Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape who has become a highly successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, calls the introduction of the iPhone a seminal event that “flipped the polarity” of what makes Silicon Valley go. Once upon a time, wealthy entities like the military and big corporations drove technological change. They were the only ones who could afford machines with leading-edge components. No more. Now it’s consumers like you and me who lead the way. “The scale economics are gigantic, since these are being sold in such volume,” says Andreessen, whose shaved head looks like an artillery shell, and who talks like a machine gun spraying clipped, staccato bursts of forward-thinking analysis. “We’re talking eventually billions of these things. As a result of that, the smartphone supply chain is becoming the supply chain for the entire computing industry. So the components going into the iPhone [like Corning’s Gorilla Glass, and especially the cellular microprocessors based on a design by ARM Holdings, a British firm] are going to take over computing. By end of decade, even servers will be ARM-based, because the scale economics will be so great that anything else will not be able to compete.”
In other words, Steve had just turned the computer industry on its head. The iPhone marked the emergence of a new form of computing that was more intimate than what had been called personal computing. “My theory about the turnaround of Apple is that what they have accomplished is relatively underappreciated,” says Andreessen. “Mac, iPhone, and iPad are all Unix supercomputers packaged into a consumer form factor. That’s basically what they did. That’s the part that nobody talks about, because everybody’s so design-obsessed.” He leans forward to drive home his point. “That iPhone sitting in your pocket is the exact equivalent of a Cray XMP supercomputer from twenty years ago that used to cost ten million dollars. It’s got the same operating system software, the same processing speed, the same data storage, compressed down to a six-hundred-dollar device. That is the breakthrough Steve achieved. That’s what these phones really are!”
Chapter 16
Blind Spots, Grudges, and Sharp Elbows
A few weeks after the debut of the second iPhone, I got a call from John Nowland, the head engineer at Neil Young’s recording studio at his ranch near La Honda, California. John and Neil’s publicist and I had spoken for a year or so about possibly working on a Fortune profile about the rock star’s serious technological forays into audiophile-quality digital recording and biofuels for cars. Like me, Neil has a hearing disability, so during our initial meeting he and I spent some time comparing notes about what it’s like for a musical person to live with damaged ears.
Nowland told me that Neil wanted to send Steve a set of new, remastered vinyl editions of every album he had ever recorded. It was intended as a peace offering of sorts, and as a reminder of the peerless sound quality of old-style analog recorded music. Neil contends, with some justification, that the demonstrably inferior recorded sound quality of digital music, which was introduced with CDs, only got worse with the shift to compressed digital audio files. Half a decade earlier, shortly after the iPod hit the market, Neil had complained publicly about the fact that the digital format Apple used for the music sold on the iTunes Music Store compressed sound files so much as to render the music unbearably “compromised,” in his words.
Steve could be pretty thin-skinned when someone prominent criticized the aesthetics of his products. He took great umbrage that Neil would, as Steve put it, “pop off in public like that without coming to talk to us about his technical concerns first.” From that point on he had rebuffed all of Neil’s attempts to smoke the peace pipe.
Still, I knew that Steve enjoyed listening to records on vinyl from time to time, so I agreed to call him to see if he’d like to get the LPs. Steve answered the phone on the second ring, and I explained what I was calling about. We had talked about Neil’s criticisms a year or so before, and I thought this might soften his grudge.
Fat chance. “Fuck Neil Young,” he snapped, “and fuck his records. You keep them.” End of conversation.
Yes, Steve Jobs had grown and changed enormously over the course of his lifetime. If personal evolution is the long process of making more of our strengths and learning to moderate our weaknesses, Steve can be said to have succeeded brilliantly at the first, but not always so well at the latter. He had blind spots, grating behavioral habits, and a tendency to give in to emotional impulse that persisted his entire life. These characteristics are often used to make the case that Steve was an “asshole” or a “jerk,” or perhaps simply “binary”—that odd adjective often used to convey the sense that he was half asshole/half genius from birth to death. These aren’t useful, interesting, or enlightening descriptions. What’s more illuminating is to take a look at the specific ways in which Steve failed to do an effective job of tempering some of his weaknesses and antisocial traits, and to consider how, when, and why some of them continued to flare up even during the years of his greatest effectiveness as a leader.
DURING THE LAST decade of his life, the issue of Steve’s character would come up periodically. With all his heady success at Apple since the turn of the century, there seemed something incongruous about the occasional, stubborn persistence of certain problematic behaviors. They didn’t resonate with the image of Apple as a company all about creativity, potential, and the good that came to humanity when imaginative people used ingenious technological tools to amplify their own potential.
Apple’s cool, creative reputation wasn’t just a veneer, even though the company did work hard and masterfully to propagate that image with Lee Clow’s brilliant ad campaigns, Jony Ive’s minimalist designs, and Steve’s exacting product introductions, where music players and cellphones were associated with words like magical and phenomenal. It was also deserved and hard-earned, especially after the iPhone became the most popular consumer electronics device ever. Apple now was bigger and more influential than Sony had ever been. But Steve’s own actions could sometimes undermine the vision. How did that sleek, clean, and austere façade square with, for example, the moment in 2008 when Steve called Joe Nocera, the New York Times columnist who had once profiled him for Esquire, “a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong”? How could a company with Apple’s cherubic marketing glow make its devices in Foxconn factories where the drudgery and difficult working conditions resulted in more than a dozen assembly-line workers committing suicide? What about those deals encouraging book publishers to switch en masse to the agency model Apple preferred, where publishers set (and raised) ebook prices in a concerted effort to pressure Amazon to raise the prices it charged? What was the justification for the mutual under-the-table agreement with other Silicon Valley powerhouses not to hire one another’s engineering talent? And how “nice and cuddly” could a company or CEO be that let former top executives take the fall when the Securities and Exchange Commission took exception to the way the company doled out stock options worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
In some of these cases, the perceived moral transgressions were likely overstated, or failed to take into account all the circumstances. But Steve exacerbated many contentious situations with behavior that ranged from rude to insouciant to arrogant. Even for those of us who knew Steve well enough to have seen the significant mellowing in his personality over the years, his continued penchant for antisocial behavior was obvious, and a subject for debate. No one I have spoken to has a unified theory for the staying power of Steve’s childish behavior, not even Laurene. But it’s possible to understand the separate parts of Steve’s personality well enough to go deeper than simply characterizing him as wholly good, bad, or binary.