An example of this magical thinking was his plan to build a luxurious yacht. Before his liver transplant, he and his family used to rent a boat for vacations, traveling to Mexico, the South Pacific, or the Mediterranean. On many of these cruises, Jobs got bored or began to hate the design of the boat, so they would cut the trip short and fly to Kona Village. But sometimes the cruise worked well. “The best vacation I’ve ever been on was when we went down the coast of Italy, then to Athens—which is a pit, but the Parthenon is mind-blowing—and then to Ephesus in Turkey, where they have these ancient public lavatories in marble with a place in the middle for musicians to serenade.” When they got to Istanbul, he hired a history professor to give his family a tour. At the end they went to a Turkish bath, where the professor’s lecture gave Jobs an insight about the globalization of youth:
I had a real revelation. We were all in robes, and they made some Turkish coffee for us. The professor explained how the coffee was made very different from anywhere else, and I realized, “So fucking what?” Which kids even in Turkey give a shit about Turkish coffee? All day I had looked at young people in Istanbul. They were all drinking what every other kid in the world drinks, and they were wearing clothes that look like they were bought at the Gap, and they are all using cell phones. They were like kids everywhere else. It hit me that, for young people, this whole world is the same now. When we’re making products, there is no such thing as a Turkish phone, or a music player that young people in Turkey would want that’s different from one young people elsewhere would want. We’re just one world now.
After the joy of that cruise, Jobs had amused himself by beginning to design, and then repeatedly redesigning, a boat he said he wanted to build someday. When he got sick again in 2009, he almost canceled the project. “I didn’t think I would be alive when it got done,” he recalled. “But that made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to do, and maybe I have a shot at being alive when it’s done. If I stop work on the boat and then I make it alive for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I’ve kept going.”
After our omelets at the café, we went back to his house and he showed me all of the models and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and minimalist. The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements. As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high. He had gotten the chief engineer of the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural support.
By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders Feadship, but Jobs was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat,” he said. “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”
He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later, and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.”
Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. Bu
t in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s yours.’”
He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found the note that he had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud:
We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.
By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.”
iCloud
In 2001 Jobs had a vision: Your personal computer would serve as a “digital hub” for a variety of lifestyle devices, such as music players, video recorders, phones, and tablets. This played to Apple’s strength of creating end-to-end products that were simple to use. The company was thus transformed from a high-end niche computer company to the most valuable technology company in the world.
Steve Jobs Page 60
