From 850 miles up the Pacific Coast, Bill Gates watched with great interest as the limping company he had helped with that $150 million investment and a commitment to make software for the Mac struggled to survive. “It was a much more mature group,” he observes. “With the Mac team or even at NeXT, when Steve went on a jag everybody just scattered into their own corner. But this Apple management team would push back and coalesce as a group. When Steve would pull any one individual out of the pack and say, ‘Your work is such shit and you’re such an idiot,’ the pack had to decide, okay, are we going to let this one go or do we really like this guy. And they could go to Steve afterwards and say, ‘Hey, come on, there aren’t that many people we can hire that are near as good as that guy, go back and apologize.’ And he would, even though his intensity was still just incredible.

“That is a really crack team that has gone through hell, and bonded with each other in toughness,” Gates continues, falling into the present tense. “I mean, you can point to everybody on that team and say, okay, he earned his pay, he earned his pay, he earned his pay. There’s no weakness in that team, nor is there a backup plan or a forward-looking alternative team. It’s just this one team.”

Steve had assembled a group that was strong enough to deal with who he was, and autonomous enough to compensate for his weaknesses. They developed their own tactics for managing him. “It was like we had a common enemy,” says Rubinstein. Members of the team would meet regularly with one another to plan how to get Steve to authorize the decisions they felt would be best, to figure out a way through or around Steve’s more imperious or ill-considered decisions or prejudices, and to try to anticipate where Steve would steer things next. They had the sense that Steve knew this was going on behind his back. “He knew that he could count on us to make things work,” says Tevanian, “even when there was friction or problems. We faced some really hard problems, you know, and he knew he could trust us to do the right thing.”

I watched Steve closely, both as he steadily and patiently composed his strategies and as he cajoled this stable, impressive team to execute them. I was skeptical because of his past failures as a manager, but intrigued. One day I asked him if he had come to enjoy the process of building companies, now that he was trying to do so for a third time. “Uh, no,” he started, as if I were a fool. But if he didn’t enjoy building companies, he sure had a thoughtful and convincing way of describing why he kept doing it. “The only purpose, for me, in building a company is so that that company can make products. One is a means to the other. Over a period of time you realize that building a very strong company and a very strong foundation of talent and culture in a company is essential to keep making great products.

“The company is one of the most amazing inventions of humans, this abstract construct that’s incredibly powerful. Even so, for me, it’s about the products. It’s about working together with really fun, smart, creative people and making wonderful things. It’s not about the money. What a company is, then, is a group of people who can make more than just the next big thing. It’s a talent, it’s a capability, it’s a culture, it’s a point of view, and it’s a way of working together to make the next thing, and the next one, and the next one.” A talent, a capability, a culture, and a point of view: the Apple he was in the midst of re-creating would have all these things, as would the products it would create.

STEVE KNEW HE had to deliver Apple’s first new product in 1998. He certainly couldn’t expect Apple’s millions of investors to wait around for years and years, as Perot and Canon had been forced to do at NeXT. But Apple didn’t have any great software applications ready to unveil, and Steve had no desire to offer any hardware that had been in the Amelio pipeline. He needed something new, and it had to have enough of his DNA to signal that serious changes were afoot. The personal computer business had been bereft of creativity and excitement for so long that it was now simply known as the “box” business. Steve needed a lot more than just another box.

He found his answer in the skunkworks of a building several blocks away from the corporate offices. That’s where Jony Ive, the designer who had so impressed Fred Anderson, was toiling away.

Ive, Apple’s head designer, was not yet a member of Steve’s inner circle. An unassuming self-starter who turned thirty at about the time that Steve arrived in 1997, Ive had signed on with Apple as a contract designer in 1992 when he still lived in London, working for a design consultancy called Tangerine. The son of a silversmith who taught at the local college in the London suburb of Chingford, Ive gravitated toward industrial design at an early age, and went on to study at what is now called Northumbria University in Newcastle. There he became an admirer of Dieter Rams, the legendary onetime chief of design for Braun, the German small appliance maker, who in the 1970s was one of the pioneers of what is now called sustainable design, and who railed against the industrial practice of planned obsolescence. Rams, who still designs furniture for a Danish company called Vitsœ, had become known for his “Ten Principles of Good Design.” According to Rams, Good Design is:

  1.  innovative

  2.  what makes a product useful

  3.  aesthetic

  4.  what makes a product understandable

  5.  unobtrusive

  6.  honest

  7.  long-lasting

  8.  thorough down to the last detail

  9.  environmentally friendly

10.  as little design as possible

During Amelio’s short tenure I had visited Jony in his workspace, called the Design Lab. After Steve returned, the lab would be moved into the main headquarters complex on Infinite Loop, and would become as off-limits as Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. But under Amelio it was accessible on the late Friday afternoon when I visited. Ive was the only employee still around that day. The space was piled high with gray plastic or Styrofoam mockups of the multitudes of previous, rather ordinary Macs he and his team had designed. Back then, his objective was to repackage computers in an artfully austere way, more than to create radically new designs. There were just two exceptions, both vivid in their own way.

The first one that he showed me was the eMate, his counterintuitive version of the Newton Message Pad for elementary school students. The clamshell-type device really did look somewhat like a mussel. Its subtle curves gave it a playful look, but what really grabbed your eyes was its translucent aquamarine plastic shell—a throbbing color that seemed to glow as if lit from within.

The other brilliant design Jony showed me was his prototype of a limited-edition machine Apple would release belatedly to commemorate the company’s twentieth anniversary. The 20th Anniversary Macintosh was his pride and joy at the time. It was a striking piece of out-of-the-box industrial design thinking. Jony and his team had placed the guts of a top-of-the-line laptop inside a svelte and slightly curved vertical slab, which had on the top half of its surface a color LCD monitor, and on the bottom half a vertical CD-ROM drive, all of which was framed by specially designed Bose stereo speakers. It was packed with state-of-the-art technology, including cable television and FM tuners and the circuitry necessary for the computer to double as TV set or a radio. Finally, Ive and his team had concocted a conch-shaped floor module to house the power supply, a subwoofer, and a powerful hi-fi audio amplifier so that the computer would supply the sonic fullness of a high-powered stereo system without generating too much heat or seeming bulky. The whole package looked as if it belonged on display in the sculpture gallery of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (In fact, one did wind up in the museum’s industrial design section.) Technovores lusted after the machines.