Ive, like Cook and Laurene, believes Steve came back from his 2004 cancer operation more focused than ever. “I remember walking and us both being in tears very, very early on, wondering whether he would see Reed graduate,” he says. “At one level there was a daily ‘What did they say? What did the tests show?’ conversation.” But Ive doesn’t think cancer is what motivated Steve during the incredibly productive end of his life. “I think it’s hard to maintain a singular focus in reaction to an illness that lasts many, many years,” he continues. “There were other things beside his illness that motivated him to focus more intensely on his work. Things like selling product in very high volume for the first time in the company’s history. I’m talking about selling tens or hundreds of millions of units of a single product. That was a huge change for Apple.
“I remember a conversation in which we talked about how do we define our metrics for feeling like we have really succeeded? We both agreed clearly it’s not about share price. Is it about number of computers we sell? No, because that would still suggest that Windows was more successful. Once again, it all came back to whether we felt really proud of what we collectively had designed and built. Were we proud of that?
“There was definitely pride, in that the numbers reflected that we were doing good work. But also I think Steve felt a vindication. This is important. It wasn’t a vindication of ‘I’m right’ or ‘I told you so.’ It was a vindication that restored his sense of faith in humanity. Given the choice, people do discern and value quality more than we give them credit for. That was a really big deal for all of us because it actually made you feel very connected to the whole world and all of humanity, and not like you’re marginalized and just making a niche product.
“There were many things that overlapped or aligned to make Steve much more sharply focused than before,” he concludes. “One was his illness, but one was an unprecedented momentum as a business that none of us had ever felt before. Feeling that momentum was as important as his illness to his creativity and success, because the excitement was still fresh.”
By the time the two got around to focusing on the iPhone, Steve had become closer to Jony than anyone he had ever worked with. “The bond became so strong between us,” says Ive. “We could just be honest and straightforward and not have to articulate precisely why this is a good idea or why this is a valuable idea. And we also were honest enough to be able to say ‘Nah, that’s a terrible idea,’ without worrying about each other’s feelings so much.”
Not surprisingly, some on the executive team thought Ive held unwarranted sway over Steve. In the years after Steve’s death, more and more unaccredited stories came forth alleging that Jony was the one who really decided who got fired and who got promoted, as if he were Steve’s Svengali. The truth was simpler than that. Steve prioritized ruthlessly, in just about every aspect of his life. To maintain his focus, Steve made clear decisions about what mattered and what didn’t. His time and friendship and discussions with Jony mattered, even at the expense of other relationships. It proved to be a relationship that was as expansive as Steve’s ambition.
“The main reason we were close and worked in the way we did was that it was a collaboration that was based on more than just the traditional view of design,” Ive says. “We both perceived objects in our environment, and people, and organizational structures intuitively in the same way. Beauty can be conceptual, it can be symbolic, it can stand as testament to progress and what humankind has managed to achieve in the last fifteen years. In that sense, it could represent progress, or it could be something as trivial as the machined face on a screw. That’s why we got on well, ’cause we both thought that way. If my contribution was simply to the shapes of things, we wouldn’t have spent so much time together. It makes no sense that the CEO of a company this size would spend nearly every lunchtime and big chunks of the afternoon with somebody who just was preoccupied with form.
“Honestly, some of the loveliest, strongest, most precious memories are those of talking at a level that was very abstract. He and I could talk philosophically about aspects of design in ways we wouldn’t with other people. I would get self-conscious if I had to talk in such philosophical terms before a group of engineers, who are brilliantly creative, but when you go on and on about the integrity and meaning of what they are building, well, that’s just not their focus. There were times when Steve and I would talk about these things and I could see in people’s eyes that they’re thinking, Oh, there they go again.
“But then we also talked about the very particular. I would say to him ‘Look. This is how we’re designing this bracket.’ Then I’d watch him take his glasses off, because he couldn’t see for shit, and I’d watch him just enjoy the beauty of all that’s inside. Even things like those special screws.”
The screws were the flattened ones used on the inside of an iPhone. When it finally debuted in 2007, the iPhone was a thing of beauty, its look almost more that of a piece of jewelry than a gadget. Even now, it still stands as perhaps the greatest physical manifestation of Steve and Jony’s remarkable creative friendship.
The iPhone was the product of the efforts of thousands of people, from Tony Fadell and Greg Christie to the workers in the Foxconn factories in China. The inventions and engineering breakthroughs necessary to make it work are too numerous to count. But it could never have been even imagined, much less made, without these two kindred spirits—Steve and Jony—working so closely together.
THE IPHONE WAS introduced on January 9, 2007, at the annual MacWorld conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It was a high-wire act. The handset was nowhere near ready to ship. There were serious software shortcomings and hardware glitches. Its individual components had been put through the wringer, but the device had hardly been tested “in the wild,” when Apple treats its prototypes the way it expects consumers to use them, shifting back and forth from phone to music player to computer quickly and indiscriminately.
Steve had never liked to “pre-introduce” a product in this way (with the exception of major operating system upgrades). There was always the possibility that the software or the screen or something else might wig out during the demo, and he also worried about tipping his hand too early in a highly competitive business. But Steve had three good reasons for pre-announcing the iPhone. The first was that he had to finally show AT&T something. The company had seen nothing for years—no mock-ups, no prototypes—and it had a clause in its deal that allowed it to pull out if Apple failed to meet certain development milestones. That was unlikely to happen, but he couldn’t take any chances. Second, as Lee Clow observed, Steve was P. T. Barnum incarnate. He loved the element of surprise when he debuted a product. While Apple had remained poker-faced on the subject of a phone for nearly three years, he wasn’t sure he could preserve a cone of silence for another few months. The iPhone would need to be tested by employees out in the real world, and sooner or later one would be spotted. He preferred to control the message. Finally, the January MacWorld confab was by far the best showcase for Steve; not only did he own the forum, but his announcement would upstage anything coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where other handset makers would be showing off their wares. He wanted to steal their headlines.
There was one other reason to make the announcement early, on the very best stage available: Steve and his team knew, in their bones, that the iPhone was something truly special. They were eager to show the world. Eddy Cue recalls: “iPhone was the culmination of everything for Steve, and of everything I had learned. It was the only event I took my wife and kids to because, as I told them, ‘In your lifetime, this might be the biggest thing ever.’ Because you could feel it. You just knew that this was huge.”