To that end, Steve also did everything he could to separate “Mac” from “Apple.” He ran the project as a fiefdom that just happened to have access to all the funds of the corporation. He spent a million dollars setting up a new home for the team in a separate building known as Bandley Three, down the road from Apple headquarters. Shortly after they moved in, a programmer named Steve Capps hoisted a skull-and-crossbones flag over the building. It became a rallying point for the team—although the rest of the company, of course, took it as a clear sign that Steve was in it for Mac, not for Apple. Again, this was true insofar as it went. But the Lisa would soon prove to be as big a dud as the Apple III, and the Apple II would come under growing pressure from Big Blue’s successful entrant in the market—the IBM PC. Apple needed a breakthrough product. And this time around, Steve would succeed brilliantly in leading the company’s talented engineers to heights they never imagined they could reach.
Raskin had opted for a cheap and anemic Motorola 6809e microprocessor chip, which would not have had the processing horsepower to employ a mouse or to create screen resolution high enough to support bitmapped graphics. Playing to the competitive instincts of hardware engineer Burrell Smith, a twenty-four-year-old savant with technical chops that rivaled those of Woz, Steve challenged him to build a prototype of the machine that instead incorporated the Lisa’s much more powerful chip—the Motorola 68000—without dramatically raising the overall cost of the machine. It was a daunting goal: you could buy twenty 6809e chips for the price of one 68000.
Smith, like Woz, could never say no to an engineering challenge. His central breakthrough was to find a way to multiply the flow of digital data from the 68000 processor through the rest of the circuit architecture, a trick that ingeniously allowed the computer to take full advantage of the increased processing power without requiring more support chips or circuits. The result: detailed and responsive graphics, exactly what was essential for a machine that employed a mouse and made bitmapped images. Smith literally lived in his lab for a month, while others in the company took off for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. He didn’t even stop to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday on December 19. But he accomplished the impossible.
Egging on Burrell Smith was just the beginning. The Mac project was an expanded version of rallying the gang in the garage, with Steve leading and inspiring a small group of extremely creative people. He stole the best programmers from the Lisa team and other projects around Apple, with a disregard for corporate niceties that was matched only by his boldness. To cite one famous example, when he was unwilling to wait a few days for the extraordinary Andy Hertzfeld to finish up some work on the Apple II, he unplugged Hertzfeld’s computer (wiping out his code in the process) and drove him and his computer over to the building where the Mac team was working. Personality traits that failed him elsewhere worked here. As always, he could be more temperamental than his subordinates, but with this group of artiste engineers he was afforded considerable leeway. “If you could take Steve, he made you up your game,” says Lee Clow. “People who were too thin-skinned to deal with his abusive approach to demanding what he wanted walked away. But I want to prove to guys like that that I can do it. I’m the kind of person who steps up.” So were many of the other stars on the Mac team.
Steve led the group on retreats every once in a while, which gave him occasion to have the team all to himself, separate from the distractions of the rest of Apple. He was an inspirational speaker. “The work fifty people are doing here,” he told them, “is going to send a giant ripple through the universe.” His language changed over the months as the project, predictably, took longer than he had expected. “The journey is the reward” and “It would be better to miss rather than turn out the wrong thing” gave way to “Real artists ship.” But the phrasing always gave his team the sense that he did indeed see them as artists, as creative innovators. “He was so protective of us,” one of them told Fortune, “that whenever we complained about somebody outside the division, it was like unleashing a Doberman. Steve would get on the telephone and chew the guy out so fast your head would spin.”
The best of them felt truly empowered and gained Steve’s respect by challenging him directly, using facts, ability, and persistence to change his mind. Sometimes they would simply ignore him outright. One of the Mac hardware engineers, Bob Belleville, worked with Sony to develop a new, much smaller disk drive for the Mac, despite being ordered directly by Steve to not do so. In the end, Sony’s disk drive made it into the Mac and prevented a potentially disastrous delay. Jobs applauded Belleville for sticking it out on his own.
“You read the books and you wonder, ‘As difficult as he is, why would anyone ever work for him?’ ” says Susan Barnes, the general manager on the Mac project. A no-nonsense financial whiz with a soothing way of managing both above and below her level, Barnes has a quiet, measured intensity that acted like a gyroscope for Steve. She may have been physically small and unassuming, but she commanded respect. “If you’ve worked enough, you know the difference between a boss who just gets it and someone you have to drag into understanding what you’re trying to do. And when you find that boss that just gets it, you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, it’s wonderful. You’re making my life so easy now.’ Steve was that kind of person. He was intellectually right up there with you. You didn’t really have to go into too many explanations. He cared passionately. And he never dialed it in.”
Over two years, the team performed heroic work. Steve drove them as relentlessly as he drove himself. He reminded them that the fate of the company hinged on their work. He harangued them for failing to meet deadlines and for falling short of perfection. The pressure grew steadily over time. It was taxing on both mind and body, and some members burned out so completely that they were never able to work in the high-tech industry again. Others found the experience exhilarating, but not something they’d want to repeat, and left Apple to find a less stressful employment environment. And then there was the small group of folks who loved it so much they stuck around, ready to do whatever it would take all over again, in order to work in the rarefied, exhilarating, and charged atmosphere that Steve created when he was running the show. When the job was over, Steve had the signatures of the forty-six key players on the team engraved on the inside of every Mac. Even people working on the Apple II found Steve’s performance inspiring. “We used to say that the Mac people had God on their side,” said one only half jokingly.
THE DEBUT OF the Macintosh established Steve as a master showman. Between the famous “1984” ad, which played just once, during the Super Bowl broadcast on January 22, 1984, and the Mac’s official presentation at the Flint Auditorium on the campus of Cupertino’s De Anza College on January 24, 1984, Steve transformed expectations of what a product introduction could be. “Steve was P. T. Barnum incarnate,” says Lee Clow, a plain-spoken man who sports a wizardly beard and sprangly white hair. “He loved the ta-da! He was always like, ‘I want you to see the Smallest Man in the World!’ He loved pulling the black velvet cloth off a new product, everything about the showbiz, the marketing, the communications.”
Working with a team of marketers and PR execs, Steve would rehearse endlessly and fastidiously. Bill Gates made appearances at a couple of these events, and remembers being backstage with Steve. “I was never in his league,” he remembers, talking about Steve’s presentations. “I mean, it was just amazing to see how precisely he would rehearse. And if he’s about to go onstage, and his support people don’t have the things right, you know, he is really, really tough on them. He’s even a bit nervous because it’s a big performance. But then he’s on, and it’s quite an amazing thing.