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Steve was presiding over a sprawling, growing business that was becoming more demanding by the day. In 2003 and 2004 alone, for example, Apple upgraded its entire product line. The four-quadrant structure still applied to personal computers. Consumers looking for a desktop computer were treated to the transition from the whimsical “sunflower” iMac G4, whose sleek flat-screen monitor swiveled on a post that rose from a bubblelike computer case, to bigger iMac G5s, slablike affairs that packed their entire computing innards behind a flat screen encased by a sleek white plastic frame. The Power Mac G5 was a formidable upgrade of Apple’s tower computer for businesses and power users, and received critical hosannas. Laptop buyers were given the choice of white or matte black plastic iBook G4s or the aluminum PowerBook G4s, which came in three different screen sizes. But between the Internet, home networking, music, and the software applications division, Apple was now churning out much more than just personal computers. New versions of iMovie and FinalCut Pro rolled out, along with a cool new application called GarageBand, which let you record and edit and mix musical compositions on your Mac. Apple also introduced a new version of its OS X operating system called Panther that came loaded with its own browser, Safari. Two new keyboards were introduced, one of them wireless. Apple’s beautiful flat-screen Cinema Display monitors grew bigger and sharper. The company that had pushed harder than any other to make Wi-Fi the standard protocol for networking introduced Airport Extreme, a heavy-duty Wi-Fi server for home users, and Airport Express, which could extend a Wi-Fi network throughout an entire McMansion. For users who wanted to make their online chats visual, the company started selling iSight, a Web camera that perched atop their computer monitor. A line of Web servers called Xserve, aimed at businesses, also got an upgrade. And last, but hardly least, iPod users got two special treats in 2004: the sleek and slender iPod Mini, and an iPod Classic with a color screen that could display photos.
Apple was on a roll. The iPod seemed to have years of growth ahead. The product line was focused, beautifully made, and popular. But, of course, Steve didn’t see this as cause for celebration or rest. He saw it merely as the foundation for his next “dent in the universe.”
Jim Collins, the bestselling author of the management classics Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, has a wonderful phrase to describe an essential characteristic of great leaders: deep restlessness. Collins applies the phrase to Steve, one of the two great leaders who inspire him the most (the other is Winston Churchill, the great English politician who was prime minister during most of World War II, from 1940 to 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955). Collins believes this restlessness is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. It is the foundation of resilience, and self-motivation. It is fueled by curiosity, the ache to build something meaningful, and a sense of purpose to make the most of one’s entire life.
Collins and Steve got to know each other when Collins was a young faculty member at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business from 1988 to 1995. During Collins’s first year teaching entrepreneurship, he asked Steve to conduct a session with his students, and they met for the first time. Even though NeXT was not exactly a rousing success, and Pixar was still finding its way, Steve was charismatic, witty, and gracious. Collins, who remained periodically in touch with Jobs throughout his life, believes those years were the best time to meet Steve. “You would have wanted to meet Winston Churchill in 1935, when he was out of favor and no one was paying attention,” he says. “Churchill had his detractors, which is not an uncommon experience for great men. But in the end you judge them by the big picture, the arc of how everything unfolded.” Churchill, like Jobs, suffered humiliating setbacks early in his career, and persevered through a long, arduous climb back to an even greater prominence.
Steve’s restlessness hadn’t always been an advantage. When he was younger, his attention could flit from one project to another, as happened when the Apple III development effort suddenly seemed mundane after he’d seen the potential of graphical computing at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Founding NeXT so shortly after leaving Apple under a cloud in 1985 was abrupt, as was his purchase of the computer graphics engineering team that would become Pixar. Back then, his restlessness sometimes seemed like impulsiveness. But he never gave up. He didn’t ever quit on Pixar or NeXT. What gave his particular restlessness real depth, then, was its relentlessness. “The things he was trying to do,” says Collins, “were always hard. Sometimes those things beat him up. But the response to fighting through that suffering can be tremendous personal growth.”
Now, in 2003 and 2004, Steve’s restlessness was pushing him forward again, into the uncertain future, and into a test of just how much he had grown. Steve was asking himself the question he always asked himself—“What comes next?”—but this time the answer was particularly complicated. Apple could build something that evolved out of its traditional foundation in personal computing, perhaps something that yet again transformed the user interface. Perhaps it needed to deliver a computer in a new physical form, something like a tablet. Perhaps it could build on the iPod’s success with another consumer electronics product, perhaps even a cellphone.
The iPod had changed everything for Apple. The iTunes Music Store, especially now that its customers included millions of PC users, was turning out to be a whole new distribution system, with very little friction and far less overhead cost than the old way of stamping out CDs in a factory and then shipping them to retailers. By the end of fiscal 2004—just three years after the initial introduction of iTunes—revenue from products related to iTunes and the iPod would account for 19 percent of Apple’s total sales. Apple sold 4.4 million iPods that year, while Macintosh unit sales slipped by 28 percent, from 4.6 million in 2000 to 3.3 million in 2004. The ultimate proof of the impact of iTunes and the iPod was in the bottom line: In 2004, the company reported net income of $276 million, up from $69 million in 2003.
But the iPod had done more than simply create a huge secondary stream of revenue. It had solidified Apple’s foundation and expanded its potential. Tim Cook now managed an intricate supply chain that fed a global manufacturing network capable of churning out tens of millions of iPods a month. Jony Ive had responded to this higher metabolism and greater manufacturing scale by experimenting with new metals, alloys, durable plastics, and super-hard glass that could be sculpted into devices as small as an iPod Mini and as big as a 32-inch computer screen. The executive team was starting to feel that the company would succeed with whatever it took on. “One of the things I’ve always felt,” Steve told me, “is that if you’re going to be creative, it’s like jumping up in the air; you want to make damn sure the ground is going to be there when you get back.” The ground under Steve had never been this solid. The time was right to jump into something radically new that completely changed the game. Steve just didn’t know which direction to leap. Resolving the dilemma would turn out to be the biggest decision of his professional life.
APPLE DID NOT have a formal research and development unit per se. Steve didn’t like the idea of relegating all forward-looking tinkering to a separate area that somehow wasn’t beholden to the people leading his most important product development efforts. Instead, research projects flowered in pockets all around the company, many of them without Steve’s blessing or even awareness. They’d come to Steve’s attention only if one of his key managers decided that the project or technology showed real potential. In that case, Steve would check it out, and the information he’d glean would go into the learning machine that was his brain. Sometimes that’s where it would sit, and nothing would happen. Sometimes, on the other hand, he’d concoct a way to combine it with something else he’d seen, or perhaps to twist it in a way to benefit an entirely different project altogether. This was one of his great talents, the ability to synthesize separate developments and technologies into something previously unimaginable. It’s a talent that he would call on to decide what came next.
Two projects had been launched with the intention of exploring the possibilities for creating a new kind of cellphone. Steve himself had asked the folks who developed Apple’s Airport Wi-Fi networking product line to do some early research on cellular phone technology. This decision made some on his team just shake their heads—Wi-Fi data-networking technology has very little to do with the cellular radio technology behind wireless phone networks. But there was another, much more immediate project in the works. Beginning in the fall of 2003, several members of Steve’s executive team, including Eddy Cue, the mastermind behind the iTunes Music Store, had been engrossed in finding a way to build iTunes-compatible music players and iTunes Music Store accessibility right into cellphone handsets.
“Everybody carried two devices. A cellphone and an iPod,” Cue recalls, patting both front pockets of his jeans. “We knew you could add iTunes to a phone and it would be almost like an iPod. It was mostly a software problem. We looked around at the industry, and in early 2004 we settled on working with Motorola, which at the time completely dominated the handset business with its RAZR flip phone. Everybody had one.” Motorola had been a key supplier to Apple for decades. Its microprocessors powered all of Apple’s computers up until the mid-1990s, and after that it was part of a consortium with IBM that designed the PowerPC chips that would be CPUs in Macs up until 2006. Motorola promised Apple that it would create a new line of phones, called the ROKR, expressly as a vehicle for iTunes.
The ROKR project was controversial from the start, for one simple reason: most people at Apple didn’t like the idea of collaborating with other companies. The iPod hardware team, especially, led by Tony Fadell, couldn’t stomach the notion of ceding the development of what they had started to call “musicphones” to the traditional handset industry. And the more Motorola showed them of its plans for the ROKR, the more certain they became that licensing their precious iPod and iTunes software had been a mistake. While Motorola had certainly built sleek and beautiful phones in the past, the company seemed hopeless when it came to designing software that could replicate the simplicity of Apple’s iPods. To Apple’s whiz kids, Motorola’s approach seemed all but inept. The Illinois company assigned separate teams of programmers to build different software components, like a directory of contacts, text messaging, and a crude Internet browser that could only display stripped-down mobile versions of websites. Nothing about these features was as intuitive as the iPod screen interface, and trying to combine the efforts of disparate, disjointed teams led to a hopeless muddle. Fadell became so exasperated with Motorola that he decided to develop his own prototypes for an Apple cellphone, the first featuring music and the second focusing on video and photos.
Ironically, two other projects that started out having nothing to do with cellphones would come to have the greatest impact on Steve’s decision about what Apple would pursue next. One of these was called Project Purple. It was a skunkworks effort Steve had ordered up to devise a new approach to what was proving to be an elusive “form factor” for personal computing: an ultralight, portable device that resembled a tablet or a clipboard, with an interactive touch screen. The concept had thwarted Microsoft’s best researchers and engineers for years, but Steve believed that his guys could make headway where others had failed. There simply had to be a more direct and intuitive way for users to interact with a computer than a keyboard and a mouse. Preferably it would be something he could use anywhere, even when sitting on the toilet.
The other effort was something that developed far from Steve’s purview. In 2002, Apple researchers Greg Christie and Bas Ording started looking into a user-interface technology that had been stuck in the mud for years. Christie and Ording decided to reconsider the possibilities of a touch-screen monitor, which allowed people to use a fingertip to activate an icon or button displayed on a video screen. Initially developed by IBM in the 1960s, touch screens had not followed a path anyone would call revolutionary. In 1972, Control Data sold a touch-screen mainframe terminal, called the Plato IV. In 1977, CERN, the European high-energy physics research consortium, built one to control particle accelerators. In the 1980s, Hewlett-Packard became the first big manufacturer to offer a touch-screen monitor as an accessory for some of its early desktop PCs—but most software available at the time couldn’t use it. Rudimentary touch screens would become the interface of choice for ATMs, airline check-in kiosks, and cash registers, but they didn’t seem to hold out much promise for personal computing.
In the early 1990s, a handful of startup entrepreneurs, along with researchers in the R&D labs of several computer makers, hit upon the idea that they might be able to reconfigure touch-screen technology into something they dubbed “pen computing.” Their idea was that users would mimic the actions of a mouse by working directly on the screen of a portable computer with a special stylus. They believed that drawing or writing directly on a screen was so natural and familiar that it would be the best way for people to interact with their computers. This was the nascent technology that John Sculley had counted on to make the Apple Newton MessagePad the next big wave in personal computing when it was introduced in 1993. The Newton failed, of course, partly because its handwriting recognition was embarrassingly inaccurate. Microsoft tried for two decades to make something of pen computing in tablet versions of the PC, but to no avail. The only somewhat successful stab at the genre was Palm’s Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA). But the small device was never intended to be a full-featured computer, and its success was fleeting.
Academics and even some forward-looking digital artists took the touch-screen concept in a different direction. In the early 1980s, they started experimenting with technology that allowed for the use of more than just one fingertip to manipulate computer images on a screen. These so-called “multi-touch” interfaces were profoundly different. Performed with combinations of fingers or hands, gestures and coordinated motions could control the screen with far more dexterity than a mouse. You could move icons and files around, or enlarge and shrink images on the screen. You had the tactile illusion of physically interacting with the image on the screen. Seeing the potential, researchers at IBM, Microsoft, Bell Labs, and elsewhere experimented with their own multi-touch projects.
Apple’s Greg Christie had been one of the key designers and software engineers of the ill-fated Newton. He had gotten over his romance with pen computing, but he had steadily followed all the multi-touch research efforts in academia and the tech industry. He hoped that partnering with Ording, who had joined Apple in 1998 and who had worked on the iPod’s scroll-wheel user interface as well as on OS X, might lead the way to make multi-touch the distinguishing technology for a serious new computer. They believed it might serve as the basis for a whole new kind of user interface.
Developing a new interface is one of the most deceptively difficult technological challenges in computer science. It isn’t simply a matter of designing some delightful new way to present images of information on a computer. It’s just as much a matter of reckoning with—and not simply discarding—past habits. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard has for years been the universally familiar means of typing and entering information into a computer. QWERTY, which refers to the first six keys on the left side of the third row of a keyboard, was a relic, a keyboard arrangement from the era of manual typewriters that was designed to keep the individual letter-embossing hammers from getting tangled up when the user was typing at high speed.
Christie and Ording decided against altering this ubiquitous, albeit hidebound, preference. Instead, they would experiment with having a virtual QWERTY keyboard appear on the screen when you needed to type. As they began to experiment with multi-touch, they found that they could do all kinds of things that were both effective and fun. The new approach was useful for editing and retouching photographic images, for making drawings, and even for annotating spreadsheets and word-processing documents. The more they worked with multi-touch, the more Ording and Christie believed they were onto something big.
Having five different projects sprout up around similar technological possibilities wasn’t unusual at Apple. Steve didn’t issue a “Let there be the iPad” command one day, and wake up the next to find the whole enterprise devoting itself to his single wish. Instead, the place was always bubbling with possibilities. His most important job was to sort through them and imagine how they could point the way to something entirely new.
STEVE HAD ANOTHER critical decision to make during this period: how to treat the cancer that had been discovered in his pancreas. The fact that the islet cell neuroendocrine carcinoma was slow-growing and potentially treatable had given Laurene and him some hope. But the key word was potentially. Steve had always taken great care of his body in ways that may have seemed quirky to others but that made sense to him. At one point in his younger days, he had been a fruitarian. He eventually settled into a vegetarian—primarily vegan—diet, as did Laurene, and he had no significant health problems. Now that he had a big one, he wanted to make sure for himself that the tumor was treated in the best way possible. In typical Jobsian fashion, that meant exploring all the alternatives.
He started out talking to close advisers like Larry Brilliant, Andy Grove, Arthur Levinson, the Genentech CEO who was on Apple’s board, and the physician/author Dean Ornish. His Stanford doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove the tumor. In fact, the team of doctors included a surgeon who had pioneered a promising new surgical method for just this type of pancreatic cancer. But Steve wasn’t immediately convinced that this was the best approach, so he told his doctors he first wanted to try something less invasive, namely treating it through his diet.
There certainly seems to have been a psychological component to his decision to temporarily avoid surgery. Years later, according to his authorized biography, Steve told Walter Isaacson, “I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work.” It’s natural to fear such an invasive operation, but for someone like Steve, who believed so strongly in the value of having control, it must have been especially complicated.
But there were also intellectual reasons to investigate and try to understand his cancer. Steve’s particular kind of tumor is a rare one. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), only about one thousand cases a year are discovered in the United States. As a result, research on pancreatic islet cell neuroendocrine carcinomas is not buttressed by the kind of massive database available to doctors studying breast or lung cancer, to cite two more common forms, or even other forms of cancer of the pancreas. (His own oncologist/surgeon admitted to me privately that not enough was known at that time to determine statistically what the best treatment should be—surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, something else, or a combination of treatments.) So Steve’s indecision about what to do was not completely off-base. “I don’t understand,” says Brilliant, “how writers can portray him, on the one hand, as this tough-ass businessman, very materialistic, with no mention of the spiritual side. But when it comes to his cancer, they claim that he had this crazy, spiritual belief that he was in a messianic situation to heal it himself.”
Steve conducted his research with the same inquisitiveness he applied to understanding what would make a great new product. He scoured the globe for other options, and made surreptitious trips to see doctors in Seattle, Baltimore, and Amsterdam. He was interested primarily in dietary treatments that might work, and alternative cures that meshed more with his inclination toward an organic lifestyle. But he also talked to many expert mainstream doctors. At one point he even convened a conference call where he was able to discuss his cancer with at least a half dozen of the best cancer doctors in the United States.
But he found nothing that was more promising than surgery. The few people who knew intimately of Steve’s cancer grew ever more exasperated as his “research” dragged on for months, and his doctors started to feel that the window for a successful operation that would get all the cancer was closing. Finally, in the summer of 2004, Steve acceded and checked into Stanford University Medical Center. On Saturday, July 31, he spent most of the day on an operating table. The surgeons opened him up and removed the tumor.
It was an extremely invasive surgery. Months later, Steve would show me his scar—a squarish semicircle nearly two feet long, starting at the bottom of one side of his rib cage, swooping down to his navel, and curving back up the other side. “The pancreas is back behind your gastrointestinal organs, so the surgeons have to have enough room to pull some of them up and out of the way to get at it,” he told me, gesturing with both hands as if he were doing it himself. “They actually took only a small part of my pancreas,” Steve continued. “Just getting to it was the hard part.”
August 1, the day after his marathon surgery, was a Sunday. Although he was still in the intensive care unit and more than a little logy from anesthesia and painkillers, he asked for his PowerBook so he could put the finishing touches on a letter to Apple employees to inform them of his illness and surgery. In some ways the letter was a marketing challenge: How can you put positive spin on the fact that you have had surgery to treat pancreatic cancer, a disease that in most cases is a death sentence? Here’s what he wrote:
I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me. This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas. I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1% of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was). I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
The far more common form of pancreatic cancer is called adenocarcinoma, which is currently not curable and usually carries a life expectancy of around one year after diagnosis. I mention this because when one hears “pancreatic cancer” (or Googles it), one immediately encounters this far more common and deadly form, which, thank god, is not what I had.
I will be recuperating during the month of August, and expect to return to work in September. While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.
Steve
PS: I’m sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.
Knowing that the letter would probably wind up being made public, he had even made sure to get a plug in for some Apple products. What he didn’t reveal—and it is quite possible that he hadn’t been told yet—was that when the surgeons opened him up, they also spotted some incipient cancerous metastases on Steve’s liver.
There is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened to Steve if he hadn’t delayed his surgery by ten months. According to the National Cancer Institute, people who have Steve’s kind of tumor entirely removed soon after an early diagnosis have a 55 percent chance of still being alive five years later.
Steve would survive for seven years, and those years would prove to be the most astounding and most productive of his life.
RECOVERING FROM A radical abdominal surgery is hellish. A massive incision like Steve’s generally guarantees a lengthy and difficult convalescence, mainly because so much soft tissue and muscle must heal without too much stress or stretching at a location where your body bends and flexes every time you sit or stand. As Steve tersely told me, “The healing process really sucked.” At first, he could hardly move without unleashing a cascade of pain radiating out from his gut all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes. When he finally got home from the two-week hospital stay, it was all he could do to sit upright in a rocking chair. He didn’t like his painkillers, because they dulled his brain. Still, he was determined to get back to the office before the end of September.
Many of us would react to a disease like Steve’s by taking it slow at the office or by tackling a “bucket list” of things we’ve always wanted to do. Steve became even more focused on work. “He was doing what he loved,” recalls Laurene. “If anything, he doubled down.” So he spent much of that seven-week convalescence thinking deeply about Apple, the computer business, and the trajectory of digital technology. He assembled an ambitious to-do list of what he wanted to accomplish once he returned to the office. “When he came back from that surgery he was on a faster clock,” remembers Tim Cook. “The company is always running on a fast-moving treadmill that doesn’t stop. But when he came back there was an urgency about him. I recognized it immediately.”
The first thing Steve did was spend time with each member of the executive team, catching up on what was going on and explaining to each how he intended to approach his work going forward. He told them that he would now focus even more of his attention on things like product development, marketing, and the retail stores, and less attention on manufacturing, operations, finance, and human resources matters. He knew he had less stamina than before, although that wasn’t easy to detect. Moreover, his doctors were keeping him on a short leash, he told them, insisting that he come in for regular checkups to make sure he was healing properly and monitoring for any other signs of cancer. He did not tell his senior staff that the cancer had likely spread, nor that he was going to have to endure rounds of chemotherapy. But he had come to accept that his business life would never again be like what it was, and he wanted them to know how that might change things at Apple. When he was done catching up, he turned his attention back to the big decision, which now seemed more urgent than ever. What would come next?
OUT OF THE five cellphone- and tablet-related projects that had been percolating, only one was dead by the fall of 2004. Not surprisingly, the Wi-Fi team had failed to come up with anything of note.
Motorola had inched ahead with its iTunes-ready ROKR phone, but the handset was starting to look like what things designed by committee usually resemble—a turkey. For one thing, Motorola opted to build a chunky, so-called candy-bar-style phone, which bore no resemblance whatsoever to its far more stylish forebears, the RAZR flip phone and the iPod. The iTunes MP3s song files would be stored on removable MicroSD flash memory cards—smaller, more fragile versions of the ones that had just begun to show up in most pocket digital cameras. Inexplicably, Motorola decided that those cards would accommodate no more than one hundred songs, even though they could easily hold many times more. And despite the fact that the phone could provide Internet access, you couldn’t use it to buy and download music from the iTunes Music Store. Instead, any unlucky ROKR buyer would have to use his computer to buy music via iTunes, and then transfer those tracks to the ROKR via cable. This wasn’t any improvement over the existing iPods—which, unlike the ROKR, couldn’t boast of having direct Internet access. The more they learned about the ROKR, the more Fadell and Apple’s other star engineers dreaded the thing. Motorola would wind up taking eighteen months to deliver it (during that same time, Apple would refresh its entire iPod product line twice), so it was no surprise that when Steve finally introduced the ROKR at Apple’s September 2005 MacWorld, it was an afterthought. Apple’s own sleek new compact iPod, called the Nano, was the star of the show.
Fadell’s musicphone prototypes, which he worked on all through 2004, were far more interesting. His first version incorporated the iPod’s distinctive thumb-wheel interface as a sort of dialer. Steve liked Fadell’s moxie, but there was an obvious problem. The thumb-wheel that worked so elegantly on the iPod turned out to be a serious hindrance on a musicphone. While it was fine for scrolling through a list of music or contacts, “thumb-dial” was awkward for actually dialing a new phone number. It was a gimmick. This prototype aimed too low with its technology and user interface design. Fadell’s second prototype, which did away with the thumb-wheel and put more emphasis on being a video player, showed great imagination, and was a manifestation of Fadell’s irrepressible ambition. It couldn’t overcome an external problem—the cellular networks of that time weren’t fast or reliable enough to provide consistent video streams. Even though Fadell’s videophone could have been produced within a year with the right telecom partner, Steve chose not to go ahead. This prototype had aimed too high, since it depended upon cellular infrastructure that was not yet in place.
The Project Purple team was running into a different set of problems. In their desire to repurpose and yet maintain compatibility with traditional Macintosh hardware and software, Project Purple’s engineers were running into the bugaboos that Microsoft and the others had encountered with their tablet PCs: bulk, weight, battery life, and cost. Even a relatively small ten-inch screen would guzzle power and quickly exhaust the tablet’s rechargeable batteries when operating untethered. Wi-Fi technology, which was the best means for connecting a mobile computer to the Internet or to other computer networks, also sucked power, as did traditional PC microprocessors—even those tailored for laptops. The power demands of a tablet seemed like an intractable problem, given that existing batteries were big and heavy.
So, while the discrete technologies to build an iPad derived from Mac technology were coming together, the actual device you could make would be heavy and impractical, and would carry just about the same price tag as a conventional MacBook. Steve knew that would be a hard sell. Still, he didn’t shutter the operation. Until he had a plan B, he wouldn’t pull the plug on Purple.
Greg Christie and Bas Ording, meanwhile, had spent several months in 2004 putting together and playing with a rather funky, but working, prototype of a multi-touch screen. The pair projected the live video image of a computer screen on a touch-sensitive surface the size of a conference room table. Using two hands, you could “move” folders around, activate icons, shrink and enlarge documents, and “scroll” around the screen horizontally and vertically with somewhat intuitive dexterity. The multi-touch gestures they had contrived to do all of this were rudimentary at this point, but “Jumbotron,” as design chief Jony Ive eventually dubbed their prototype, was intriguing enough to offer a sense of how engaging it would be to control a touch-screen computer with your fingers. Ive, who had become a self-appointed scout for game-changing user interface technologies in Apple’s own labs, had been following Christie and Ording’s work all along and was mesmerized when he saw the Jumbotron demo in action. He wanted Steve to see this. He believed Apple could make multi-touch the basis of a new kind of device, and he believed it should be a tablet computer.
STEVE, TOO, HAD been thinking that Apple’s next step would probably involve some kind of fundamental reconfiguration of the traditional personal computer. He had always been leaning toward making a tablet. That’s why he gave the green light to Project Purple in the first place. But shortly after he returned from surgery, during one of their regular brainstorming walks around the Apple campus, Steve told Jony Ive that he was beginning to think differently. “Steve wanted to shelve the project,” Ive recalls. “I was so surprised because I was so excited about it. But one of the observations he made—and this is classically brilliant Steve—was that, ‘I don’t know that I can convince people that a tablet is a product category that has real value. But I know that I can convince people they need a better phone.’ ” This suggestion wasn’t made in glorious ignorance of the engineering it would require. He knew absolutely that building a phone was much, much harder than doing a tablet, because it had to be so small, and because it had to be a good phone and a good computer and a good music player. What he really wanted was to try to sell a whole new category of device. That, to him, was worth the risk.
When Steve finally checked out the Jumbotron multi-touch demonstration prototype by Greg Christie and Bas Ording, “he was completely underwhelmed,” says Ive. “He didn’t see that there was any value to the idea. And I felt really stupid because I had perceived it to be a very big thing. I said, ‘Well, for example, imagine the back of a digital camera. Why would it have a small screen and all of these buttons? Why couldn’t it be all display?’ That was the first application that I could think of on the spot, which is a great example of just how early this was. Still he was very, very dismissive. It was another example of one of those times when what he says and the way he says it is not personal. You could take it that way, but it wasn’t.”
After mulling over multi-touch for a few days, however, Steve changed his mind. Perhaps multi-touch really was the user-interface leap he had been looking for. He started to pick the brains of people he respected. He called Jony to talk about it further. He conferred with Steve Sakoman, another former Newton and Palm engineer who now worked for Avie Tevanian as the VP of software technology, and who had been pushing for Apple to make the move into phones. And he wanted to hear what the iPod guys thought about multi-touch, since they’d already built the two musicphone prototypes. He asked Tony Fadell to come check out the Jumbotron, since he had the hardware engineering expertise to judge what it might take to build such a technology into a much smaller device that could be mass-produced. Once he saw it, Fadell agreed that the technology was really interesting, but allowed that it wouldn’t be easy to shrink that demo the size of a Ping-Pong table down to something functional that could fit into a pocket-sized device. So Steve gave him exactly that challenge. “You’ve figured out how to blend music and a phone,” he told Fadell. “Now go figure out how to add this multi-touch interface to the screen of a phone. A really cool, really small, really thin phone.”
In hindsight, it’s clear that seeing Christie and Ording’s multitouch demo was an epiphany for Steve, one that was not all that different from his first visit to Xerox PARC twenty-five years earlier. Helping people interact more directly and intuitively with intelligent devices was the central factor in creating a new genre of smart mobile gadgets. The Mac had been a radical new conception of the user interface for a computer, and the iPod’s thumb-wheel had been a user interface breakthrough as well. Multi-touch had the same potential as the Mac’s GUI. But he’d have to move quickly.
Thanks to the iPod, Steve knew that his team could strike fast. And also because of the iPod experience, he knew that Apple could make mind-boggling quantities of whatever device it created. So he decided that Apple was going to create a cellphone. The company was going to put in the palm of your hand a gadget as slick and compact as an iPod, that could download or play music and even video streamed directly over a wireless network, that would be a great phone with amazing voice-mail and directory features, and that would be a computer as powerful as the engineering workstations he’d built at NeXT. Most people hated their cellphones, he liked to say. Apple would create one they would love.
All this decision making took place in late January 2005. It was hardly the only big thing going on Apple—after all, at MacWorld Steve had unveiled the Mac Mini computer, the iPod Shuffle, and a new suite of personal productivity applications called iWork, which he hoped would compete directly with Microsoft Office. But the cellphone project quickly became the main topic of discussion when he and Jony met, as they did almost every day now. They would have lunch together three or four times a week, and take long walks afterward kicking around ideas for solving such mundane-sounding problems as how to keep a touch screen from reacting to contact with your ear when you are talking on the phone, or which materials to use so that your screen wouldn’t get all scuffed when sitting in your pocket alongside keys and loose change. Steve would sometimes go back to Jony’s design lab and sit there for hours, watching designers tinker with prototypes, or else the two of them would stand together at the whiteboard, drawing and modifying each other’s design ideas. They were two kindred spirits, and Steve would now collaborate more closely with Jony than he ever had with Woz or Avie or Ruby or even Ed Catmull and John Lasseter.
As he brainstormed with Jony, and as Fadell’s team started to get going on a real design, Steve became increasingly confident. Creating a wholly new kind of mobile phone wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it would turn out to be even more daunting than the original Macintosh project. But Steve was certain he could negotiate a good deal with a telephone company, now that he’d gained some experience from the ROKR deal. He felt sure that his team could master the software and engineering challenges. He began to have the sense that if it all panned out, this new gadget might be the biggest-selling electronic product of all time. It wasn’t just going to be a phone, nor was it going to be a phone that was a media player. It was going to be a full-blown computer, too. That meant it would also be a smartphone, one that was perpetually connected to the Internet. The easiest part was coming up with a name for it: iPhone, of course.
