With his final slide, Jobs emphasized one of the themes of his life, which was embodied by the iPad: a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street. “The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he concluded. The iPad was the digital reincarnation of the Whole Earth Catalog, the place where creativity met tools for living.
For once, the initial reaction was not a Hallelujah
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Chorus. The iPad was not yet available (it would go on sale in April), and some who watched Jobs’s demo were not quite sure what it was. An iPhone on steroids?
“I haven’t been this let down since Snooki hooked up with The Situation,” wrote Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons (who moonlighted as “The Fake Steve Jobs” in an online parody). Gizmodo ran a contributor’s piece headlined “Eight Things That Suck about the iPad” (no multitasking, no cameras, no Flash . . . ). Even the name came in for ridicule in the blogosphere, with snarky comments about feminine hygiene products and maxi pads. The hashtag “#iTampon” was the number-three trending topic on Twitter that day.
There was also the requisite dismissal from Bill Gates. “I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard—in other words a netbook—will be the mainstream,” he told Brent Schlender. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with the iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” He continued to insist that the Microsoft approach of using a stylus for input would prevail. “I’ve been predicting a tablet with a stylus for many years,”
he told me. “I will eventually turn out to be right or be dead.”
The night after his announcement, Jobs was annoyed and depressed. As we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone.
I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining.
There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, “Fuck you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, “Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.” And some
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don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.
He did get one congratulatory call that day that he appreciated, from President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. But he noted at dinner that the president had not called him since taking office.
The public carping subsided when the iPad went on sale in April and people got their hands on it. Both Time and Newsweek put it on the cover. “The tough thing about writing about Apple products is that they come with a lot of hype wrapped around them,” Lev Grossman wrote in Time. “The other tough thing about writing about Apple products is that sometimes the hype is true.” His main reservation, a substantive one, was
“that while it’s a lovely device for consuming content, it doesn’t do much to facilitate its creation.” Computers, especially the Macintosh, had become tools that allowed people to make music, videos, websites, and blogs, which could be posted for the world to see. “The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people’s masterpieces.” It was a criticism Jobs took to heart. He set about making sure that the next version of the iPad would emphasize ways to facilitate artistic creation by the user.
Newsweek’s cover line was “What’s So Great about the iPad? Everything.” Daniel Lyons, who had zapped it with his “Snooki” comment at the launch, revised his opinion. “My first thought, as I watched Jobs run through his demo, was that it seemed like no big deal,” he wrote. “It’s a bigger version of the iPod Touch, right? Then I got a chance to use an iPad, and it hit me: I want one.” Lyons, like others, realized that this was Jobs’s pet project, and it embodied all that he stood for.
“He has an uncanny ability to cook up gadgets that we
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didn’t know we needed, but then suddenly can’t live without,” he wrote. “A closed system may be the only way to deliver the kind of techno-Zen experience that Apple has become known for.”
Most of the debate over the iPad centered on the issue of whether its closed end-to-end integration was brilliant or doomed. Google was starting to play a role similar to the one Microsoft had played in the 1980s, offering a mobile platform, Android, that was open and could be used by all hardware makers. Fortune staged a debate on this issue in its pages. “There’s no excuse to be closed,” wrote Michael Copeland. But his colleague Jon Fortt rebutted, “Closed systems get a bad rap, but they work beautifully and users benefit.
Probably no one in tech has proved this more convincingly than Steve Jobs. By bundling hardware, software, and services, and controlling them tightly, Apple is consistently able to get the jump on its rivals and roll out polished products.” They agreed that the iPad would be the clearest test of this question since the original Macintosh. “Apple has taken its control-freak rep to a whole new level with the A4 chip that powers the thing,” wrote Fortt. “Cupertino now has absolute say over the silicon, device, operating system, App Store, and payment system.”
Jobs went to the Apple store in Palo Alto shortly before noon on April 5, the day the iPad went on sale.
Daniel Kottke—his acid-dropping soul mate from Reed and the early days at Apple, who no longer harbored a grudge for not getting founders’ stock options—made a point of being there. “It had been fifteen years, and I wanted to see him again,” Kottke recounted. “I grabbed him and told him I was going to use the iPad for my song lyrics. He was in a great mood and we had a nice chat after all these years.” Powell and their youngest child, Eve, watched from a corner of the store.
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Wozniak, who had once been a proponent of making hardware and software as open as possible, continued to revise that opinion. As he often did, he stayed up all night with the enthusiasts waiting in line for the store to open. This time he was at San Jose’s Valley Fair Mall, riding a Segway. A reporter asked him about the closed nature of Apple’s ecosystem. “Apple gets you into their playpen and keeps you there, but there are some advantages to that,” he replied. “I like open systems, but I’m a hacker. But most people want things that are easy to use. Steve’s genius is that he knows how to make things simple, and that sometimes requires controlling everything.”
The question “What’s on your iPad?” replaced
“What’s on your iPod?” Even President Obama’s staffers, who embraced the iPad as a mark of their tech hipness, played the game. Economic Advisor Larry Summers had the Bloomberg financial information app, Scrabble, and The Federalist Papers. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had a slew of newspapers, Communications Advisor Bill Burton had Vanity Fair and one entire season of the television series Lost, and Political Director David Axelrod had Major League Baseball and NPR.
Jobs was stirred by a story, which he forwarded to me, by Michael Noer on Forbes.com. Noer was reading a science fiction novel on his iPad while staying at a dairy farm in a rural area north of Bogotá, Colombia, when a poor six-year-old boy who cleaned the stables came up to him. Curious, Noer handed him the device.
With no instruction, and never having seen a computer before, the boy started using it intuitively. He began swiping the screen, launching apps, playing a pinball game. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that isn’t magical, I don’t
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know what is.”
In less than a month Apple sold one million iPads.
That was twice as fast as it took the iPhone to reach that mark. By March 2011, nine months after its release, fifteen million had been sold. By some measures it became the most successful consumer product launch in history.
Advertising
Jobs was not happy with the original ads for the iPad. As usual, he threw himself into the marketing, working with James Vincent and Duncan Milner at the ad agency (now called TBWA/Media Arts Lab), with Lee Clow advising from a semiretired perch. The commercial they first produced was a gentle scene of a guy in faded jeans and sweatshirt reclining in a chair, looking at email, a photo album, the New York Times, books, and video on an iPad propped on his lap. There were no words, just the background beat of “There Goes My Love” by the Blue Van. “After he approved it, Steve decided he hated it,” Vincent recalled. “He thought it looked like a Pottery Barn commercial.” Jobs later told me:
It had been easy to explain what the iPod was—a thousand songs in your pocket—which allowed us to move quickly to the iconic silhouette ads. But it was hard to explain what an iPad was. We didn’t want to show it as a computer, and yet we didn’t want to make it so soft that it looked like a cute TV. The first set of ads showed we didn’t know what we were doing. They had a cashmere and Hush Puppies feel to them.
James Vincent had not taken a break in months.
So when the iPad finally went on sale and the ads started airing, he drove with his family to the Coachella Music Festival in Palm Springs, which featured some of his favorite bands, including Muse, Faith No More, and Devo. Soon after he arrived, Jobs called. “Your
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commercials suck,” he said. “The iPad is revolutionizing the world, and we need something big. You’ve given me small shit.”
