Once again, Jobs was the impresario and Woz the engineering genius. Steve pushed Woz, cajoling him, berating him, and challenging his thinking. Woz responded by giving his new machine a versatility and instant usefulness never seen before in a microcomputer. It was the most complete computer in a single, manageable box the world had ever seen. All you really needed to add to it was a TV monitor. The Apple II, its innards housed in a sleek, beige plastic case with a built-in keyboard, resembled the consumer-friendly electric typewriters that were popular then. It was designed as a finished product ready for the home, school, or office; the Apple 1, it now seemed clear, could be relegated to the world of soldering irons, oscilloscopes, voltmeters, and other electronic arcana that the average consumer never wanted to worry about.

The new model had a significantly faster microprocessor than its predecessor and more built-in memory, which also improved performance. It had an audio amplifier and speaker, and jacks for plugging in a joystick for game play or a cassette tape drive for cheap data storage. Since Woz wanted it to be useful to the hobbyist programmer the minute it was plugged in, he also built the BASIC programming language right into the system, loading it into a special chip of its own that was hardwired to the motherboard. Perhaps most important, the computer was designed to accommodate unforeseen future hardware modifications that could either soup up its performance or optimize it for a particular kind of computing task, whether crunching numbers, playing games, building searchable lists, or writing programs. Woz built in eight so-called expansion “slots” that would allow the insertion of special circuit cards—essentially smaller circuit boards—that could work in concert with the microprocessor and memory chips on the motherboard for particular purposes, such as adding a floppy disk drive, or more advanced video graphics, or better sound, or the expansion of memory. This gave the Apple II the potential to become a much more capable computer once professionally designed software applications and special expansion circuit cards were available for it, and they weren’t long in coming.

As it had in the garage, Steve’s perfectionism and his comfort with being out of synch with conventional wisdom led to conflicts. Steve had opposed adding those expansion slots, for example, because he thought a perfect consumer computer should be so easy to use that no one would ever want to add to the hardware’s capabilities by opening it up. The instinct—to deliver a computer with the simplicity of an appliance—may have been an admirable long-term goal, but it was a profoundly wrongheaded choice for a personal computer in 1977. Business-minded tinkerers had already expressed interest in designing add-in cards that would let the Apple II interact with or control telephones, musical instruments, laboratory instruments, medical devices, office machines, printers, and on and on. Woz understood this, and won the argument.

But on several other decisions where Steve defied conventional wisdom he was right. You wouldn’t want a truly personal computer to sound like an industrial machine, he reasoned, so he convinced a talented engineer by the name of Frederick Rodney Holt to design a special power supply that didn’t heat up so much that it required a noisy, perpetually whirring fan to keep the machine from melting down. Jobs also pushed for an external shell that looked more like an appliance than a piece of lab equipment, going so far as to visit department stores for inspiration. This insight seems obvious now, but at the time computer hobbyists preferred industrial-looking cases, or even topless machines that showed off the complexity of their insides, and allowed for easy modification. For less hard-core consumers, the Apple II’s design was more inviting and self-contained and presentable, and those qualities alone made it very different from anything else out there at the time. Even though its first significant software application—VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program written by Dan Bricklin and Robert Frankston—wouldn’t arrive until 1979, the $1,295 Apple II was an immediate hit upon its April 1977 introduction. Within one year the company that was accustomed to selling a dozen Apple 1’s every few weeks was selling 500 or so Apple II’s every month.

TWICE NOW, STEVE had proved himself to be a strong leader of a small group of people. The challenge he faced was to figure out how he himself could be led, by Markkula and Scott, as they set out to do something he knew that he could not possibly manage alone: design, build, and steer a growing company to develop, manufacture, distribute, and sell computers. Ceding control had not been difficult at all for Wozniak, who had absolutely no interest in overseeing the details of a burgeoning business. A world-class electrical engineer, he always seemed happiest at his workbench, where he could tinker, invent, and debate with his fellow engineers about wonky details as Apple’s vice president for research and development.

It was far more complicated for Steve, and not just because he had an adolescent problem with authority. He had seen now that his contrarian thinking was essential for the kinds of breakthrough products he wanted to engineer, and he had also seen that his irascible methods could prod a group of people to deliver that vision. Those were qualities that didn’t mesh easily with the grown-up leadership that Scotty was trying to bring to Apple.

What Scotty offered were systems. If Apple were a family, Scotty would have handled the nuts and bolts of the household, setting up bank accounts, closing on a mortgage, and so on. Of course, what he did for Apple was far more complicated. An engineer with a strong manufacturing background at National Semiconductor, Scotty was a high-tech dweeb, right down to the plastic pocket protector he really did have in his short-sleeved dress shirts. He came to Apple having already managed hundreds of people and overseen the complex fabrication processes at a chipmaker. At Apple, he provided most of the managerial heavy lifting required to build a sophisticated high-tech company from scratch: leasing office and factory space and equipment, masterminding the design of a reliable manufacturing process, building a sales team, creating quality controls, supervising the engineering, installing management information systems, and putting together an executive staff to handle finance and hiring. He initiated the critical process of developing solid relationships with key components suppliers and software developers. Steve absorbed a lot by watching Scotty handle these tasks.

Adding to the complexity of what Scott was trying to manage was the fact that Apple was pioneering a nascent industry that was different from most others in one crucial way: computers were systems that blended three key underlying technologies that all were in a state of perpetual and rapid change—semiconductors, software, and data storage. A company couldn’t simply devise a single great, innovative product, tool up, stamp it out, and then sit back and count the money. That had worked for high-tech companies like Polaroid and Xerox during their first decades. But this was different. As soon as a computer company had breathed life into one new system, it had to buckle down and start all over again in order to outdo itself before some other Promethean company reconfigured newer versions of these ever-improving technologies and stole its fire. And it would have to do so over and over again, generation after generation. In fact, it soon became clear that it was smart business for a company to start work on the product that would render obsolete its latest and greatest offering well before the first one even made it to market. That’s how fast things would change in the tech marketplace that was just beginning to materialize. And each of the system’s three underlying technologies was improving independently at its own breathtaking pace, so there was always more leverage to be had by employing the latest, greatest building blocks as they became available.