August 1, the day after his marathon surgery, was a Sunday. Although he was still in the intensive care unit and more than a little logy from anesthesia and painkillers, he asked for his PowerBook so he could put the finishing touches on a letter to Apple employees to inform them of his illness and surgery. In some ways the letter was a marketing challenge: How can you put positive spin on the fact that you have had surgery to treat pancreatic cancer, a disease that in most cases is a death sentence? Here’s what he wrote:

Team,

I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me. This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas. I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1% of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was). I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

The far more common form of pancreatic cancer is called adenocarcinoma, which is currently not curable and usually carries a life expectancy of around one year after diagnosis. I mention this because when one hears “pancreatic cancer” (or Googles it), one immediately encounters this far more common and deadly form, which, thank god, is not what I had.

I will be recuperating during the month of August, and expect to return to work in September. While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.

Steve

PS: I’m sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.

Knowing that the letter would probably wind up being made public, he had even made sure to get a plug in for some Apple products. What he didn’t reveal—and it is quite possible that he hadn’t been told yet—was that when the surgeons opened him up, they also spotted some incipient cancerous metastases on Steve’s liver.

There is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened to Steve if he hadn’t delayed his surgery by ten months. According to the National Cancer Institute, people who have Steve’s kind of tumor entirely removed soon after an early diagnosis have a 55 percent chance of still being alive five years later.

Steve would survive for seven years, and those years would prove to be the most astounding and most productive of his life.

RECOVERING FROM A radical abdominal surgery is hellish. A massive incision like Steve’s generally guarantees a lengthy and difficult convalescence, mainly because so much soft tissue and muscle must heal without too much stress or stretching at a location where your body bends and flexes every time you sit or stand. As Steve tersely told me, “The healing process really sucked.” At first, he could hardly move without unleashing a cascade of pain radiating out from his gut all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes. When he finally got home from the two-week hospital stay, it was all he could do to sit upright in a rocking chair. He didn’t like his painkillers, because they dulled his brain. Still, he was determined to get back to the office before the end of September.

Many of us would react to a disease like Steve’s by taking it slow at the office or by tackling a “bucket list” of things we’ve always wanted to do. Steve became even more focused on work. “He was doing what he loved,” recalls Laurene. “If anything, he doubled down.” So he spent much of that seven-week convalescence thinking deeply about Apple, the computer business, and the trajectory of digital technology. He assembled an ambitious to-do list of what he wanted to accomplish once he returned to the office. “When he came back from that surgery he was on a faster clock,” remembers Tim Cook. “The company is always running on a fast-moving treadmill that doesn’t stop. But when he came back there was an urgency about him. I recognized it immediately.”

The first thing Steve did was spend time with each member of the executive team, catching up on what was going on and explaining to each how he intended to approach his work going forward. He told them that he would now focus even more of his attention on things like product development, marketing, and the retail stores, and less attention on manufacturing, operations, finance, and human resources matters. He knew he had less stamina than before, although that wasn’t easy to detect. Moreover, his doctors were keeping him on a short leash, he told them, insisting that he come in for regular checkups to make sure he was healing properly and monitoring for any other signs of cancer. He did not tell his senior staff that the cancer had likely spread, nor that he was going to have to endure rounds of chemotherapy. But he had come to accept that his business life would never again be like what it was, and he wanted them to know how that might change things at Apple. When he was done catching up, he turned his attention back to the big decision, which now seemed more urgent than ever. What would come next?

OUT OF THE five cellphone- and tablet-related projects that had been percolating, only one was dead by the fall of 2004. Not surprisingly, the Wi-Fi team had failed to come up with anything of note.

Motorola had inched ahead with its iTunes-ready ROKR phone, but the handset was starting to look like what things designed by committee usually resemble—a turkey. For one thing, Motorola opted to build a chunky, so-called candy-bar-style phone, which bore no resemblance whatsoever to its far more stylish forebears, the RAZR flip phone and the iPod. The iTunes MP3s song files would be stored on removable MicroSD flash memory cards—smaller, more fragile versions of the ones that had just begun to show up in most pocket digital cameras. Inexplicably, Motorola decided that those cards would accommodate no more than one hundred songs, even though they could easily hold many times more. And despite the fact that the phone could provide Internet access, you couldn’t use it to buy and download music from the iTunes Music Store. Instead, any unlucky ROKR buyer would have to use his computer to buy music via iTunes, and then transfer those tracks to the ROKR via cable. This wasn’t any improvement over the existing iPods—which, unlike the ROKR, couldn’t boast of having direct Internet access. The more they learned about the ROKR, the more Fadell and Apple’s other star engineers dreaded the thing. Motorola would wind up taking eighteen months to deliver it (during that same time, Apple would refresh its entire iPod product line twice), so it was no surprise that when Steve finally introduced the ROKR at Apple’s September 2005 MacWorld, it was an afterthought. Apple’s own sleek new compact iPod, called the Nano, was the star of the show.

Fadell’s musicphone prototypes, which he worked on all through 2004, were far more interesting. His first version incorporated the iPod’s distinctive thumb-wheel interface as a sort of dialer. Steve liked Fadell’s moxie, but there was an obvious problem. The thumb-wheel that worked so elegantly on the iPod turned out to be a serious hindrance on a musicphone. While it was fine for scrolling through a list of music or contacts, “thumb-dial” was awkward for actually dialing a new phone number. It was a gimmick. This prototype aimed too low with its technology and user interface design. Fadell’s second prototype, which did away with the thumb-wheel and put more emphasis on being a video player, showed great imagination, and was a manifestation of Fadell’s irrepressible ambition. It couldn’t overcome an external problem—the cellular networks of that time weren’t fast or reliable enough to provide consistent video streams. Even though Fadell’s videophone could have been produced within a year with the right telecom partner, Steve chose not to go ahead. This prototype had aimed too high, since it depended upon cellular infrastructure that was not yet in place.