But Steve didn’t just focus on the flashy iMacs—that too was a mistake the old Steve would have made. He made sure that his team did an equally excellent job filling the other three quadrants of the grand plan. The so-called towers, as the desktop computers for professionals were known, were the machines that paid the bills. Loaded with faster chips, more memory, better graphics, and slots for adding hard drives and CD burners and other accessories, the towers were engineered for power users—hence their name, the Power Mac. These big machines sat under your desk, linked to a monitor on your desktop, and were so fast that Apple marketed them as the first “personal supercomputers.” They were hefty, but Ive’s design gave the impression that they were sleek and manageable—they even had dual handles that mimicked the iMac’s, and one side that opened up to make tinkering with the innards easier. The base model cost at least a thousand dollars more than the iMac, but it also carried much higher profit margins.

Here, too, Steve avoided a mistake Apple had made the first time around. He didn’t claim that the Power Mac was the computer for all businesses, and in so doing try to push Wintel-based PCs out of the market. Instead, he targeted the Power Macs at the new, more entrepreneurial class of small businesses emerging with the rise of the Internet economy: engineers, architects, publishers, advertising agencies, website designers, and so on. This was a world that could tolerate and even celebrate “Think Different,” while the dominant class of big corporations looked on fearfully at the radical and potentially undermining change the Internet seemed to promise.

The design and engineering genius that was applied to the iMacs and towers was applied to the laptops as well. The personal models, called iBooks, mimicked the fun of the iMac with a beguiling, bright orange clamshell design that echoed the shape of the old eMate. The higher-end PowerBooks for professionals were curvy, too, but they were sheathed in a rubbery-feeling black shell and powered by a PowerPC microprocessor that briefly allowed Apple to claim the somewhat dubious title of “fastest laptop in the world.” The cumulative effect of these revitalized iMacs was simple but profound: just three years removed from near death, Apple had reestablished itself as the most, if not the only, truly creative company in the computer business. “When we returned to Apple,” Steve told me around this time, “our industry was in a coma. There was not a lot of innovation. At Apple we’re working hard to get that innovation kickstarted again. The rest of the PC industry reminds one of Detroit in the seventies. Their cars were boats on wheels. Since then, Chrysler innovated by inventing the mini-van and popularizing the Jeep, and Ford got itself back in the game with its Taurus. Near-death experiences can help one see more clearly sometimes.”

The turnaround, however, did not come without expensive failures. Apple had done a good job embracing the Internet, by making the process of getting access to the Web as simple as any other function of an iMac. But Apple’s eWorld, a proprietary online subscription service bundled with new iMacs, was a flop, despite a friendly interface that suggested that going online could be as easy as walking from one neighborhood to the next. All it really offered was email services and a way to download software, and in practice it wasn’t any easier to use than bigger services like EarthLink and AOL, which came bundled on Wintel PCs.

A costlier failure was a pet project that Ruby and Steve worked on together and argued about endlessly, the so-called Power Mac “Cube,” which was introduced in 2000. Harking back to the design of the NeXTcube, but one-eighth the size, Apple’s G4 Cube was such a stunning, clean design that it too wound up in the Museum of Modern Art. Unfortunately, it didn’t wind up in many homes or offices.

Steve loved the Cube. It packed a lot of power—although not quite enough to qualify as a true power user’s computer—into a translucent cube just seven inches by seven inches all around. Its cables plugged into Apple’s first super-wide flat-screen monitor for the desktop. My monitor measured twenty-five inches diagonally, and it rested on my office desk next to the Cube like a minimalist sculpture. But in this case, Steve made similar mistakes to ones he made at NeXT. He overlooked some of the engineering idiosyncrasies necessitated by the stark design he loved. Worse yet, the Cube seemed snakebit by a host of manufacturing problems. Its clear plastic shell cracked on many machines, a flaw that ruined what had seemed a design masterpiece. My Cube never cracked, but the monitor developed its own, strange, aesthetic problem: ants and other insects were somehow attracted to squeeze through seams in the clear plastic frame that surrounded the screen, and once inside they couldn’t get out. Over time, the two transparent “feet” of the screen filled up with bug carcasses, but the effect was not as pleasing as when a prehistoric fly is trapped in amber. I teased Steve about the bug-friendly screen he’d developed a couple of times, but he never found it all that amusing. He pulled the plug on the Cube early, and it never sold anything near the numbers he had forecast.

STEVE HAD SURROUNDED himself with a mature, experienced, and disciplined team, made up of people who could argue back fiercely. And for once, he allowed them significant authority—Apple was simply too big for him to make all the decisions himself. Gradually, the organization developed in a way that allowed him to get the details he needed without micromanaging those areas of the company where he added a lot less. He primarily managed through his inner circle (although he convened meetings of the top one hundred people from time to time), and the Monday morning executive team meeting became the linchpin of the week. His attempt to delegate worked well, for the most part. In matters of finance, for instance, “I would get him involved when I needed him,” remembers Anderson. Steve was trying to keep his fingers on the pulse of a growing company without stifling it.

He also liked having a confidant—someone he could banter with outside the formal lines responsibility of daily corporate life. In the early years of Steve’s return, Mike Slade served that function. Slade, by his own admission, isn’t any kind of creative “genius,” like Lee Clow or Woz. But he had lots of real-world experience, he spoke his mind, and was both easygoing and independent enough to engage in spirited repartee with Steve without any qualms. He also had made it clear he did not want an executive position at Apple, which made it easier for him to have a good personal relationship with Steve. They would sometimes jog together in the early morning, and he even went Rollerblading with Steve and Laurene.

Slade showed up in Cupertino on Mondays and Tuesdays, flying down from Seattle. No one reported to him, and Steve had told the group that he had no particular authority. But when he was at Apple he almost never left Steve’s side. Their Mondays would begin with the executive management team meeting. After that the two would usually go eat in the cafeteria, and later venture into the Design Lab. Slade tried to participate in their discussions. “Jony would say stuff like, ‘Steve, I’m not sure the design language and the way it’s joining with this is quite right. What do you think?’ ” says Slade, laughing. “And I’m going, ‘Yeah, it’s cool. Can I have a Coke now?’ They’d ask me, ‘Do you think we’ve got the right degree of opacity,’ and all I can think is, ‘Why am I here?’ ” Of course, Slade knew more than he’ll admit. But his sense of humor and realism appealed to Steve. Steve didn’t allow himself to relax with his inner circle the way he would with Slade. “Slade was the court jester,” says Ruby, who also became good friends with Slade over the years.