Historically, Steve had always preferred that Apple create its own software from scratch—he didn’t trust anyone as much as he trusted his own people. But since Apple was coming so late to digital music, it would not have time to develop a music management program on its own. So Steve decided to go shopping for an existing jukebox app that Apple could adapt to its own style.

Three independent developers had already created jukeboxes for the Macintosh. The best of the bunch was a forty-dollar application called SoundJam, which happened to be developed by two former Apple software engineers. SoundJam was also of interest to Steve because at its heart was a sophisticated database program that would allow music to be cataloged by more than a dozen attributes. It was a favorite of so-called power users who had large libraries of thousands of music tracks to manage. It was simple to navigate and operate, and it could import music files directly from audio CDs and compress them in a variety of formats into smaller chunks of digital data.

In March 2000, Apple bought SoundJam and attached some unusual terms: the authors of SoundJam would come to work for Apple, but their software distributor could continue selling the existing SoundJam product until Apple had reengineered it into iTunes. The other catch was that the whole transaction be kept secret for two years. There would be no public indication that anything had changed at SoundJam, the distributor and the SoundJam programmers would continue to make money, and Apple could keep its designs on building a jukebox application under wraps. Secrecy was key, since so many parties—studios, consumer electronics manufacturers, tech companies, broadcasters—were trying to find a way to lead digital music. Apple had been a leaky ship during its early years and throughout the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio era. But Steve had eradicated that problem by making it more than clear that anyone caught leaking company information or plans would be fired immediately. So the transaction stayed a secret, as he wished.

Tamaddon’s applications division, which had learned a lot from the development of iMovie, moved with speed and a minimum of fuss. The SoundJam team was integrated in seamlessly. Its developers worked directly with Avie and Sina to improve some attributes of the old program, including Steve’s favorite—a psychedelic “visualizer” feature that generated trippy, colorful, abstract moving full-screen images derived from whatever music was playing. More important, they simplified the software, eliminating options and complexity whenever they could. This, too, it turns out, would become a hallmark of the new Apple that Steve was creating. Saying no—to software features, new projects, new hires, boondoggle conferences, all kinds of press queries, even to Wall Street’s desire for better guidance on future earnings, and anything else deemed extraneous or distracting. Above all, saying no became a crucial way of keeping everyone, including himself, focused on what really mattered. The sheer simplicity of the quadrant strategy had laid the foundation for an organization that would say no again and again—until it said yes, at which point it would attack the new project with fierce determination.

The iTunes team moved remarkably fast. A mere nine months after having purchased SoundJam, and just a year after Bill Gates’s public christening of the concept of a world of connected computers, consumer electronics devices, and applications, Steve was able to unveil iTunes at the MacWorld trade show in San Francisco on January 9, 2001. He had a strong set of products to show off besides iTunes, including the Titanium PowerBook, the first of what would become Apple’s exceedingly popular laptops to be clad in metal rather than plastic, and OS X, which would finally ship as a finished product in March.

But iTunes turned out to be the real star of the show, because it was something that practically everyone in the room knew that they wanted. Steve demonstrated how the software would allow you to rip an entire library of music CDs into a digital archive on your Mac’s hard drive, and how the iTunes database would help you easily find and play particular tracks. You could mix tracks into a personal playlist of music that could be stored in the app or burned back onto a recordable, portable CD. And unlike OS X, which wouldn’t ship until late March, iTunes was available for download immediately, for free. Steve then showed a television ad with a stage full of recognizable pop music stars that concluded with the slogan that would soon show up on billboards across the country: Rip. Mix. Burn. He may have been in his forties, but the campaign was totally cool.

Also, for the first time in public, Steve took his first steps on the path to publicly co-opting Gates’s promised future. In classic Apple style, he began by reworking the language of Gates’s vision, trading “consumer-electronics-plus” for the much more felicitous “digital hub.” Energetically pacing the stage, he walked the audience through an enormous screen shot showing a Mac in the middle of six spokes extending to a digital still camera, a PDA, a DVD player, a CD Walkman, a video camcorder, and something called a digital music player. It was an image that updated his old principle of a computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” The Mac, Jobs explained, would be the ideal tool for managing, editing, and organizing content from all these devices, as well as a central repository for software updates, contacts, music and video files, and anything else you needed on your mobile devices. The computer industry’s P. T. Barnum made it all seem so much friendlier than the intimidating future Gates had painted. He made it seem accessible and human and simple. Apple promised to deliver software and hardware that you could manage and bend to your will. That was the power of the “I” in iTunes. You ruled this future, not Microsoft, or even Apple. Such was the power of Steve’s elocution.

Two days earlier, Gates had once again waxed on about what he now was calling the “digital living room” at CES. Microsoft’s booth there was tricked out to resemble a series of rooms in a typical home. Nothing about it was very realistic. When it came to the consumer’s future, Gates was the one offering the airy visions of a breakthrough future, while Steve was inching ahead with real products. It was almost as if the two men had reversed roles from that interview I’d conducted at Steve’s house a decade before.

During the first week after iTunes was introduced and made available online for free, 275,000 copies were downloaded. That was just a slice of the 20 million Macs installed around the world, but it already exceeded the number of actual users of iMovie, which had been available for download for fifteen months. There was just one problem: other than the iMac sitting in the center of the octopus-like digital hub diagram Steve had shown at MacWorld, none of the connected devices had been made by Apple. That had to change.

EARLY IN 2001, toward the end of a meeting with Steve, Eddy Cue, a young software engineer with a good head for business who would come to play a key role in Steve’s executive team, bellyached. “We can’t make things better than we’re making them,” he said. “Yet we’re at the same place we were at back in 1997.” Indeed, while annual sales had reached $7.9 billion in 2000, they were projected to drop well below $6 billion in 2001. “You’ve just got to hang on,” Steve told him. “People will come around.” His patience was admirable, but then again, Steve had believed since the 1980s that the world would eventually come to recognize the superiority of Apple products. Here he was in a new millennium, still waiting on humanity. His company was stable, but it wasn’t yet strong. It needed something to get it growing. It needed a new kind of product.