The first time Steve made the long trek over to the Design Lab, Ive was nervous and apprehensive. “That very first time we met, he had already started to talk about reengaging Harmut Esslinger [the founder of Frog Design, who had designed the first Mac],” Ive says. “He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me. And he should have done that, based on the products that we were shipping at the time, which weren’t very good at all.” The products and the prototypes didn’t thrill Steve, but Ive himself made a bigger impression. He is quiet and earnest, and can be beguilingly engaging when describing what he is trying to accomplish with his designs, in his proper British accent. Like Steve, Jony has a gift for clearly explaining complex ideas. Steve was impressed. “You know Jony. He’s kind of a cherub,” Steve told me in late 1997. “I liked him right away. And I could tell after that first meeting that Amelio had wasted his talent.”

Just as important, Jony was impressed by Steve. Thousands of Apple employees had scattered their résumés across Silicon Valley as they tried to abandon Amelio’s leaky ship, and Jony had resolved to look around himself. But he quickly saw that Steve and Amelio couldn’t have been more different. “Amelio described himself as the turnaround king,” Ive remembers. “So he was focused on turnaround, which is mainly about not losing money. The way you don’t lose money is you don’t spend it. But Steve’s focus was completely different, and it never changed. It was exactly the same focus from the first time I met him to right to the very end: the product. We trust if we do a good job and the product’s good, people will like it. And we trust that if they like it, they’ll buy it. If we’re competent operationally, we will make money.” It was that simple. So Jony decided not to leave Apple, a choice that would lead to the closest and most fruitful creative collaboration of Steve’s entire career, even more symbiotic than his original partnership with Steve Wozniak.

Nonetheless, Steve killed both of Jony’s pet projects. The eMate disappeared along with all other traces of the Newton (save a few key patents), and the 20th Anniversary bit the dust after selling just 12,000 units. The products didn’t fit into his quadrants. Besides, he told me one day, “I just don’t like television. Apple will never make a TV again.” This was Jony’s introduction to Steve’s coldhearted decision-making. Like Avie and Ruby and Fred and Tim, he had come to understand that Apple’s best chance forward was with Steve, and that if you were in with Steve, you were in all the way, bumps and all.

THERE WAS ONE thing that especially intrigued Steve at the Design Lab: the odd texture and eerie translucence of the eMate’s plastic shell. That detail became a seed idea for the iMac, the first product of the new Steve Jobs era at Apple.

Technologically, the iMac was not a radical departure from the past. But working closely with Steve, Ive designed a cosmetic standout that, for the first time in years, gave the personal computer some personality. The iMac was a dramatically rounded shell made of material similar to the eMate’s. Through its “Bondi blue” (named for the evocative tropical waters of Bondi Beach, near Sydney, Australia) translucent plastic exterior, a buyer could see the inner workings of the computer, its rigorously arranged wires and circuit boards loaded with chips that looked like 3-D maps of cities. The computer and monitor were housed in a single bulbous module with a circular hatch on the back that doubled as a handle, to allow access for repairs or modifications. Steve loved the handle despite its impracticality, because it was a throwback to the original Mac. The machine weighed thirty-eight pounds, so it wasn’t likely that anyone would actually treat it like a laptop to be carried around from one workspace to another. But the handle, the shape, and the translucence combined to make the iMac seem like a bottle of blue fun. It was exactly the kind of hot new product he needed to once again differentiate Apple from the “box” crowd—the Dells and Compaqs and HPs and IBMs.

Two other decisions—one technological, one driven by marketing—also made the iMac stand out from that crowd of putty-colored rectangular slabs. Steve and Jon Rubinstein opted for a CD-ROM drive instead of a standard floppy disk drive, despite the fact that most people at the time still stored their data on floppy disks. You could buy a separate, external floppy disk drive to plug into the iMac, but Steve reasoned that most software would soon be delivered on CD-ROM optical discs—a technology that was already fast displacing vinyl and tape cassettes as the primary medium for recorded music. He also felt certain that within a year or two, recordable CD-ROM drives would render floppy disk drives redundant. As he had before, he was betting that users would accept a slightly uncomfortable move into the future, one that would force them to convert their data to a new format. This time he got it right.

Steve’s other noteworthy decision was to slot the letter i in before Mac. The iMac was built to be plugged into the Internet, via sockets that could handle either a phone line or, for those lucky enough to have access, a connection to a full-fledged Ethernet network. It sported a built-in telephone modem as standard equipment, while most computer makers sold those only as an optional add-on. Steve had foreseen that buyers would see this “Internet” Mac as a forward-looking computer with an eye toward the future of personal computing, which was clearly going to revolve around the Internet. But the i did more than that. The i was personal, in that this was “my” computer, and even, perhaps, an expression of who “I” am. And what a bold expression it was, fresh and transparent and different. It seemed like the kind of computer that an individual who could “think different” would use.

Many critics in the burgeoning computer press sneered that the iMac was neither faster nor more powerful than machines from its competitors. After all, for a decade speed and power had been the only way personal computers differentiated themselves. Those same critics disliked the fact that this blue, rotund thing looked more like a toy than a computer. But they had missed the point completely. The iMac’s radical design sent exactly the kind of reassuring, friendly, and differentiating message that Steve wanted to send. With one product, Apple had reinforced its position as the “personal” computer company. The iMac was a vivid reminder that personal computers are tools for people, and that they should both reflect and amplify an individual’s own personality. That’s why the iMac was an instant success, selling nearly two million units in the first twelve months of production, and becoming Apple’s first bona fide hit in years.

Its success was critical to Steve’s plans for a rebound. Steve had returned to Apple believing strongly that design could be a significant part of Apple’s resurrection; the iMac supported his theory. “When we did the first iMac,” he later told me, “there was such resistance in hardware engineering. A lot of people thought it wasn’t a Mac, that it would fail. But the minute that everybody saw it succeed in the marketplace, a lot of the people started to turn around and go, ‘Okay, this design stuff is important I guess.’ They felt the thrill of success again.” Steve and Jony’s iMac enabled Apple to make a bold first step toward recovery, buying Apple some precious time at a moment when most observers thought it was headed to its grave.

ONE OF STEVE’S great failures during his first tenure at Apple had been his inability to deliver strong sequels to the Mac or even the Apple II. But that wasn’t the case with the iMac. Just one year after its introduction, the company started to sell a new version in five gumdrop colors. They were even cooler than the Bondi blue machines, because they came with a simple slot drive for CDs, replacing the clunkier drawer that came with the first ones. And their optimistic, brilliant colors played well into Apple’s marketing, which kept redefining the Apple brand as forward-looking, lively, and creative.