“I mean, his whole thing of knowing exactly what he’s going to say, but up on stage saying it in such a way that he is trying to make you think he’s thinking it up right then …” Gates just laughs.

Making the “1984” ad with Steve was a pirate enterprise for creative director Clow, art director Brenton Thomas, and Steve Hayden, who wrote the copy. Steve didn’t let the board see the ad until a couple of days before the Super Bowl, and they were horrified. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott, the sixty-second spot features a lone woman, in color, running through a sea of gray men and women listening obediently to a huge talking head nattering threateningly from an enormous screen about the enlightened potential of absolute conformity. As the ad nears its end, the woman hurls the large hammer she’s been carrying and smashes the screen. A simple line follows: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ” Sculley got cold feet and told Chiat\Day to sell off the expensive Super Bowl ad space it had purchased. The agency unloaded a thirty-second spot, but lied to Sculley and told him they couldn’t sell the longer one. Marketing chief Bill Campbell decided to air the ad despite the worries of Sculley and the board. Hayden, who was as talented in his own right as Clow, later drew a cartoon that summed up his feelings about Sculley. According to Clow, it showed the CEO and Jobs walking together through a park. Steve is telling Sculley, “Ya know, I think technology can make the human race better.” The thought bubble above Sculley’s head reads, “I’m gonna win over the board. This kid’s gonna be out of here within six months.”

As it was supposed to do, the brilliant ad set up Steve’s “ta-da!” at the official presentation at De Anza. That day, Jobs was P. T. Barnum at his very best. He strolled the stage confidently. He positioned the Mac on the side of the rebellious, the creative, and the bold by reading lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” He took gleeful aim at IBM. He showed off the computer’s beautiful graphics, with its script “Insanely Great” unscrolling across the giant video screen above the stage. The amazing new machine even introduced itself to the crowd, its goofy cyborg voice intoning, “Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag,” referring to the padded canvas tote bag that had concealed it until Steve pulled it out and plugged it in. The crowd went wild, and Jobs, who seemed to choke up, soaked in the admiration. He delivered to the audience the idealized version of what the Mac was supposed to be, and the press ate it up. Primed by a long and brilliant pre-debut press campaign by McKenna, the magazines and trade journals went crazy. The Mac won raves across the board, from Computerworld to Fortune to Esquire to Money magazine, which called it “hands down, the best piece of hardware for its price.” Rolling Stone hailed its subculture bona fides. Venture magazine even went so far as to applaud Steve’s “maverick” management.

The machine was housed in a cute, seemingly self-sufficient ivory-colored box the shape of a miniature refrigerator, a design so cozy it de-fanged the word computer all on its own. But the user interface was the real triumph of friendliness. For the first time, you could create files that looked like paper documents. You could use your mouse to control a cursor that would drag those documents into folders. If you wanted to delete what you had worked on, you put the document into a trash bin. These things had all been demonstrated at PARC but with none of the wondrous simplicity and playfulness on display at De Anza. The superlative reviews, curiosity, and deals with some of the nation’s leading universities fueled strong sales for a few months. But after the initial curiosity wore off, sales declined precipitously.

Truth is, the Mac that Steve had delivered was deeply flawed. It was a brilliant piece of engineering and a gorgeous vision of where computing could go, but it was far too underpowered to be useful. Trying to hold the Mac to a $1,995 retail price, he had refused to include more than 128K of memory—about a tenth of what came with the higher-priced Lisa. The Mac’s bitmapping technology soaked up power. The lines and characters that appeared on its screen were pretty, but they sometimes took forever to show up. In fact, the original Mac did just about everything at a glacial pace. It came with a floppy disk drive rather than a hard drive, so copying files from one floppy disk to another was an arduous process in which the user had to pop the two floppies in and out of the computer multiple times. Adding to the machine’s woes: the Mac launched with hardly any software, because the operating system was still being tweaked right up to the day of launch. No wonder sales dried up. In his effort to realize a vision, Steve had slighted the machine’s utility.

STEVE SHOULD HAVE been the guy leading the charge to overcome the Mac’s technological faults. There was plenty to be done—develop a hard drive for the machine, increase its memory, work with independent software developers to build more applications that took advantage of its great graphics. In fact, shortly after the Mac shipped, he was officially put in charge of the division overseeing both the Lisa and the Mac. But Steve wasn’t interested in supervising incremental improvements for either model. His career to date consisted of a couple of failures—his work on the Apple III and the Lisa—and a couple of breakthrough products. After creating an industry, and then capturing the world’s imagination with another revolutionary computer, he couldn’t be bothered with the heavy lifting required to make the Mac succeed as an ongoing business.

Moreover, the glittery debut of the Mac sent Steve’s life spinning into a new stratosphere of celebrity, one that pumped up his sense of grand accomplishment. He delivered Macs to Mick Jagger, Sean Lennon, and Andy Warhol. For his thirtieth birthday, he hired Ella Fitzgerald to entertain a crowd of a thousand guests at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. He affected a high-handedness that hurt him within his own industry as well. Steve had alienated the critical software developer community throughout the entire development of the Mac by making it seem that it would be a grand privilege if he allowed them to develop applications for his precious machine. “We’d go down to Cupertino,” remembers Bill Gates, “and Steve would be like, ‘This thing is so fucking cool; in fact, I don’t even know why I’m going to let you guys have anything to do with this. You know, I heard what a bunch of idiots you guys are, and, you know, this thing is so golden. It’s going to ship for $999, we’re about nine months away.’ ” Other times, Steve would betray his own insecurities. “And then the second day we’d have another meeting,” remembers Gates, “and Steve would be like, ‘Oh, shit, is this thing any good? Oh, God, can you help us out with this?’ ” Either way, he wasn’t easy to work with.

The arrogance wasn’t tempered by the Mac’s swooning sales. Mike Slade, who then worked in marketing at Microsoft but later became an Apple employee and one of Steve’s close friends, remembers seeing that ego on full display in the fall of 1984, when Slade accompanied Gates to Apple’s national sales meeting at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu. Getting its application software onto the Mac was critical for Microsoft, which had assigned a slew of developers to create graphical software for the new machine. And eventually Microsoft would become the leading Mac software vendor. But at the time the company had serious competition from Lotus, which had developed a spreadsheet for Mac called Jazz. “Jim Manzi and Eric Bedel [Lotus’s CEO and the Jazz product manager] were like the new girl in the frat,” remembers Slade, whose sharp sense of humor masks the kind of analytic chops that made him a favorite of both Gates and Jobs. “Steve and his whole gang were there, and they’re ignoring not only me but Bill [Gates]. They’re treating Bill like he’s the fucking janitor. They even gave us a bad table for dinner.” That night, Slade and Gates went for a long walk on the beach. “Bill was so caught up in the thing, so nervous. He had these Bass Weejuns on, and by the time we got back to the hotel they had salt water all over them. He had no idea he had been walking through water. He was oblivious to the whole thing.”