Academics and even some forward-looking digital artists took the touch-screen concept in a different direction. In the early 1980s, they started experimenting with technology that allowed for the use of more than just one fingertip to manipulate computer images on a screen. These so-called “multi-touch” interfaces were profoundly different. Performed with combinations of fingers or hands, gestures and coordinated motions could control the screen with far more dexterity than a mouse. You could move icons and files around, or enlarge and shrink images on the screen. You had the tactile illusion of physically interacting with the image on the screen. Seeing the potential, researchers at IBM, Microsoft, Bell Labs, and elsewhere experimented with their own multi-touch projects.
Apple’s Greg Christie had been one of the key designers and software engineers of the ill-fated Newton. He had gotten over his romance with pen computing, but he had steadily followed all the multi-touch research efforts in academia and the tech industry. He hoped that partnering with Ording, who had joined Apple in 1998 and who had worked on the iPod’s scroll-wheel user interface as well as on OS X, might lead the way to make multi-touch the distinguishing technology for a serious new computer. They believed it might serve as the basis for a whole new kind of user interface.
Developing a new interface is one of the most deceptively difficult technological challenges in computer science. It isn’t simply a matter of designing some delightful new way to present images of information on a computer. It’s just as much a matter of reckoning with—and not simply discarding—past habits. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard has for years been the universally familiar means of typing and entering information into a computer. QWERTY, which refers to the first six keys on the left side of the third row of a keyboard, was a relic, a keyboard arrangement from the era of manual typewriters that was designed to keep the individual letter-embossing hammers from getting tangled up when the user was typing at high speed.
Christie and Ording decided against altering this ubiquitous, albeit hidebound, preference. Instead, they would experiment with having a virtual QWERTY keyboard appear on the screen when you needed to type. As they began to experiment with multi-touch, they found that they could do all kinds of things that were both effective and fun. The new approach was useful for editing and retouching photographic images, for making drawings, and even for annotating spreadsheets and word-processing documents. The more they worked with multi-touch, the more Ording and Christie believed they were onto something big.
Having five different projects sprout up around similar technological possibilities wasn’t unusual at Apple. Steve didn’t issue a “Let there be the iPad” command one day, and wake up the next to find the whole enterprise devoting itself to his single wish. Instead, the place was always bubbling with possibilities. His most important job was to sort through them and imagine how they could point the way to something entirely new.
STEVE HAD ANOTHER critical decision to make during this period: how to treat the cancer that had been discovered in his pancreas. The fact that the islet cell neuroendocrine carcinoma was slow-growing and potentially treatable had given Laurene and him some hope. But the key word was potentially. Steve had always taken great care of his body in ways that may have seemed quirky to others but that made sense to him. At one point in his younger days, he had been a fruitarian. He eventually settled into a vegetarian—primarily vegan—diet, as did Laurene, and he had no significant health problems. Now that he had a big one, he wanted to make sure for himself that the tumor was treated in the best way possible. In typical Jobsian fashion, that meant exploring all the alternatives.
He started out talking to close advisers like Larry Brilliant, Andy Grove, Arthur Levinson, the Genentech CEO who was on Apple’s board, and the physician/author Dean Ornish. His Stanford doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove the tumor. In fact, the team of doctors included a surgeon who had pioneered a promising new surgical method for just this type of pancreatic cancer. But Steve wasn’t immediately convinced that this was the best approach, so he told his doctors he first wanted to try something less invasive, namely treating it through his diet.
There certainly seems to have been a psychological component to his decision to temporarily avoid surgery. Years later, according to his authorized biography, Steve told Walter Isaacson, “I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work.” It’s natural to fear such an invasive operation, but for someone like Steve, who believed so strongly in the value of having control, it must have been especially complicated.
But there were also intellectual reasons to investigate and try to understand his cancer. Steve’s particular kind of tumor is a rare one. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), only about one thousand cases a year are discovered in the United States. As a result, research on pancreatic islet cell neuroendocrine carcinomas is not buttressed by the kind of massive database available to doctors studying breast or lung cancer, to cite two more common forms, or even other forms of cancer of the pancreas. (His own oncologist/surgeon admitted to me privately that not enough was known at that time to determine statistically what the best treatment should be—surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, something else, or a combination of treatments.) So Steve’s indecision about what to do was not completely off-base. “I don’t understand,” says Brilliant, “how writers can portray him, on the one hand, as this tough-ass businessman, very materialistic, with no mention of the spiritual side. But when it comes to his cancer, they claim that he had this crazy, spiritual belief that he was in a messianic situation to heal it himself.”
Steve conducted his research with the same inquisitiveness he applied to understanding what would make a great new product. He scoured the globe for other options, and made surreptitious trips to see doctors in Seattle, Baltimore, and Amsterdam. He was interested primarily in dietary treatments that might work, and alternative cures that meshed more with his inclination toward an organic lifestyle. But he also talked to many expert mainstream doctors. At one point he even convened a conference call where he was able to discuss his cancer with at least a half dozen of the best cancer doctors in the United States.
But he found nothing that was more promising than surgery. The few people who knew intimately of Steve’s cancer grew ever more exasperated as his “research” dragged on for months, and his doctors started to feel that the window for a successful operation that would get all the cancer was closing. Finally, in the summer of 2004, Steve acceded and checked into Stanford University Medical Center. On Saturday, July 31, he spent most of the day on an operating table. The surgeons opened him up and removed the tumor.
It was an extremely invasive surgery. Months later, Steve would show me his scar—a squarish semicircle nearly two feet long, starting at the bottom of one side of his rib cage, swooping down to his navel, and curving back up the other side. “The pancreas is back behind your gastrointestinal organs, so the surgeons have to have enough room to pull some of them up and out of the way to get at it,” he told me, gesturing with both hands as if he were doing it himself. “They actually took only a small part of my pancreas,” Steve continued. “Just getting to it was the hard part.”