In October 1999, Steve introduced iMovie as part of the rollout of a new generation of juiced-up iMacs. But sales were sluggish. Steve blamed himself for not explaining it well enough. So at an executive team meeting in December 1999, Steve gave early prototypes of new Sony digital camcorders to six of his top execs, asking each to shoot and edit his own four-minute home movie, with the finished productions to be shown in a week. He would pick the best of the bunch to show during his appearance at the January 2000 MacWorld in an effort to demonstrate how iMovie was something anyone could master over a weekend.

“Fred [Anderson], Ruby [Jon Rubinstein], Avie [Tevanian], Tim [Cook], Sina [Tamaddon], Steve, and me all made four-minute movies. I’ll be honest, it was a painfully cumbersome process, even for geeks like us,” remembers Slade. “You had to shoot the movie, then spool the video into the iMac, edit it, add music and credits, and then spool it back out onto the camcorder because the hard disk wasn’t big enough to hold both the original video clips and the finished movie, and we didn’t yet have recordable DVD drives. Many of us thought it was a pretty worthless strategy.

“But the movies were pretty funny,” he allows. “I had little kids back then, so I showed them playing in the leaves on a fall day with Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’ as the background music. Steve’s was about his kids, too. And Fred, well, apparently his life was so boring that all he could do was make a movie about his goddamn cat. Tim Cook made one about trying to buy a house in Palo Alto, and how overpriced they were. I thought Ruby’s was the best, though. He had been on a business trip to Dallas on his birthday that week, so he made this totally deadpan movie of the highlights of his day, where he had scenes sitting alone in his hotel room, and in conference rooms, and other boring places showing himself saying ‘Happy Birthday, Jon. Woohoo!’ everywhere he went. And Sina made a beautiful one about his kids playing with their pets and jumping on the bed to a Green Day song.” (That’s the one Steve chose for MacWorld.)

The short little movies may have been fun to watch, but most of them had taken many hours to create. Movie editing, even when simplified by iMovie, was a process that required time, dedication, and skill. It was the kind of thing that a parent might do once in a while, but only in rare cases when he or she had a lot of free time over the weekend. It wasn’t until after the Garden Court off-site convened by Avie and Ruby that Steve acknowledged that Apple needed to create a much simpler consumer application than iMovie, something that users could engage with easily every day. The consensus at the meeting was that a digital music management application seemed like a good possibility. Rather than dig in his heels and insist on greater effort to make iMovie a hit, Steve chose to follow his team into the world of digital music. The big question now was whether Apple could move fast enough to make up for arriving so late to that party.

IT’S NOT SURPRISING that Steve had been so attracted to iMovie, since it was a piece of software designed primarily for parents. He and Laurene now had three children, after the birth of Eve in 1998, and by the turn of the century had settled into a relatively predictable and normal domestic routine.

Steve’s ability to compartmentalize and focus, qualities that were helping him turn around Apple, also shaped the way he balanced his work and family life. Back when he had been leading the Mac team or driving NeXT, Steve had spent many a late night at the office as part of a small team trying to deliver the next great thing. But now his role at Apple was so different: heading up a company with thousands of employees, Steve managed everything through his small team of senior executives. Rather than hover over the shoulders of star engineers and programmers, he could do much of his work via email. So he would make it home for dinner almost every night, spend time with Laurene and the kids, and then work at his computer late into the night. He and I were iChat buddies at the time, and I would regularly see the green light on next to his name on my screen in the wee hours, an indication that he was logged in to his Mac. (iChat was Apple’s video chat application, and there were times when we used it to talk about business, although sometimes his son, Reed, then an early teen, would sneak up behind Steve and make faces at me as we talked.)

On a spectrum plotting how much time parents spend with their kids versus time they spend focused on their job, Steve would land far toward the latter end. Both he and Laurene knew Steve would always work very, very hard—it had been a basic assumption when they’d gotten married. “Neither of us had much of a social life,” says Laurene. “It was never that important to us.” Laurene often worked beside him at night, at first on Terravera, a small health food business she eventually sold, and then on College Track, her first philanthropic venture. They had adjoining studies; she’d run ideas past him, and on many nights he’d spend an hour or two talking over Apple business with her. They’d often catch a TV show before falling asleep, mostly The Daily Show with Jon Stewart after it launched in 1999. The bulk of the parenting did fall on Laurene, but they scheduled their lives to ensure that Steve was involved. The Christmas holidays were often spent in Hawaii, mostly at a bungalow at the Kona Village Resort on the Big Island.

Besides creating a schedule that accommodated Steve’s heavy workload, the couple did everything they could to try to give their children what Steve himself defined as a “normal” life. He and Laurene created an environment that hewed to what can best be described as upper-middle-class norms. Over the years, their neighborhood was increasingly populated by the rich and famous (Larry Page of Google lived nearby, and Steve Young, the famous San Francisco 49ers quarterback, was a neighbor), but Steve and Laurene did everything they could to make their house feel as homey as possible. It was not a walled compound. The front door opened right to the street. The children roamed the neighborhood. The family biked around the area together.

Very slowly, Steve and Laurene even added furniture. “Those stories are true,” Laurene sighs, albeit with a chuckle. “He truly could take forever to decide on stuff like that, but then so could I.” While you could see the telltale signs of children around, it usually was far neater than my own house—having a staff can help with that. As lovely as it was inside, I always thought the heart of the place was the rambling vegetable and flower garden outside the kitchen door. It was the property’s most distinct feature and completely unlike the landscaping that graced other homes in the area. When I visited I’d sometimes catch Steve having just finished up in the garden, or Laurene walking in with one of the kids and a basket of freshly picked veggies and flowers.

This was his refuge. Although colleagues occasionally would visit him there, he tried to keep his home and family life completely sequestered from the press. As he did with other journalists who knew him well, it was understood that any discussions we ever had about his family were off the record—when I wrote in Fortune about my own kids coming over to see Toy Story with his son, Reed, I cleared it with him first.

But Steve and Laurene didn’t make any effort to hide away from their neighbors. They were regulars in downtown Palo Alto. Fortune had its Silicon Valley bureau offices on Emerson Street, just up the street from a building Steve had bought to use as an office closer to home. He didn’t use it all that much, but when he did it wasn’t unusual to see him out for a walk with a colleague, or running a personal errand by himself. (When Fortune eventually closed the bureau as part of a series of cost-cutting moves, I told Laurene about it, and she leased the space as the headquarters of a nonprofit she was starting, which she called the Emerson Collective.) Once when I ran into Steve we wound up shopping for a new bicycle for Laurene’s upcoming birthday. Steve had done his research, so it didn’t take long. We were in and out of Palo Alto Bicycles on University Avenue in ten minutes. He said, “I’d never have Andrea do something like this,” referring to his longtime administrative assistant. “I like buying presents for my family myself.”