mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. The doctors looked at Powell, puzzled. She was finally able to distract him so they could put on the mask. He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex. He suggested ways it could be designed more simply. “He was very attuned to every nuance of the environment and objects around him, and that drained him,” Powell recalled.
One day, when he was still floating in and out of consciousness, Powell’s close friend Kathryn Smith came to visit. Her relationship with Jobs had not always been the best, but Powell insisted that she come by the bedside. He motioned her over, signaled for a pad and pen, and wrote, “I want my iPhone.” Smith took it off the dresser and brought it to him. Taking her hand, he showed her the “swipe to open” function and made her play with the menus.
Jobs’s relationship with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his daughter with Chrisann, had frayed. She had graduated from Harvard, moved to New York City, and rarely communicated with her father. But she flew down to Memphis twice, and he appreciated it. “It meant a lot to me that she would do that,” he recalled. Unfortunately he didn’t tell her at the time. Many of the people around Jobs found Lisa could be as demanding as her father, but Powell welcomed her and tried to get her involved.
It was a relationship she wanted to restore.
As Jobs got better, much of his feisty personality returned. He still had his bile ducts. “When he started to recover, he passed quickly through the phase of gratitude, and went right back into the mode of being grumpy and in charge,” Kat Smith recalled. “We were all
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 634
wondering if he was going to come out of this with a kinder perspective, but he didn’t.”
He also remained a finicky eater, which was more of a problem than ever. He would eat only fruit smoothies, and he would demand that seven or eight of them be lined up so he could find an option that might satisfy him. He would touch the spoon to his mouth for a tiny taste and pronounce, “That’s no good. That one’s no good either.” Finally Eason pushed back. “You know, this isn’t a matter of taste,” he lectured. “Stop thinking of this as food. Start thinking of it as medicine.”
Jobs’s mood buoyed when he was able to have visitors from Apple. Tim Cook came down regularly and filled him in on the progress of new products. “You could see him brighten every time the talk turned to Apple,” Cook said. “It was like the light turned on.” He loved the company deeply, and he seemed to live for the prospect of returning. Details would energize him.
When Cook described a new model of the iPhone, Jobs spent the next hour discussing not only what to call it—
they agreed on iPhone 3GS—but also the size and font of the “GS,” including whether the letters should be capitalized (yes) and italicized (no).
One day Riley arranged a surprise after-hours visit to Sun Studio, the redbrick shrine where Elvis, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, and many other rock-and-roll pioneers recorded. They were given a private tour and a history lecture by one of the young staffers, who sat with Jobs on the cigarette-scarred bench that Jerry Lee Lewis used. Jobs was arguably the most influential person in the music industry at the time, but the kid didn’t recognize him in his emaciated state. As they were leaving, Jobs told Riley, “That kid was really smart. We should hire him for iTunes.” So Riley called Eddy Cue, who flew the boy out to California for an interview and ended up hiring him to help build the early R&B and
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 635
rock-and-roll sections of iTunes. When Riley went back to see his friends at Sun Studio later, they said that it proved, as their slogan said, that your dreams can still come true at Sun Studio.
Return
At the end of May 2009 Jobs flew back from Memphis on his jet with his wife and sister. They were met at the San Jose airfield by Tim Cook and Jony Ive, who came aboard as soon as the plane landed. “You could see in his eyes his excitement at being back,”
Cook recalled. “He had fight in him and was raring to go.” Powell pulled out a bottle of sparkling apple cider and toasted her husband, and everyone embraced.
Ive was emotionally drained. He drove to Jobs’s house from the airport and told him how hard it had been to keep things going while he was away. He also complained about the stories saying that Apple’s innovation depended on Jobs and would disappear if he didn’t return. “I’m really hurt,” Ive told him. He felt
“devastated,” he said, and underappreciated.
Jobs was likewise in a dark mental state after his return to Palo Alto. He was coming to grips with the thought that he might not be indispensable to the company. Apple stock had fared well while he was away, going from $82 when he announced his leave in January 2009 to $140 when he returned at the end of May. On one conference call with analysts shortly after Jobs went on leave, Cook departed from his unemotional style to give a rousing declaration of why Apple would continue to soar even with Jobs absent: We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 636
where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.
And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.
It sounded like something Jobs would say (and had said), but the press dubbed it “the Cook doctrine.”
Jobs was rankled and deeply depressed, especially about the last line. He didn’t know whether to be proud or hurt that it might be true. There was talk that he might step aside and become chairman rather than CEO. That made him all the more motivated to get out of his bed, overcome the pain, and start taking his restorative long walks again.
A board meeting was scheduled a few days after he returned, and Jobs surprised everyone by making an appearance. He ambled in and was able to stay for most of the meeting. By early June he was holding daily meetings at his house, and by the end of the month he was back at work.
Would he now, after facing death, be more mellow? His colleagues quickly got an answer. On his first day back, he startled his top team by throwing a series of tantrums. He ripped apart people he had not seen for six months, tore up some marketing plans, and chewed out a couple of people whose work he found shoddy. But what was truly telling was the pronouncement he made to a couple of friends late that afternoon. “I had the greatest time being back today,” he
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 637
said. “I can’t believe how creative I’m feeling, and how the whole team is.” Tim Cook took it in stride. “I’ve never seen Steve hold back from expressing his view or passion,” he later said. “But that was good.”
Friends noted that Jobs had retained his feistiness. During his recuperation he signed up for Comcast’s high-definition cable service, and one day he called Brian Roberts, who ran the company. “I thought he was calling to say something nice about it,”
Roberts recalled. “Instead, he told me ‘It sucks.’” But Andy Hertzfeld noticed that, beneath the gruffness, Jobs had become more honest. “Before, if you asked Steve for a favor, he might do the exact opposite,” Hertzfeld said. “That was the perversity in his nature. Now he actually tries to be helpful.”
His public return came on September 9, when he took the stage at the company’s regular fall music event. He got a standing ovation that lasted almost a minute, then he opened on an unusually personal note by mentioning that he was the recipient of a liver donation. “I wouldn’t be here without such generosity,”
he said, “so I hope all of us can be as generous and elect to become organ donors.” After a moment of exultation—“I’m vertical, I’m back at Apple, and I’m loving every day of it”—he unveiled the new line of iPod Nanos, with video cameras, in nine different colors of anodized aluminum.
By the beginning of 2010 he had recovered most of his strength, and he threw himself back into work for what would be one of his, and Apple’s, most productive years. He had hit two consecutive home runs since launching Apple’s digital hub strategy: the iPod and the iPhone. Now he was going to swing for another.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 638
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 639
THE iPAD
Into the Post-PC Era
You Say You Want a Revolution Back in 2002, Jobs had been annoyed by the Microsoft engineer who kept proselytizing about the tablet computer software he had developed, which allowed users to input information on the screen with a stylus or pen. A few manufacturers released tablet PCs that year using the software, but none made a dent in the universe. Jobs had been eager to show how it should be done right—no stylus!—but when he saw the multi-touch technology that Apple was developing, he had decided to use it first to make an iPhone.
In the meantime, the tablet idea was percolating within the Macintosh hardware group. “We have no plans to make a tablet,” Jobs declared in an interview with Walt Mossberg in May 2003. “It turns out people want keyboards. Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already.” Like his statement about having a “hormone imbalance,” that was misleading; at most of his annual Top 100 retreats, the tablet was among the future projects discussed. “We showed the idea off at many of these retreats, because Steve never lost his desire to do a tablet,” Phil Schiller recalled.
The tablet project got a boost in 2007 when Jobs was considering ideas for a low-cost netbook computer.
At an executive team brainstorming session one Monday, Ive asked why it needed a keyboard hinged to the screen; that was expensive and bulky. Put the keyboard on the screen using a multi-touch interface,
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 640
he suggested. Jobs agreed. So the resources were directed to revving up the tablet project rather than designing a netbook.
The process began with Jobs and Ive figuring out the right screen size. They had twenty models made—
all rounded rectangles, of course—in slightly varying sizes and aspect ratios. Ive laid them out on a table in the design studio, and in the afternoon they would lift the velvet cloth hiding them and play with them. “That’s how we nailed what the screen size was,” Ive said.
As usual Jobs pushed for the purest possible simplicity. That required determining what was the core essence of the device. The answer: the display screen.
So the guiding principle was that everything they did had to defer to the screen. “How do we get out of the way so there aren’t a ton of features and buttons that distract from the display?” Ive asked. At every step, Jobs pushed to remove and simplify.
At one point Jobs looked at the model and was slightly dissatisfied. It didn’t feel casual and friendly enough, so that you would naturally scoop it up and whisk it away. Ive put his finger, so to speak, on the problem: They needed to signal that you could grab it with one hand, on impulse. The bottom of the edge needed to be slightly rounded, so that you’d feel comfortable just scooping it up rather than lifting it carefully. That meant engineering had to design the necessary connection ports and buttons in a simple lip that was thin enough to wash away gently underneath.
