1
After hours of getting
this thing right...
God, look at that.
Look, I'm on television.
- Hey! Isn't that amazing?
- Yeah, it is.
- You're on TV in New York, too.
- What's that?
- You're on TV in New York, too.
- No, no.
- Yes, you are.
- Am I really? Are you serious?
- Yeah, they got you in New York.
- God.
I'm gonna let you
put it in your own ear.
- Really?
- It's a talk back.
- They're going to talk to you.
- This is not the real thing, right?
You just want a picture of me now?
- They're going to sit you here first.
- God.
You need to tell me
where the restroom is, too,
cos I'm deathly ill, actually,
and ready to throw up
at any moment, so...
- It's right across the hall.
- Great. I'm not joking.
We're ready to go, gentlemen.
New York's waiting for a shot of him.
If you see in my eyes,
I've been crying just a little bit.
And it seems really ridiculous
because I've never met the man.
I know life is ephemeral,
but I just, you know,
I expected him to be around
a little longer.
Pretty sure everybody did,
but, you know...
The thing I'm using right now,
an iMac, he made.
He made the iMac.
He made the Macbook.
He made the Macbook Pro.
He made the Macbook Air.
He made the iPhone.
He made the iPod.
Yeah, he's made the iPod Touch.
He's made everything.
Hey, Mr Tambourine Man
Play a song for me
I'm not sleepy
And there's no place I'm going to
Hey, Mr Tambourine Man
Play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning
I'll come following you
It's not often that the whole
planet seems to feel a loss together,
but after the death of Steve Jobs,
co-founder of Apple
and singular dreamer,
all day, we watched
as there was a kind of global wake.
On Facebook, millions changing
their profiles to the Apple logo.
A kind of black armband,
a gesture of gratitude.
We've been monitoring
the hashtag "thankyousteve."
My favorite tweet last night
was four simple letters
simply saying, "iSad."
Hi.
When Steve Jobs died,
I was mystified.
What accounted for the grief of
millions of people who didn't know him?
I'd seen it with John Lennon
and Martin Luther king,
but Steve Jobs wasn't a singer
or a civil-rights leader.
Many commentators were surprised
by the intensity and the power
of this wave of emotion.
What was it?
And I think it was truly love.
Jobs has proven to be the one
and only person in the world
who can create
technology products that people love.
Wall-E.
I love "Wall-E,"
a film Jobs's Pixar produced,
and I love my iPhone,
but the grief for Jobs seemed to go
beyond the products he left behind.
We mourned the man himself,
but why?
Behind the scenes, Jobs could be
ruthless, deceitful and cruel.
Yet he won our hearts by convincing us
that Apple represented a higher ideal.
It was not like other companies.
It was different.
Good morning and welcome to Apple's
1984 annual shareholders' meeting.
I'd like to open the meeting
with part of an old poem,
about a 20-year-old poem, by Dylan.
That's Bob Dylan.
"Come writers and critics
who prophesize with your pens
and keep your eyes wide,
the chance won't come again."
"And don't speak too soon
for the wheel's still in spin
and there's no telling
who that it's naming."
"For the loser now will be later to win,
for the times, they are a-changing."
Jobs loved Dylan
maybe because he wasnt just one thing.
He was a storyteller who could
be whatever we wanted him to be.
I don't even what know what
All Along The Watchtower means.
I think it is one of
the most beautiful, haunting,
brilliant pieces of poetry ever.
And to me, it's like Steve.
"There must be some way
out of here, said the..."
What is it?
Said the Joker to the Thief.
He's both.
"There must be
Some way out of here"
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth
There's something going on
here in life
beyond just a job and a family
and career.
There's another side of the coin.
It's the same thing
that causes people to want to be poets
instead of bankers.
And I think that that same spirit
can be put into products.
And those products can be manufactured
and given to people,
and they can sense that spirit.
A computer is a straightforward,
everyday machine.
A simple way of studying
the principle of how it works
is that a computer is quite dead.
It can do nothing without
someone to give instructions.
When I was growing up,
computers weren't something to love.
They were something to fear.
They were huge, impersonal,
made by faceless corporations.
But for Jobs, it was different.
I saw my first computer
when I was 12 at NASA.
We had a local NASA center
nearby. It was a terminal,
which was connected
to a big computer somewhere.
This is one of the consoles
they might be using in the future.
It looks very much like
just a regular typewriter.
Too often the equipment of the past
has sort of been designed
for other machines.
They're really not for people.
I saw my second computer a few
years later, the Hewlett-Packard 9100.
The 9100 computing calculator.
It was very large. Had a very small
cathode ray tube on it for display.
And I got a chance to play with
one of those maybe in 1968.
I started going up
to Hewlett-Packard's Palo Alto
research lab every Tuesday night,
and I spent every spare moment I had
trying to write programs for it.
I was so fascinated by this.
We have a pointing device
called a mouse.
I don't know why we call it a mouse.
By 1968, Stanford's
Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse,
was asking new questions
about the essential nature of our
changing relationship with computers.
If in your office,
you as an intellectual worker
were supplied with a computer display
backed up by a computer
that was alive for you all day
and was instantly responsible,
responsive,
instantly responsive
to every action you had,
how much value
could you derive from that?
We needed a guide to help us
navigate this new relationship.
My whole adult life has been spent
building personal computers.
So, the history of my vocation
and my avocations
and, you know,
my growing up are all the same,
and it's very hard
to separate one from the other.
I come from a place called
Silicon Valley, California,
and you'll find there are
a lot of electronics kits around.
My electronics teacher realized
that I had a lot of computer ability
that went beyond anything he could
possibly teach me in school.
He knew that as long as I was in class,
I was just going to sit around,
playing pranks on the other students
like wrapping little hair wires
around certain circuits
so when they plugged in their radio,
it would blow up.
As hard as I think about it,
I don't think I ever had one friend
who was not one of the tech kids.
I met Woz when I was maybe
12 years old, 13 years old.
He was the first person I met
that knew more electronics than I did.
And one of the things that Woz and I did
was we built blue boxes.
One day I picked up a magazine,
and I started reading a story
about phone phreaks and blue boxes.
When phone phreaks
have a convention,
as they did in the ballroom
of a seedy New York hotel lately,
masks are given out at the door.
People don't give their right names.
The blue box was a little device that
put special tones into anybody's phone
and those tones would connect you
anywhere you wanted.
Halfway through reading this,
I called Steve Jobs over
and started reading it to him
over the phone.
There's a way to fool
the entire telephone system
into thinking you were
a telephone computer
and to open up itself and let you call
anywhere in the world for free.
You could call from a pay phone,
go to White Plains, New York,
take a satellite to Europe.
And you'd go around the world
and call the pay phone next door.
Shout in the phone,
be about 30 seconds,
it'd come out the other end
of the other phone.
And he's like, "Hello,"
There's a lag and, "Hello, how are you?"
"I'm fine." You know?
Why, one might wonder,
would someone want to do that?
To rip off the phone company.
And these were illegal, I have to add.
In college, I had a blue box
of my own. It was important
because long-distance phone calls
were really expensive back then.
It was also a way
of sticking it to the man.
This would become an important
selling point for Jobs, too,
even as he left
the technical work to others.
Well, I had this blue box design.
I did a trick in there
that I've never done that good a trick
in any other design in my life.
And Steve Jobs said,
"Hey, why don't we sell them?"
You know, you rapidly run
out of people you want to call,
but it was the magic that two teenagers
could build this box
for $100 worth of parts
and control hundreds of billions
of dollars of infrastructure
in the entire telephone network
in the whole world.
We could sort of influence the world,
you know?
Control it, in the case of blue boxes,
but something much more powerful
than controlling.
Influencing, in the case of Apple.
And they're very closely related.
I really do, to this day,
feel that if we hadn't had had
those blue box experiences,
there never would have been
an Apple computer.
I think Jobs
was always a storyteller.
There was always this sense
that he was constructing a persona.
The first time I sat down
with him to work on a story,
he immediately asked me
if I had read
Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions."
I think he was assimilating
into this personality,
this notion that he had found in Kuhn.
The random result
that eventually creates
a paradigm shift where everybody
one morning wakes up,
and they think the new way.
And I believe that he thought
that he was a paradigm shifter.
That was part of his story. He wanted
to have a foot in both worlds.
He wanted to be the renegade,
but he also wanted to be legit.
This is the video deposition
of Steven P Jobs.
We are on the record at 9:22am.
Can we just sort of briefly go over
your employment history after 1973?
I was employed by Atari,
a maker of video games.
- What timeframe?
- I don't know. Early '70s.
Creativity is a lot about anarchy.
I had been in the video-game
business two years
and our corporate culture
was really "work hard, play hard."
The true original sin of Apple
literally takes place
before the company is founded.
Jobs had left Reed College
and now he was back in Silicon Valley.
Woz was working at HP.
I was such a nerd.
When I finished designing calculators
at Hewlett-Packard in the daytime,
I would work on my own little projects.
I saw "Pong" in a bowling alley,
and I said,
"I know logic design,
and I know electronics of televisions."
"I'll use my home TV, snake a wire in,"
and I built myself a "Pong."
Steve came back from Reed College
and saw that I had built
my own Pong game.
And so that gave him the idea
to go down to Atari.
And he went down,
and he showed them the board
and he wound up with a job.
Steve came in and said,
in typical Steve Jobs fashion,
"I'm not going to leave
until you hire me."
And I really appreciated his intensity.
He had one speed. Full on.
I had one little project
that everyone kept turning down.
It was a project called "Breakout."
And finally I said,
"Steve, hey, do this for me."
In the back of my mind,
I knew that Woz was coming over all
the time after working at HP all day,
and I thought,
"OK, I'll put Steve on the night shift."
"Woz will come over. I'll get
two Steves for the price of one."
Steve said, "Nolan Bushnell
of Atari wants another game built."
But we only had four days, Steve said.
When a game is made out of chips
and it's not a program,
four days is, like, impossible.
This is months' worth of work.
I did the entire design,
and then Steve would breadboard
my design for a little while.
We were up four days and nights
non-stop. Both got mononucleosis.
And we got "Breakout" delivered
to Atari, and they paid for it.
Later on,
Woz and I were out to dinner.
He was talking about Breakout,
and I said, "Well, you know,
you guys got paid pretty well for it."
He looked at me puzzled, and I said,
"Yeah, I mean,
you did such a good job."
"I think there was at least
a $5,000 bonus that you guys got."
So, yeah, he was paid $7,000,
and he told me that we were paid $700,
and he wrote me a check for $350.
You know, and that hurts
because we were friends.
And do you do that to a friend?
If he'd said, "I need the money,"
I would have said, "Take it all."
I was happy to be on the project.
I think that Steve...
...was very driven
and would very often take
shortcuts to achieve his goals.
Then in time we'll tell who has fell
And who's been left behind
When you go your way
And I go mine
Apple was a sitcom.
It was a 30-year sitcom.
And Steve was the main character.
This was written in December 1976.
In fact it starts out saying,
"Who's Apple," so that was very early.
He and Woz came in.
Steve had long hair down his back.
He had a Ho Chi Minh beard,
cutoffs, Birkenstocks.
And Wozniak was maybe a little bit
upscale from that, but not much.
I used to like Intel's advertising,
So I called them up one day,
and I said, "Who does your advertising?"
They said, "Well, Regis McKenna."
"What's a Regis McKenna?"
They said, "No, it's a person."
Wozniak had a technical article
on the Apple II.
He wanted us to try to get it
placed into a magazine.
Nobody could read it. It was
all technical jargon and so forth.
And so I told him
I'd have to rewrite it,
and he wasn't happy about that.
He said, "No one's going to rewrite
my stuff."
I said, "Well,
then there's nothing I can do for you,
so you might as well leave."
Steve called back,
and he pretty much convinced me
that he would be the person
that we'd be dealing with
and that Wozniak would be designing
and building things,
which is the way it happens
in most businesses.
The engineers are more back room
and you work with either the
entrepreneur or the marketing people.
Did you think early on
that Steve could be the guy?
Oh, definitely. You just had to spend
a few minutes with him and you knew it.
He had the ability
to talk about the possibility
of what this computer could be.
And I think the key is not just
talking about the product,
but giving you an idea
of what is possible using this product
and what the next generation
is going to be like.
So he gives people this feeling
of forward movement.
- How many calculators do you own?
- Two, maybe.
Right, and do you use
the automatic bank-telling machines?
- Sure.
- Life is already seducing you
into learning this stuff.
It's not going to happen at once,
and it's certainly not
a 1984-ish vision at all.
It's just going to be very gradual
and very human
and will seduce you
into learning how to use it.
Transitioning from a hobby
to a personal computer,
that whole idea was driven by Steve.
He was trying to say
we need to differentiate ourselves
and really move out
of this hobbyist realm.
It ended up
coming out of the room saying,
"We're going to call ourselves
the personal computer."
Industry experts say
we're no longer on the verge
of the personal computer revolution.
We're right in the midst of it,
thank you.
And it's gathering steam
with more and more people
jumping aboard every day.
I use my computer right now
for mostly word processing.
I use it for solar evaluation programs.
We put our entire accounting system
on it.
The wife can use it to store recipes.
To balance my checkbook for me.
We do the computer club's bulletin.
- Playing games.
- Shopping by mail.
- Budgeting.
- Bowling-league type scores.
- Electronic mail.
- A guy can be creative on it.
I mean, he can use it
for whatever he can dream up.
This is a 21st-century bicycle
that amplifies a certain intellectual
ability that man has.
The effects that it's going to
have on society
are actually going to far outstrip
even those that the petrochemical
revolution has had.
Time magazine, I think,
said single-handedly he created
the industry because he was relentless.
The powers that be
of "Time" magazine
decided that they would make
the Man of the Year that particular year
the Computer of the Year.
I was transferred to the bureau
in San Francisco.
And gradually I began to cotton on
to the fact
that there were a lot of stories
in this part of California
between San Jose
and San Francisco
about these odd, little companies
that people on the East Coast
at that point
hadn't heard about
and really didn't care about.
And then I got very interested in Apple
and Steve was,
of the early characters in the company,
the most articulate and the most
interesting and the oddest.
Steven Jobs helped build
the first Apple computer in his garage.
He is now 26 years old
and is chairman of the board.
There was some debate
over whether or not
they should use the name "Apple."
You know, the whole model
of the computer industry
and the computer business was IBM.
Another business service of
tomorrow made possible today by IBM.
IBM was an anonymous organization.
No one knew who the president was.
They probably had no idea.
The IBM logo looked like it was
carved out of Roman marble, you know?
It was just
this monolithic kind of thing.
And we took just the opposite,
which was,
"Let's make Steve very high profile.
Let's tell our story."
Working in this garage,
Jobs and a high-school classmate
quit their positions
at large electronic companies,
and using tiny silicon chips,
built this small computer board.
Funny, the garage story was
less of a feature in those early days.
It later on became more of a look back
when people started doing stories
on the background, and so forth.
You know, I told Steve this,
and most of my clients in fact,
there's a song in Fiddler on the Roof
that Tevye sings.
He says, "If I were a rich man."
And he said, "I'd sit in the temple,
and I'd lecture to the wise men
all day long,
and it wouldn't matter
if you're right or wrong."
"When you're rich,
they think you know."
So, in a technology business,
you have to show that you are successful
in order to have a platform.
It led to
a quarter-billion-dollar business
and the most popular typewriter-sized
computer on the market today.
Steve Jobs,
I realize this is your baby,
and you've made a career out of it,
but you're also
something of a philosopher.
Do you see the inherent possibility
of bad coming out of all of this?
Well, I think one of the things
you really have to look at
is you have to go watch
some kids using these things.
And what you find is far
from something quite harmful.
In effect, what you see
is an instantaneous reflection
of a part of themselves,
the creative part of themselves
being expressed.
He was going for a computer
that really felt like
an extension of the self.
That's what people wanted, and I think
he sensed that. He knew that.
My first book on the computer culture
was called "The Second Self."
The key quote
that gave me the title was,
"When you think of a computer,
you put a little piece of your mind
into the computer's mind,
and you come to think
of yourself differently."
Our whole company,
our whole philosophical base,
is founded on one principle.
And that one principle
is that there's something very special
and very historically different
that takes place when you have
one computer and one person.
Did you have an opportunity
to meet Jobs?
Yes,
I met him on several occasions.
And did you sense
from talking to him
that he really did understand
what he was doing?
I think he understood what he was doing.
He knew
he had created something intimate
and that could be sold
as something intimate.
And it would be you.
I mean, it would be for you.
It wasn't just for you. It was you.
Can you just show me
the front of it?
That's the part
that most people would recognize.
This is a piece that everybody
remembers from the ads,
from the Time magazine cover
with Steve holding it in his lap.
And this is the famous beige that
we're never going to have any more of.
He hated this even at this time,
but we were kind of stuck with it
by the time we got there.
It was a fun little machine.
He called me just out of the blue.
I was working at Xerox.
And I picked up the phone,
and it was Steve Jobs.
And he said, "I hear you're a good guy,
but everything you've done so far
is crap. Come work for me."
I told my wife at the time.
I said, "Well, what could happen?"
"How bad could this be?"
I didn't realize how bad it could be.
First trip Steve ever made to Japan
was to see what we could do about
getting a disc drive for the machine.
And we saw the Sony disc facility
in Atsugi, Japan.
He had a lot of affection for Sony
because the Walkman was a machine
that he just thought
was the bee's knees.
You really feel the music
with a Sony Walkman
The Sony Walkman is
a tiny stereo cassette player
with truly incredible sound.
You really feel the music
You really feel it
I think it was the first product
in human history
that went over a billion units.
That he liked.
One of things that Steve thought
was important,
and Jerry Manock facilitated it,
was this is
where all the signatures are.
And they're all the people,
the original group,
that actually signed the machine.
There's Steve Jobs right in the middle.
My name is over here.
Why did you do that?
Because the people that worked
on it consider themselves,
and I certainly consider them, artists.
These are the people that
under different circumstances
would be painters and poets, but,
because of the time that we live in,
this new medium has appeared
in which to express oneself
to one's fellow species.
And that's a medium of computing.
We would sit
in the temples in Kyoto,
just taking off our shoes at the door
and sitting.
Did he take from that any
kind of aesthetic vision, do you think?
I think certainly.
A simplicity.
Just feeling that inner calm
that's so available
at some places in Japan.
He was a very much a person
who was comfortable in silence.
Steve ruled by a kind of a chaos.
And it's easy to make chaos,
and if you're comfortable with it,
you can use it as a tool.
And he used a vast number
of really irritating tools
to get other people involved
in his schemes.
He's seducing you, he's vilifying you
and he's ignoring you.
You're in one of those three states.
When you get a core group of,
you know, ten great people,
it becomes self-policing
as to who they let into that group.
So, I consider the most important job
of someone like myself is recruiting.
Steve Jobs brought us all together
in a place that had no rules.
He's a maniac. He's a maniacal genius.
His job is to stir up everything.
Most places in life
are continuously telling you
that your dreams aren't possible
or practical.
You don't want to hear that
when you're under 30.
What you want to do is race after them.
You ask yourself, why are you doing it?
I'm certainly not doing it
for Steve Jobs.
I'm doing it for what I think is
a much greater good than that.
Everybody just wanted to work, not
because it was work that had to be done,
but it was because it was something
that we really believed in.
Here is how we see personal computers.
Here is how we want the world to be.
And here's how we're going to change it.
We have a vision
of what we want it to be.
We want to convert people.
We want to make converts.
I felt my job at Macintosh
was to make the division
work smoothly enough
that we could actually get this thing
from really a mess of kids
playing around with a bunch
of hardware and software
into something that would be
a commercial product.
And that's what I did.
I got that machine finished.
It is now 1984.
IBM became the apparent visible threat.
IBM wants it all,
and is aiming its guns
on its last obstacle
to industry control. Apple.
Will Big Blue dominate
the entire computer industry?
The entire information age?
Was George Orwell right?
Today, we celebrate
the first glorious anniversary
over the information
purification directives.
That ad was again
a juxtaposition with IBM.
- That's what it was about.
- Yeah.
The people in the audience
were mindless IBM users.
Yes. You know,
for Steve it was great
because he had this bad guy/good guy,
and he loved playing that role.
We shall prevail!
Looking back, behind the scenes,
it's easy to see the irony in the ad.
Today, Apple is Goliath.
Rolling. Rolling.
But even in 1984,
when Apple cast itself
as the counterculture company,
working at Apple was a lot tougher
than IBM.
I think if you talk to a lot of
people on the Mac team,
they will tell you it was the hardest
they've ever worked in their life.
Some of them will tell you
it was, you know,
the happiest they've ever been
in their life,
but I think all of them will tell you
that it is certainly one of the most
intense and cherished experiences
they will ever have in their life.
- Mm-hmm. Yeah, they did.
- So...
You know...
Some of those things are
not sustainable for some people.
I ended up
changing my entire life.
I lost my wife in that process.
I lost my children in that process.
I lost...
The whole structure of my life
was just changed forever
by going and working on the Mac.
Because the work
became so intense?
The work was intense.
The commitment needed to do it
was intense.
I would go into work
on a Tuesday morning
and half the people would hate me,
and I'd come back on Wednesday morning,
and half the people would hate me,
but it was the other half.
There were an awful lot
of prima donnas in that outfit,
so I was always in conflict.
Here's the piece you wrote.
You want to read it?
"Steve's passing did come
as a bit of a shock for me."
"For a bit more than three years,
1982 to 1985,
we were together a lot of the time."
"We made a dozen trips to Japan
together. We were close."
"After that,
I only saw him a few times."
"I haven't seen him in many years."
"He was an extraordinary person in many
ways and quite normal in others."
"The outpouring of feelings
from people all over the world
was a bit of a surprise to me at first,
and then it seemed natural."
"He was for them
a combination of James Dean,
Princess Diana and John Lennon
and maybe Santa Claus."
"What is in that bag of goodies?"
"The iPod, the iPhone
and the iPad are so personal."
"They are warm in your hand.
They sing to you when you're alone."
"They are caressed."
"In those three years together,
I packed in a decade or two
of experience."
"Steve packed in a couple of centuries
in his 56 years."
"He did everything he wanted,
and all on his own terms."
"It was a life well and fully lived,
even if it was a bit expensive
for those of us who were close."
You do have friends, you know?
Even if they're bizarre people.
Yes. He is.
He's one of those mythic characters.
Yeah, and they're not that much fun
on the ground most of the time,
but there are those moments
when suddenly...
They're the only person
who could've ever done it.
Right.
- Yeah, and they change us.
- Right.
Without death,
there would be very little progress.
I'm sure that life evolved
without death at first
and found that without death,
life didn't work very well.
Because it didn't make room
for the young
who didn't know how the world was,
you know, 50 years ago,
but who saw it as it is today
without any preconceptions
and dreamed how it could be
based on that.
The minute that you understand
that you can poke life,
you can change it, you can mold it,
you'll want to change life
and make it better
cos it's kind of messed up
in a lot of ways.
Once you learn that,
you'll never be the same again.
Just be here.
Don't judge, don't try,
don't stop, don't start. Just be here.
It's all just enough.
It's enough to know that I love you.
Steve and I met two weeks into
our freshman year at Reed College.
We had both happened to buy
"Be Here Now."
And it was such an unusual book.
I just wanted...
I was carrying it around
and wanted somebody to talk to about it,
and Steve was the one person
who also had read it.
When we went to India,
we were looking for
remarkable experiences.
We didn't have a guru.
We didn't have a particular school.
And so we traveled around
for four months.
Had some interesting experiences.
No major enlightenment experiences.
Steve's quote later was,
"We had figured out that
we weren't going to meet somebody
who was going to make us enlightened."
If you think about Hindu spirituality,
you think of Mother Teresa
feeding the poor.
That's not really the path
that Steve took.
Those weren't Steve's values.
It was the next year,
after India,
when he connected
with the Zen Center in Los Altos.
Zen is about clarity,
simplicity, cleanliness.
Ending the duality of your ego
and simplifying your life.
And that really appealed to Steve.
It's based on taking off
and creating something for yourself.
You know, giving life to your own life
in whatever way you wish to do it.
At the time
he was starting Apple,
Steve was very actively looking
for a mentor.
Kobun Chino would
become Jobs's spiritual advisor.
Kobun encouraged Jobs
not to retreat into a monastery,
but instead to find Zen
in his life and work.
But they would argue
over the path to enlightenment.
Steve always says, "Make me monk.
Please make me monk."
I say, "Not until proof."
When I was living in California,
23 years ago...
Midnight...
I answered the doorbell and there he is.
18 years old, he was.
And he wanted to see me.
And I looked into his eyes, and...
They looked terrible,
but he is not crazy.
I must talk with him.
I took him for a walk
through the downtown of Los Altos.
All stores closed.
One bar called The Teacup was open.
We sat down at the counter.
I had Irish coffee and he had juice.
After sipping, he started to talk.
He said, "I feel I'm enlightened."
"I don't know what to do with this."
That's wonderful.
That is very wonderful.
I need proof of it.
A week later he came back
with a little metal sheet in his hand.
Many things were going,
wires going around...
I didn't know what it was.
It was a chip of a personal computer.
He said, "I designed it.
My friend Woz helped me."
"This is called Lisa."
"I named it Lisa."
Which is the name of his daughter.
That was the origin of Apple Computer.
And I'm still not quite sure
that was a true proof or not.
He's brilliant, but too smart, I think.
When you broke the Lisa story,
why was that important?
There was a computer called "Lisa."
And everybody wondered
who the computer was named after.
I didn't choose
to name the computer "Lisa."
I was obviously curious
about why it was named "Lisa".
Fair or unfair, I think that was,
to me,
that was a germane part of the story.
With your mercury mouth
In the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke
I was 17, sitting in the quad.
Early spring,
warm and cold at the same time.
And I look over, and there's
this guy I have never seen.
I've been there for three years.
I can't believe how gorgeous he is.
And he starts to walk out of the quad,
and I followed him
cos I thought,
"I've got to introduce myself to him."
And I'm going, "What do I say?"
I had no idea what to say.
A few months later,
I was working on a film.
We worked all night long,
and he walks up out of the dark.
He was confident and awkward.
He was a study in contrasts.
And he had jeans on that drooped
because they had so many holes in them.
And he was very intentional,
very intense.
And then he handed me a poem
by Bob Dylan.
"Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."
He would re-write Dylan's songs
to fit his life.
And then he... he just scanned the quad
and the darkness
that went over his face...
The edge, the worry,
the dissonance, was shocking to me.
And I was young enough where I thought,
"Did I say something wrong?"
But later I realized
that wasn't what it was.
That was part of who he was.
And I mean, that was one of the things
that I was attracted to,
is that he had a lot going on
inside him.
Steve was a romantic,
and he really loved Chrisann.
I think she was
a seductive force in his life,
and there was a part of Steve
that didn't want to push that away.
But the main thing in Steve's life,
number one,
was getting Apple off the ground.
And he just really could not focus
on anything else.
I came out in June of '77,
and the three of us went
and rented a house in Cupertino.
Apple is beginning.
Steve and I are falling in love again.
But we're going back and forth
big time now.
It's just like I'm insecure
because he's so unkind,
and then we connect.
But I don't know how to handle
how fast Steve's mind is
and how fast
he throws negative stuff at me.
And by the time I figure out,
"I've got to get out of here..."
Um...
"This is not working."
Um... "I don't want to be in their club,
Daniel's or just even with Steve."
"It's just not working."
That's when I got pregnant.
What happened when
you told Steve that you were pregnant?
Um...
I told Steve in the dining room.
Steve's jaw clenched.
And searing anger...
And he runs out the door,
kind of like a teenager,
slams the door.
She got pregnant.
And Steve just was, "Not... not...
not me."
"It's not me. It's not me," right?
Even though that was not
a reasonable thing to say.
After Lisa was born,
Steve came up three days later.
And we're sitting in a field,
and he...
We're like, trying to negotiate...
...what name we both feel good about
for her.
He knows he's the father.
He comes with the idea
of wanting to call her Claire,
and I don't want Claire because
it's too much like Clara,
his mother's name.
So, we're looking through the book,
and we're thinking
and going back and forth,
trying different names,
and finally I go, "Lisa!"
He said, "Yeah!"
We both loved that name.
But later I realized he wanted
to name a line of computers
or the next computer
the "Claire."
I only knew this later.
He went back to Apple
and changed it to the "Lisa."
It says a lot about somebody
that they would have the wit,
the imagination, the audacity,
to name a computer in the fashion
that Steve named this
and believe that you're going to
be able to get away with it.
That is the sort
of very telling anecdote
that helps illuminate
somebody's personality.
My biological mother was
a young, unwed graduate student,
and she decided
to put me up for adoption.
So, everything was all set
for me to be adopted at birth
by a lawyer and his wife.
Except that when I popped out,
they decided at the last minute
that they really wanted a girl.
So, my parents,
who were on a waiting list,
got a call in the middle
of the night, asking,
"We've got an unexpected baby boy.
Do you want him?"
They said, "Of course."
My biological mother found out later
that my mother had never
graduated from college
and that my father had never
graduated from high school.
She refused to sign
the final adoption papers.
She only relented a few months later
when my parents promised
that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life.
You know, another paradox
for him, you know, here's a guy,
you know, being pissed off
that he was left for adoption,
and when he has a child,
he wants to run the other way.
Yes, that's a huge paradox.
Even when I first met Steve, the fact
that he was given up for adoption
was a huge emotional issue
in his life.
I was, I remember,
right here on the lawn
telling Lisa McMoyler, who lived
across the street, that I was adopted,
and she said, "So, does that mean
your real parents didn't want you?"
Ooh, lightening bolt. I remember
running into the house.
I think I started crying, asking
my parents, and they sat me down.
They said,
"No, you don't understand."
They said,
"We specifically picked you."
That was clearly
a very defining image in his life,
both that he was rejected
and that he was special.
The IPO was November 1980.
By the summer of 1980,
it was clear it was going to happen,
and so Steve's net worth
was going to go from $10 million
to around $200 million.
And I think he had the opportunity
to completely reinvent himself.
In his reinvention, some
people who helped him were left behind.
Woz had no taste for management,
so he left Apple with a big stock
package and a lifetime stipend.
Daniel Kottke had been
one of Apple's first employees.
In the run-up to the IPO,
an Apple executive offered
to give Daniel the same amount
of stock that Steve would give.
Steve replied,
"Fine. I'll give him zero."
Jobs also saw an opportunity
to rewrite his history with Chrisann.
He composed a fiction which implied
she had many sexual partners,
and he claimed he was sterile
and therefore did not have the physical
capacity to procreate a child.
A woman with a baby,
and I was that threatening to them.
If he'd said, "I can't do this,
but let me help
because I can be practical here,"
that would have been...
...made for so much.
But it almost seemed that the point
was to be out of integrity.
When a court-ordered DNA test
proved Jobs's paternity,
he stopped fighting Chrisann
in court.
She was on welfare at the time,
so Jobs reluctantly agreed to pay
$500 a month in child support.
When Apple went public,
he was worth nearly $200 million.
Steve is so hugely successful,
and yet he treated
so many people so badly.
How much of an asshole
do you have to be to be successful?
What is the moral of the story here?
Hello. I am Macintosh.
It is with considerable pride
that I introduce a man
who's been like a father to me.
Steve Jobs.
He didn't know
what real connection was.
So he was a part of the technology
that connected the world.
Does that make sense?
He made up another kind of connection.
You know,
I didn't sleep a wink last night.
There's a version of Steve Jobs
presenting the iPhone
where you can see his own feeling
of "I love this object."
Isn't this awesome?
His stuff was beloved,
but it wasn't that he was beloved.
He wasn't a nice guy.
First, he had a reputation
as a womanizer,
and then he had a reputation
as sort of not caring about anybody
and as being kind of a tough guy.
People are not connected to him
because of his character.
That is not people's connection to him.
In Be Here Now by Ram Dass,
one of the memories I still have
after all these years
was when someone goes into
a state of enlightenment...
...but they do it while
they're still attached to their ego...
They call that, as I recall him
saying it, "the golden chain."
And that's what I feel
happened to Steve.
He went into magnificence
and into enlightenment, but he...
He just...
He blew it.
Steve Jobs blew it?
How many people in the world
believe that?
He made products everyone loved.
He was the computer era's
most successful entrepreneur.
How could anyone think he blew it?
The entrepreneur's a person
who wants to shake things up,
who wants to change things,
who sees a better way of doing that.
But he or she tends to be
a royal pain in the neck.
Apple computer has sued
its co-founder and former chairman,
Steven Jobs, to stop him
from starting a rival company.
Jobs quit Apple last week in a bitter
fight with his board and management.
So, Apple is reorganizing.
John Sculley is taking control
from Steven Jobs.
Tell us about your departure
from Apple.
Oh, it was very painful. I'm not even
sure I want to talk about it. Um...
What can I say? I hired the wrong guy.
- That was Sculley?
- Yeah.
And... he destroyed everything
I'd spent ten years working for.
What did you do
after you left Apple in 1985?
I started two companies.
One was started
by buying the computer-graphics
division of Lucasfilm.
We christened it Pixar.
Pixar was acquired by Disney.
I'm on the board of directors
of the Walt Disney Company.
And the other was called NeXT.
From having left
or been bounced from Apple,
did he have a kind of a chip
on his shoulder?
Was there some...
Was this Steve in the wilderness?
I don't think he felt he was
in the wilderness at all.
I think he felt he was on a path.
He was on a mission.
Where are we going to?
In 1986, after he had left Apple
and was in the process
of starting this new company,
"Esquire" convinced him to
give a journalist a week of his time.
So, I basically spent that week
with him,
talked to him a lot, went to dinner,
sat in on meetings,
and got to see Jobs as he was
at that moment in his life.
But, I mean, I agree that...
Let me back up a bit.
So, somebody's got to say,
"Here's what we can do,
and we can make it happen,
and here's the level of thing
we can ship in 16 months."
And what I hear him saying is,
"Well, anything more than
a port of Mac author, forget it."
And boy, that just makes me smoke.
If he was in a meeting
and somebody said,
"Here's a great idea," and put the idea
out there and he didn't like it,
he'd just chop the person
into mincemeat.
The problem I've got, though,
is one,
will everybody believe
that the stake is in fact in the ground,
and, secondly,
when software comes back
and says what they can do
by summer or spring of '87,
will they be telling us the truth?
Well, George, I can't change the world,
you know.
What do you want me to do?
What's the solution?
But you see,
what we can learn is...
What I want is probably irrelevant.
I mean,
there are certain realities here,
both psychological and market,
that are going to come into play,
in my own personal judgment.
And I think this is a window
that we've got. We've been given it.
And thank God we've been given it.
Nobody else has done this.
It's a wonderful window.
We have 18 months.
The article was about people
who are maniacal about work.
And Steve Jobs was the most maniacal
person I could think of,
which is why I wanted
to write about him.
You made the connection
in that first piece a bunch of times,
you know, the monk among priests.
What was the relationship
between that extreme
of working 24/7
and that monastic life?
I mean, he did seem to have
that rather interesting dedication.
OK, so, a monomaniacal commitment
to something
is something
that most people don't have.
And that, like the monk, requires you
to kind of shed extraneous things,
and Steve Jobs absolutely,
positively had that.
Jobs talked about
becoming a monk
at this remote Zen temple
where Kobun Chino had studied.
I wonder what he liked
about the idea of it.
Was it the discipline of the monks?
Their unwavering focus?
In meditation, Jobs loved
inspecting his own mind
and changing the way it worked.
He focused on the spirit of things
and sought perfection
in the machines he made.
But Kobun thought
Jobs was missing the point.
A search for perfection
would never bring him peace
or harmony with those around him.
But maybe harmony is
what Jobs was looking for in Japan.
He went there dozens of times,
and not just for business.
He stayed in fancy hotels,
not Zen temples,
but right to the end,
he kept going back.
After he met and later married
Laurene Powell,
he would take three
of his four children there,
including Lisa.
Jobs's relationship with Lisa
remained full of conflict,
but a few years before Jobs's death,
Lisa wrote about a moment of peace.
I didn't live with him, but he
would stop by our house some days,
a deity among us for
a few tingly moments or hours.
He was a more extreme vegetarian
than my mother and I
and sharp-focused.
One day, he spit out a mouthful of soup
after hearing it contained butter.
With him, one ate a variety of salads.
He believed that great harvests
came from arid sources.
Pleasure from restraint.
He knew the equations
that most people didn't know.
Things led to their opposites.
But once, he took me with him
on a business trip to Tokyo
where we went to a sushi bar
in the basement of the Okura hotel
with its high ceilings and low couches,
like a Hitchcock set.
He ordered great trays of unagi sushi,
cooked eel on rice.
He ordered too many pieces, knowing
we wouldn't be able to finish them,
but that we didn't want
to feel they would run out.
It was the first time I'd felt,
with him,
so relaxed and content
over those trays of meat.
The excess, the permission and warmth
after the cold salads
meant a once inaccessible space
had opened.
He was less rigid with himself,
even human under the great ceilings
with the little chairs,
with the meat and me.
But the event was not self-sustaining.
We went back home to salads.
They satisfied me less
now that I knew the alternative.
- What eventually happened to NeXT?
- Apple purchased it.
- OK, when?
- I believe 1997.
When Apple bought NeXT,
Apple was pretty messed up.
It was pretty easy to see.
Apple Computer,
a pioneer in the personal computers
and software business,
has fallen on hard times.
Over a three-month period,
Apple's profits plunged
by more than $50 million.
With big losses in the last
quarter, with profit margins shrinking,
Apple seems destined for a takeover.
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple
with Steve Wozniak,
and on Friday,
Apple went to the well once again,
bringing Jobs back as a consultant,
writing one
of the most unlikely chapters ever
in the lore that is Silicon Valley.
Steve.
I joined the company
in February '97.
After a couple of days there,
I was in complete shock.
The company was close to bankruptcy,
and it was total chaos.
The NeXT acquisition
had just occurred,
and there were major changes
going on.
And Steve was involved at that point
in time, but on the margins.
I haven't been back here
in over ten years,
so, yeah, it's an interesting feeling.
It's a little strange,
but not too strange.
At some point in time,
the process was started
to look for a full-time CEO.
And at that point in time,
Steve got much more involved.
Now, he still wasn't the CEO.
I don't think he was 100% sure
the company was savable yet,
and so I think he was
hedging his bets a little bit.
He had to make a decision whether he
really wanted to take on that role
because being CEO of Apple
is an all-consuming role,
and I'm not sure Steve thought
that that's something
that he wanted to do for what
turned out to be the rest of his life.
I took the title of Interim CEO
and agreed to come back for 90 days
to help recruit a full-time CEO.
How did that recruitment effort go?
I failed.
You know, the real hero
of that early part of the story
is Fred Anderson.
Fred restructured the company
financially
and bought us the time to build
the foundation for today's Apple.
And then Fred even had an impact
on the product strategy
because when Steve came back,
the first major project we
started was a network computer.
That was kind of the rage at the time,
but it wasn't a consumer product at all.
Fred kept going,
"You know, wait a minute,
we got to have a consumer product."
"You guys have to focus
on a low-end Mac
because that's what's going to
turn the company around."
So, the executive team and Steve
decided that we would switch
from doing the network computer
and make that the iMac.
There you go, right here.
Can you see it?
She comes in colors everywhere
In the world of computers,
it's kill or be killed.
And the original whiz kid was thought
to be dying an early death.
We went for colors that really expressed
the spirit of the machine.
And that is... you know,
it's powerful, but fun.
And the first thing
I thought I'd do is give you an update.
We've managed to go from losing
a billion dollars the year before
to actually making over $200 million
during the first three quarters.
Boy, what a difference a year makes.
Guess what? Mac is back.
She comes in colors everywhere
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
He was the kind of person that
could convince himself of things
that weren't necessarily true.
He could go to people
and ask them to do something
that they thought was impossible.
Steve did create
reality distortion around him.
You know, if he told you
the sky was green, for a while,
you'd kind of go, "Yeah, OK.
Yeah, the sky's green."
To me... marketing is about values.
This is a very complicated world.
It's a very noisy world.
And we're not going to get a chance
to get people to remember much
about us. No company is.
And so, we have to be really clear
on what we want them to know
about us.
Our customers want to know
who is Apple
and what is it that we stand for.
What we have is something
that I am...
...I am very moved by.
Here's to the crazy ones.
Jobs was so moved
by the ad he'd commissioned
that he produced a version where
he did the voiceover himself.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones
who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules, and they
have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing
you can't do is ignore them
because they change things.
While some may see them
as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough
to think they can change the world...
...are the ones who do.
It honors those people
who have changed the world.
Some of them are living,
some of them are not.
But the ones that aren't, you know
that if they ever used a computer,
it would have been a Mac.
The theme of the campaign is
"Think different."
Think different.
In one brilliant, ungrammatical phrase,
Jobs told a story of rebellion,
the triumph of the iconoclastic genius.
With "Think different," was Jobs
trying to frame his own story?
More than a CEO,
he positioned himself as an oracle,
a man who could tell the future
of technology.
You know, a lot of times,
great products are sort of convergence
of the right set of technologies.
And Steve was brilliant
at getting to a fork in the road
and choosing the right fork.
We got a chance to play
with a variety of music players,
and they sucked.
So, we decided, Steve said,
you know, "Go build a music player."
So, I assembled a small team to take
a look at what it would take to do it,
and the conclusion was the technology
really wasn't ready yet.
Then in February of 2001,
the Toshiba guys brought out
the 1.8-inch hard drive.
So, as soon as I saw that I go,
"That's what we need
to build the iPod."
So, I went to Steve, and I go,
"OK, I know how to do it now."
"I need $10 million."
And Steve goes, "OK,
I'll write you a $10 million check."
I went to Fred to make sure
the check wouldn't bounce,
and Fred said, "Yeah, you know, go."
And so I started ramping the team up,
and, you know, we delivered
the iPod later that year.
One, two, three, four
Tell me that you love me more
Sleepless long nights
That is what my youth was for
Oh, oh, oh
You're changing your heart
Oh, oh, oh
You know who you are
One, two, three, four
Tell me that you love me more
Sleepless long nights
That is what my youth was for
Oh, teenage hopes
Jobs's genius
was how he sold the iPod.
It wasn't a machine for you.
It was you.
People sometimes forget
that they're very unique
and that they have very unique
feelings and perspectives.
You know,
the whole computer industry
wants to forget about the humanist side
and just focus on the technology,
but we think there's
a whole other side to the coin,
which is what do you do
with these things?
Can we do more than just spreadsheets
and word processors?
Can we help you express yourself
in richer ways?
Apple at the core, its core value,
is that we believe
that people with passion
can change the world for the better.
That's what we believe.
Steve talks a lot
about the values of the company.
And said that Apple was a company
that was designed
to make the world a better place.
Was that a heartfelt thing for Steve?
I believe it was
a heartfelt thing for Steve.
I think that he did want to make
the world a better place.
I think that he felt
by delivering great products
that were easy to use and beautiful,
that it would
make people's lives better.
Is that enough?
Is making and selling products,
even if they're good,
even if they're the best, enough
to make the world a better place?
Apple's a business.
And we've somehow attached
this emotion to a business,
which is just there to make money
for its shareholders, right?
That's all it is. Nothing more.
You know, creating that association
was probably one of Steve's
greatest accomplishments.
- It's queued up to play.
- Awesome.
I remember at this point, when the music
plays in the beginning,
there's just this energy, right?
You have on the one side
this huge bank of photographers,
and I remember
looking at all these guys
with their cameras trained on Steve,
thinking,
"You guys have no idea
what's about to happen."
And to be fair, neither did we.
Thank you for coming.
We're going to make some history
together today.
Any time you see an Apple event,
know that there's a team of people
in the audience who are just sick.
We are calling it "iPhone."
Today... Today,
Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
And so, rather than talk about this
some more, let me show it to you.
So, if you're giving a demo,
and you deviate off the script,
well, lots of bad things
can go wrong.
When Steve comes up with,
"Here's what I want to show,"
everything is dissected.
The message that he's trying to say
is then dissected
into very specific actions.
And let me go ahead and get
that picture within picture up.
I'm going to go ahead and just push
the "sleep wake" button.
There we go, right there.
And to unlock the phone, I just take
my finger and slide it across.
All right, you want to see that again?
So, he's got, you know,
several discrete parts of the demo.
We had a flask of Scotch with us,
and after every little part,
the person who was responsible for
that portion, you know, took a hit.
I want to make a call to Jony Ive.
I can just push here,
and I see Jony Ive's contacts
with all his information.
The Jony Ive call, oh, my God.
There's all sorts of ways that
this could have gone sideways.
- Hey, Jony, how you doing?
- I'm good. How you doing?
Well, it's been two-and-a-half years,
and I can't tell you how thrilled I am
to make the first public phone call
with iPhone.
He goes to the music.
Let's go into Dylan here.
Let's play Like a Rolling Stone.
He gets the web browser up there.
I want to show you Safari
running on a mobile device.
So, let's go to the web.
Boom.
Unbelievable.
And then at the end,
he has that moment
where he swizzles it all together.
At the end, where he orders thousands
of lattes from some, you know,
poor woman at a Starbucks
down the road.
Good morning. This is Starbucks
and how can I help you?
Yes, I'd liked to order
4,000 lattes to go, please.
No, just kidding.
Wrong number. Thank you. Bye-bye.
OK.
As soon as the demo was over,
we left.
And we just turned San Francisco
into a... It was a shit show.
That was a night to remember.
Man, you just had this release
of years of anxiety.
And then we got up tomorrow,
the next day, and did it all over again.
And we had to finish the product
at this point.
And that was tough,
especially with a raging hangover,
but it was a lot of fun.
The biggest thing he made was
the iPhone, definitely.
He made the iPhone,
which shocked the world
with its touch screen and stuff.
So, what are we down to?
13 minutes and...
Whoo-hoo!
- It's go time!
- Oh, yeah.
- Oh, yeah. Swipe to unlock.
- Sweet!
All my life
Is changing every day
There she is.
In every possible way
iPhone's been shipping
for exactly 200 days today.
And I'm extraordinarily pleased
to report
that we have sold
four million iPhones to date.
Never quite as it seems
And then I open up and see
The person falling here is me
Today we're introducing
the iPhone 3G.
In a little over two years,
we have sold 30 million iPhones.
And with a swipe,
you have changed your life.
Yes!
- How may I help you?
- iPhone 4. Where is the iPhone 4?
Oh, I'm very sorry,
but we are currently sold out.
However, we did finally get
some more HTC Evos in.
What? What is that?
Is it an iPhone?
No, it is that 4G phone on Sprint.
If it's not an iPhone,
why would I want it?
Well, it's similar to an iPhone,
but has a bigger screen.
I don't care.
The internet speeds
are around three times faster.
- I don't care.
- It fucking prints money.
- I don't care.
- It can grant up to three wishes.
Even if one of those wishes
is for an iPhone.
- I don't care about any of that.
- OK, fine.
Then what the hell entices you
about the iPhone 4,
if you don't mind me asking?
It is an iPhone.
I remember the first set of
people I interviewed about the iPhone.
I've been interviewing people
about their computers
for, you know, decades.
I've never seen this kind of connection
before with an object.
In the beginning,
the impulse was to sit you down
and to show you everything
on their iPhone.
As time's gone on,
there's been less of that
and more of what I call
the "alone together phenomenon."
It has turned out to be
an isolating technology.
Did you ever see
that Wim Wenders film,
"Until the End of the World"?
Yes, I love that.
People fall in love with their dreams,
and they walk around
with hoods over their head
and screens in front of them,
fascinated by their dreams.
By the time I came to rescue
Claire, the only thing she cared about
was having fresh batteries
for her video monitor.
It's a little bit like that.
It's a dream machine,
and you become fascinated
by the world that you can find
on these screens.
And the face of that technology
was Steve Jobs.
What would you say about
the responsibilities of power
once you've achieved
a certain level of success?
Power? What is that?
Your daddy, he's an outlaw
He found a loophole
where if you lease a car,
you have a six-month grace period
to put license plates on.
And so he leased the same car
every six months,
to avoid putting license plates
at all.
I think he told people
that it's because he didn't
want people to identify him.
Well, there's nothing more identifiable
than a silver Mercedes
with no license plate.
I mean, it screams "Steve Jobs"
in the Valley.
Riding to work with Steve Jobs.
Riding to work
with the good ol' Stevie.
Oh, look at that,
he's in the carpool lane.
And it does give you a glimpse
of how he thought he was above the law.
He oversees his kingdom
Where no stranger does intrude
His voice
It trembles as he calls out
For another plate of food
One more cup of coffee for the road
Jobs also made it a habit
to park his plateless Mercedes Benz
in handicap parking spots
around the Apple campus.
It even became something
of a pastime in the Valley,
to take a picture next to Steve's car.
One more cup of coffee before I go
To the valley below
He was a hero in the Valley
because he made buckets of money,
but unlike Bill Gates,
Jobs told people that giving away money
was a waste of time.
Under Jobs, Apple terminated
its philanthropic programs.
Jobs kept acting
as if Apple was a start-up,
but by 2010, it was one of the most
valuable companies in the world.
Among the rich and famous,
Jobs was a compelling character.
A counter-culture businessman.
But what were his values as a citizen?
Was he interested in power
to change the world
or the right to have power
without responsibility?
There was an experience
where actually a couple of people
were fighting over you,
were they not?
- Oh, man. I went to Palm.
- Then a bunch of people went to Palm.
Yeah. Yeah.
- Was Steve pissed off?
- Oh, man. Yeah.
I gave my resignation.
It went up the chain, like you do.
And just sure as hell,
like 20 minutes later,
I get a call from Steve's admin,
"Steve wants to see you."
He sits down. He just kind of sits
there, and he looks at me.
And I start to kind of launch
into my little spiel that I had planned,
and he says, "You know
you fucked up Bluetooth, right?"
I just stopped. I'm like...
And then we go through
this half-hour mind fuck.
It becomes very "Godfather" - esque.
You know, "You're part of my family,
and Apple's my family,
and you don't want to leave my family."
And at the end, he says,
"If you choose to leave my family,
should you decide to take so much
as one member of my family away from me,
I will personally take you down."
To keep his family together,
Jobs was willing to let Apple bend
or even break the law.
In 2011, a class-action lawsuit
filed by more than
64,000 Silicon Valley workers
revealed that Jobs, along with
the CEOs of Google, Intel and Adobe
had colluded not to recruit
each other's employees.
If you're working there at Apple,
or wherever you're working,
you've got another company
that you might move to
and take your expertise with you
and earn more money at that company.
They won't accept your rsum.
They won't return your phone calls.
Right. Because they won't
let them poach each other.
- Correct.
- That's not a legitimate situation.
You know what some of
the strongest evidence was?
E-mails of the late, great Steve Jobs.
- Really?
- Tons of them, yes.
Less than a month after
Google co-founder Sergey Brin
received this threat from Jobs,
Google circulated a "do not cold
call" list that included Apple.
Two years later, Google tried again,
and Jobs e-mailed Google CEO
Eric Schmidt
to remind him of their
gentlemen's agreement.
Schmidt placated Jobs by assuring him
that the culprit would be fired
within the hour.
When Jobs learned
that the woman had been canned,
he showed his pleasure
in two efficient keystrokes.
Someone's going to come out
of the door. Do we want a shot of that?
Are you taking a picture
of the inside?
We're taking a picture
of the Apple logo on the door.
OK, we cannot have people
taking pictures.
Tonight, a Wall Street scandal
has reached deep into
an iconic American company,
the Apple Corporation.
It all centers on an alleged scheme
to under-report Apple's expenses
by $40 million,
including $20 million
that went straight to the company's
celebrity CEO Steve Jobs,
in the form of what are known
as backdated options.
I first met Steve Jobs shortly after
I became editor of Fortune magazine.
And I said, "Listen, we'd love to have
a good relationship with Apple
and do stories about you."
And he said, "Look,
this is how it's going to work."
"You know,
you want to do a story about us,
you call us up, propose it,
you know, we'll think about it."
"We'll basically
come up with the ideas with you,
or come up with the ideas,
we'll call you,
we'll figure out who the writer is going
to be on your staff to do the story."
And I said, "Well, you know, Steve,
that's not really how we do things."
And he goes, "That's how
you do things with Apple."
So I say to myself,
"Why don't we do a story
about the stock options?"
"Because no one's
really figured it out."
So, I decided to put one of our top
investigative reporters on the story,
Peter Elkind.
Steve Jobs had a very talented group
of key lieutenants around him.
And he wanted give his people stock
option grants that were so big,
that they wouldn't even think about
going somewhere else
because the upside was so enormous.
The key thing is if the stock goes up,
which we always hope it does,
then the golden handcuffs are
dramatically increased,
which is what I was hoping
would happen.
To make those option deals
even sweeter,
companies would allow executives
to buy stock on dates in the past
when the price was low
so executives could make
millions in the blink of an eye.
This was called "backdating."
And it seemed like
the perfect solution,
except for one thing.
If not properly reported,
backdating is illegal.
200 US public companies
are under investigation
over charges of backdated stock options
for their senior executives.
Backdating was a dicey game,
and it landed several executives
in jail for fraud,
but it became a frequent practice
at Apple under Jobs.
Apple eventually conducted
an internal investigation
and found thousands of cases
where stock options had been
handled inappropriately.
None of that had taken place
according to the company's own report
before Steve Jobs had returned there.
A key advisor on many of
the troubled backdating schemes
was a powerful Silicon Valley attorney,
Larry Sonsini.
Larry Sonsini had kind of
spread this dark art
in the world of Silicon Valley.
He's the guy who whispered to the CEOs
of all the top tech companies,
"Here's how you can do this."
He was certainly very close
to Steve Jobs.
Sonsini had known Jobs
since Apple went public in 1980
and had been a board member at Pixar
when it created a vast program
of brazenly backdated options
for top executives.
Yet despite Jobs's long history
with backdating,
Apple's own investigation,
led by Al Gore,
absolved Jobs of any wrongdoing.
Their conclusion was that
Steve Jobs didn't appreciate
the accounting implications
of the issue.
I know you're not an accountant,
but do you have an understanding
as to what generally accepted
accounting principles are?
Not really.
Jobs's accounting naivet
would be challenged by
his own CFO, Fred Anderson.
A hero during Apple's comeback,
Anderson was one exec who
took the fall for backdating.
As Apple's chief financial officer,
Mr Anderson,
you had overall responsibility
to ensure that the company
complied with all financial
reporting requirements, true?
On advice of council,
I decline to answer based
on my Fifth Amendment rights.
When the SEC investigated,
Apple effectively
threw Anderson under the bus.
He was forced to resign
from Apple's board
and to pay $3.6 million in penalties.
But in a very unusual statement,
Anderson's lawyer made it clear
that Fred had relied on statements
by Jobs that turned out to be false
and that Anderson had explained
the dangers of backdating to Jobs.
Now, this contradicted exactly what
Jobs and the company had maintained
which was that Steve Jobs didn't
appreciate why this was a problem.
I think the notion
that Steve Jobs knew nothing
and Fred Anderson and Nancy Heinen
were entirely responsible
is ridiculous.
The company has confirmed
that Jobs himself
was awarded backdated options
that carried a false date
in October 2001.
According to Apple's own report
to the SEC,
The award was "improperly recorded
as occurring at a special board meeting
when in fact such a board meeting
did not occur."
A fictitious board meeting
that awarded Jobs 7.5 million options.
Just what was going on?
At first, all fingers pointed
to another member
of the Apple comeback team,
General Counsel Nancy Heinen,
who had certified the minutes
of the phony board meeting.
Like Anderson,
Heinen would settle with the SEC
without admitting or denying guilt.
But her silence raised questions.
Would she have just decided on her own
to fake a board meeting
in order to enrich Steve Jobs?
Who wanted this done?
As we've seen in the discussions
of the past hour,
I spent a lot of time trying
to take care of people at Apple
and to, you know,
surprise and delight them
with what a career at Apple
could mean to them and their families.
And I felt that the board wasn't
really doing the same with me.
- Right.
- So I was...
...hurt, I suppose would be
the most accurate word.
I'd been working, you know,
I don't know,
four years, five years of my life,
and not seeing my family
very much and stuff.
And I just felt like
there's nobody looking out
for me here, you know?
Right. OK.
So, I wanted them to do something,
and so we talked about it.
There's no question that
the directives came from him.
Yet, when the SEC investigated,
it was as if he was immune.
I'd wished they'd have come to me
and said,
"Steve, we've got this new grant
for you,"
without me having to suggest anything
or be involved in anything
or negotiate anything.
That would have been much better
from the company's point of view
because it would have made me
feel better at that time.
According to one analyst,
if Jobs had gone to jail
for backdating,
the company's value would have
dropped by $22 billion.
But Jobs was Apple's indispensable man,
and Apple, Silicon Valley's
indispensable company.
A cornerstone
of the entire American economy.
But just how American was Apple?
Do you swear that the testimony
you're about to give will be...
When the US Senate
questioned Jobs's successor,
Tim Cook,
about the company's tax practices,
many of the subcommittee members
took a moment to state,
for the record, just how tough
they were willing to be.
I love Apple, and I'm very proud
of Apple as an American company.
Apple is an American success story.
Its products are justifiably well-known
and used throughout the world.
Just like millions around the world,
I carry an iPhone in my pocket.
What may not be so well-known
is that Apple also has a highly
developed tax-avoidance system,
a system through which it has
amassed more than $100 billion
in off-shore cash in a tax haven.
Apple found its tax haven
in the green fields of Ireland
where Jobs and his team set up
holding companies in the early 1980s.
The scheme is known as
a "Double Irish".
Holly Hill industrial estate
can scarcely be compared
to California's Silicon Valley.
There is the feeling that Apple of Cork
may become something of a Silicon Hill.
Today, Apple holds more than
$137 billion of its profits overseas.
Much of it in two small Irish
companies, one with no employees.
While the actual cash is held
and invested by New York banks,
the paper profits are steered
through an office park in Reno, Nevada,
and then back to the Emerald Isle
where it's taxed at rates less than 1%.
Senator, we're proud
that all of our R&D,
or the vast majority of it,
is in the United States.
I know, but the profits that
result from it are sitting in Ireland
in corporations that you control
that don't pay taxes.
Part of the mythology
of these new companies
was that they in some way reflected
something about America.
Both Google and Apple
have played on the idea
of political virtue as part
of selling their company.
So then to find out they weren't about
political virtue is distressing.
Steve Jobs said he wanted
to change the world, but into what?
Companies all over the world
make choices on how to treat workers,
what to give back
and where to put their money.
What were Steve's choices?
In meditation, he found simplicity.
He loved the idea of "Be Here Now."
But where was "here?"
Ladies and gentlemen,
we have just landed
at Beijing International Airport.
I thought it was important
to cover China
because Apple has
all of its products made there.
I mean,
they design their own products,
but the manufacturing is done in China,
and so it's caught up in another
country's industrial revolution.
And a lot of that is
out of Apple's control.
Four workers died
and 77 were wounded
in explosions
at two Apple supplier factories
caused by careless safety procedures.
The solvents used to sparkle
Apple's touch screens
were powerful but dangerous,
causing nerve damage
that led to weakness
and loss of touch in workers.
They complained about low wages
and pressure to meet Apple's deadlines.
In the Chinese factories
of many tech companies,
copper, chromium
and other heavy metals
saturate the run-off that flows
into local waterways.
Sometimes chemical levels
are so high
that sewage treatment plants
can't adequately clean the water
for it ever to be used again.
In 2010, Chinese activist Ma Jun
contacted all the tech manufacturers
to discuss the issue
and even wrote to Jobs personally.
All the companies ultimately responded
except one. Apple.
It wasn't until Jobs left the company
that Apple even agreed
to speak to Ma Jun.
Foxconn is Apple's top supplier,
so it all goes downhill from there
in terms of the standards,
in terms of everything.
These young people
come from the countryside
under unimaginably poor conditions,
looking for a better life.
Sun Danyong, nicknamed Yong,
came to Foxconn
from a small mountain village.
Placed in the product
communications department,
he was responsible for the security
of iPhone prototypes
bound for Apple's headquarters
in Silicon Valley.
In 2009, an iPhone 4 prototype
went missing on Yong's watch.
Sun Danyong was
the first factory worker
who came under the spotlight.
What makes his story incredibly vivid
is that in today's day and age,
there's CCTV cameras recording
where his movements were.
He had a conversation with his friends
on the Chinese Twitter site,
and you could really track
what had happened.
Yong searched
high and low for the prototype
before reporting it missing
to Foxconn security.
That evening, officials took him
into an interrogation room
where he was assaulted
and was told police would arrive
the next morning to question him.
Yong was finally permitted
to leave the factory at 10:41pm.
He wandered to an internet cafe
where he chatted online
with his friends.
He logged off
around 1:30 in the morning.
Soon after, security cameras
spotted him in an elevator
in his apartment complex.
He got out on the 12th floor
and texted his girlfriend.
At 3:33am, security cameras recorded
Sun Danyong jumping to his death.
Over a period of two years or so,
there were 18 suicides.
Foxconn set up these nets
to catch people who fall off.
People were jumping
off of the buildings,
so they were going to
prevent people from dying
by having safety nets to catch them.
You know, they've had,
if you count the attempted suicides,
13 so far this year.
And while that is still...
They have 400,000 people at this place.
So, 13 out of 400,000
is 26 per year so far.
For 400,000 people or, you know,
let's say seven per 100,000 people,
that's still under the US suicide rate
of 11 per 100,000 people,
but it's really troubling.
Right. It's in one place, too.
Well, you measure it
by number of people.
You measure it by numbers of people.
So, we're all over this.
And it's... It's very troubling.
So, we're over there trying
to understand what's happening,
and more importantly,
trying to understand how we can help.
Apple isn't the only company
to manufacture in China,
but it is different in one way.
Its enormous profit margin.
The profit on every iPhone 4
was over $300.
Yet Apple paid its Chinese workforce
less than $12 per phone.
If Jobs had really "thought different,"
shouldn't he have cared more
about the people
who touched the iPhones
before they appeared in
the hands of Apple's customers?
When I was writing
critical stories about Apple,
the mail would be 80% hate mail.
Even the most reasoned,
judicious criticism
about labor practices in China,
for crying out loud, it didn't matter.
People didn't want to hear it.
They loved this company.
They loved its products.
They loved the status symbol
of having these things in their hand
and looking at it all the time,
and it just felt cool,
and they'd stood in line for two days
to buy one,
and they didn't want to hear it.
I was one of those people
who had to have an iPhone.
I didn't want
to hear about other products,
and I believed against all reason
that owning an iPhone made me
part of something better.
And when it was in my pocket,
for every idle moment,
my hand was drawn to it,
like Frodo's hand to the ring.
The real magic of it
is that these myths
are surrounding a company
that makes phones.
A phone is not a mythical device.
Um...
And it sort of makes you wonder
less about Apple than about us.
The myth-making
around technology in general
allows the technologist to do things
that would be viewed as heinous
if they were done
by other kinds of companies.
This is a story that's amazing.
It's got theft, it's got buying
stolen property, it's got extortion.
I'm sure there's sex
in there somewhere, you know?
Really?
So somebody should make
a movie out of this.
If you were to make a movie
about it,
the first scene would be set in
a beer garden in Silicon Valley.
As he swilled a few steins of Pilsner,
Apple's Gray Powell was testing out
a new iPhone prototype.
But when Powell staggered
out of the bar, he forgot one thing.
The iPhone.
It was found on a bar stool
by a college student named Brian Hogan.
And this e-mail
comes into our tip box,
and there was this guy claiming
that he had this new iPhone prototype.
Getting inside Apple's security fort,
and look at something
that is under wrap.
But back then, when Steve Jobs was
at the helm and in his full power,
it was impossible
to get anything from them.
It was incredibly exciting.
At that point, Apple didn't have
a whole lot of leaks.
And then I go to Nick and I say,
"We think it's the real thing,
and they want their money."
And Nick said, "Anything you want."
For us, there's no question
as to whether we write the story or not.
That's what was so disturbing,
I think, to Steve Jobs,
was that he'd been used to having
a much more controlled
relationship with the press.
Our plan was to take pictures of it,
write about it,
and then return it back to Apple.
Hey, I'm Jason Chen.
This is the new iPhone.
Here are some of the new features.
In the beginning, it was OK.
Only nerds looking at it, I guess.
And then the story
started to pick up.
You know, it was the biggest
scoop in tech in history.
"Hi, this is Steve Jobs.
I want my phone back."
And it was
in a really charming voice.
And it's same way you'd ask for,
you know, a hat you'd lent a friend.
I'd met him a couple of times before.
It was his voice, unmistakably.
He said, "You know, I'm not mad at you."
"It's someone we worked with
who lost it."
"But you've had your fun,
and we need this phone back
before it gets into the wrong hands."
And at that point, I was thinking,
"Isn't it already in the wrong hands?"
Nick at that moment said,
"Ask for a letter."
"Ask for an official letter
asking for it."
"We need the actual confirmation
that this is the real thing."
The next call,
he said he didn't want to claim it.
He really changed his tone
at that point,
because it would affect
the sales of the current model,
which is kind of disappointing,
you know?
You hear all these stories about
this guy not caring about money.
And he goes,
"This is some serious shit."
"If I have to serve you papers,
I'm coming for something,
and it's going to mean someone in your
organization is going to go to jail."
For a reporter who's got a chip
on his shoulder against corporations,
that's like,
"Martyr me. Please, martyr me."
"I'll go to jail for an iPhone.
Like, really."
He called back later and he said,
"OK, we'll get you the letter,"
and he was just resigned and cold.
So, they sent us the letter,
and they sent a lawyer from Apple
to Jason's house to pick up the phone.
It was a very cold exchange.
He said, "I believe you have
something of mine," or something.
And I handed it to him, and he said,
"Thank you very much," and he left.
Was that the end of it,
as far as Apple was concerned?
No, of course not.
Then all the nightmares started.
The cops had to bash in the guy's door?
Don't they know there's an app for that?
Anyone who'd worked
with Jobs before
would know of other instances
where he'd been a bully.
But this was probably
the most public evidence of bullying.
My wife and I went out for dinner.
We came back home,
and we noticed the garage door
was slightly opened.
You know, and I was wondering,
"What's going on?"
And I opened it all the way,
and I noticed there were people inside.
And I thought, you know,
"Holy crap, I'm being robbed."
And then I looked closer
and realized it was cops.
The cops seized boxes
of Chen's personal property
including four computers,
two cellphones
and a box of his business cards.
For the Gizmodo movie, this raised
questions of plot and motivation.
Why break down Chen's door
after he returned the iPhone?
They showed me the warrant
to search the premises and said,
"We're part of the REACT team."
After they searched the house,
obviously I went and Googled it.
The officers
who raided Chen's apartment
were part of a little-known criminal
task force called REACT,
composed of local, state
and federal officials
on the lookout for corporate espionage
in Silicon Valley.
My initial response was,
"This is cool. It's Apple."
Chris Feasel was the deputy DA
advising REACT on the case.
After the raid on Chen's apartment,
Feasel was received at Apple
by Jobs himself.
He was very, very nice,
very high-energy.
We had a back-and-forth about
what he wanted to see happen
versus what some of the realities were
about doing a prosecution.
He was very supportive about whatever
choices that we made on the case.
Where do people
come down on this?
- Where do you come down on it?
- Well, I can just tell you what...
There is an ongoing investigation
by the DA, and I'm not current on it.
He was very involved in it
and very interested in it
and wanted to be kept abreast
about what was going on
in the investigation.
Jobs had every reason to
expect that he would be kept informed
because REACT wasn't
a purely government agency.
It had a steering committee
composed of many of the major
companies in the Valley.
In a town so completely dominated
by the tech industry,
had law enforcement become the muscle
for the largest corporations
in the world?
He was very, very adamant
and very passionate about his creation.
And the only analogy I can think of is
if somebody stole your baby,
you would be very upset about it.
That's how Mr Jobs felt.
Somebody had taken his baby.
In spite of pressure from Apple,
the DA decided
not to pursue the charges against Chen
because he hadn't received
stolen property.
He was a journalist doing a story.
When this whole thing
with Gizmodo happened,
I got a lot of advice
from people that said,
"You shouldn't go after a journalist
because they bought stolen property,
and they tried to extort you.
You should let it slide."
"Apple's a big company now.
You don't want the PR."
"You should let it slide."
And I thought deeply about this,
and I ended up concluding
that the worst thing
that could possibly happen
as we get big and we get
a little more influence in the world,
is if we change our core values
and start letting it slide.
I can't do that. I'd rather quit.
What values
was Jobs talking about?
When Apple was taking on IBM,
it was David versus Goliath.
But when Apple became Goliath,
to whom was Jobs giving the finger?
The sad thing is that how many
months did he have left after that?
This was a guy who knew,
who knew at the time,
he was dying, and he dedicated,
what, ten minutes of his life
to talk about these guys
who found a phone in a bar
and then published a story about it?
Isn't that a little bit strange?
My third story is about death.
About a year ago,
I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,
and it clearly showed
a tumor on my pancreas.
I didn't even know
what a pancreas was.
The doctors told me
this was almost certainly
a type of cancer that is incurable,
and that I should expect to live
no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home
and get my affairs in order,
which is doctor's code
for "prepare to die."
It means to try and tell your kids
everything you thought you'd have
the next ten years to tell them
in just a few months.
I lived with that diagnosis all day.
Later that evening, I had a biopsy.
I was sedated, but my wife,
who was there,
told me that when they viewed the cells
under a microscope,
the doctors started crying
because it turned out to be
a very rare form of pancreatic cancer
that is curable with surgery.
I had the surgery
and, thankfully, I'm fine now.
Steve Jobs talked about
his cancer very emotionally
at the Stanford graduation ceremony
in 2005.
And he very clearly told the story
to make it sound as though
he had been diagnosed
and moved immediately to surgery,
and been cured.
That simply wasn't true.
What I found out, over a period
of months of reporting,
was that Steve Jobs actually
had been diagnosed with cancer
nine months earlier, and that
for a period of nine months,
he had refused to have the surgery
that every medical expert said
was necessary to increase
his prospects for survival.
Instead of having the surgery,
he had sought
alternative medicine approaches
to try to cure himself of cancer.
Entrepreneurs have
an almost pathological need
to control their own fate.
They'll take any suffering
if they can just be in charge
of their destiny
and not have it
in somebody else's hands.
Apple's stock has been
volatile on rumors about Jobs's health.
The company's stock
was halted for a time,
then took a big hit when it re-opened
in after-hours trading.
Apple's share prices have dropped
with every pound
that Jobs has lost in recent months.
Apple really landed
into a dicey situation
when Steve decided
to issue a letter saying,
"Well, you know,
nothing's wrong with me."
"It's just a minor problem,"
And it wasn't a minor problem.
Steve Jobs made a point
of withholding from the world
that he faced this illness.
That's something
investors want to know,
because when you
bought Apple stock then,
you were buying into Steve Jobs.
He was obligated
to tell shareholders right away
about this serious illness.
You do personally
want to give Steve the privacy,
but Steve put the spotlight on him,
and you can't turn that off
just because it's inconvenient.
After the story came out,
I saw Steve.
He started talking about Apple,
and he said,
"You know, Apple is really a company
that doesn't have any divisions."
"We don't have all this bureaucracy."
And I said, "Steve, that would be
a great story for Fortune."
And he looked at me, and he said,
"No."
"I don't think we can do that story
with you. Not now."
"Not now."
And then he said,
and the whole room went quiet,
and he said, "you know, we used to..."
"We used to really be friends
with Fortune,
I used to be friends with Fortune,
but not anymore. Not anymore."
And then I remember these tears
came out of his eyes,
and one was on his glasses,
and then one, I remember it rolling
off his cheek and hitting his shirt,
and he was just crying,
and the whole room was silent.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs today
made his first public appearance
since getting a new liver
five months ago.
For the first time,
the 54-year-old CEO
publicly acknowledged
the liver transplant this spring
that saved his life.
Well, I now have the liver
of a mid-20s person.
I'd like to take a moment and thank
everybody in the Apple community
for the heartfelt support I got, too.
It really meant a lot.
And I'd also like
to especially thank Tim Cook
and the entire executive team of Apple.
They really rose to the occasion
and ran the company very ably
in that difficult period.
So, thank you, guys.
Let's give them a round of applause.
He loved what he did.
I do have an e-mail from him
saying that.
He said, you know,
"Both of us were fortunate," he said,
in that we loved what we did
and we were able to do it
for a long time.
And he said,
"What else could you ask for?"
We're maybe a little more experienced,
certainly more beat-up,
but the core values are the same.
I don't see why you have to change
if you get big.
Straightforward to me.
Apple was big.
By this time, one of the biggest
corporations in the world.
But each time we saw Jobs,
he seemed smaller.
As his devices got stronger,
Jobs got weaker.
It's so much more intimate
than a laptop,
and it's so much more capable
than a smartphone
with this gorgeous, large display.
I think that a lot of the grief
at Jobs's death
was a fear that we had been
very comfortable
for the last decade in his hands.
It's phenomenal to hold the internet
in your hand.
That he was going to keep
doing these amazing things.
Now he's gone, and there's no indication
that anyone's going to replace him.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
- It always helps...
- We love you!
Thank you.
It always helps,
and I appreciate it very much.
He resigned officially
in August. Two weeks earlier,
Apple had become the highest-valued
corporation on Earth.
And thank you for coming so much.
We've got a great week
planned for you.
This is a field
where one does not write a principia
which holds up for 200 years
or paints a painting that'll be
looked at for centuries,
or builds a church
that will be admired
and looked at in astonishment
for centuries.
No, this is a field
where one does one's work,
and in ten years, it's obsolete
and really will not be useable
within ten or 20 years.
I mean, you can't go back
and use an Apple I,
cos there's no software for it.
In another ten years or so,
you won't be able to use an Apple II.
You won't even be able to fire it up
and see what it was like.
It's sort of like
sediment of rocks.
You're building up a mountain,
and you get to contribute
your little layer of sedimentary rock
to make the mountain that much higher.
But no one on the surface will,
unless they have x-ray vision,
will see your sediment.
In Japan, there's
an idea called "mono no aware,"
meaning "the deep awareness of things".
It celebrates the melancholy
of the passing of life
and sees more beauty in the fallen leaf
than the one on the branch.
Maybe that's what Japan held for Jobs.
The sadness of the soul
as expressed in the beauty of things.
In the end, I was left
with the same question
with which I began this journey.
"Why did so many strangers weep
for Steve Jobs?"
It's too simple to say it was
because he gave us products we love
without asking why we love them
the way we do.
It's too simple even to conclude
that we love them
because they connect us
to a wider world
and the people in our lives
that are far away,
because these machines isolate us, too.
Perhaps the contradictory nature
of our experience with these gadgets
mirrors the contradictions
in Jobs himself.
He was an artist who sought perfection,
but could never find peace.
He had the focus of a monk,
but none of the empathy.
He offered us freedom,
but only within a closed garden,
to which he held the key.
To reconcile these contradictions,
I think we have to look to the other
half of our relationship with Jobs.
To ourselves.
As Jobs wanted it,
the screen of my iPhone is dark.
A Zen landscape of the unseen.
If I stare into it, I see
an obscure reflection of myself,
but this impression
lasts just a fleeting moment
before I press the home key
and the screen lights up.
But perhaps I should spend a moment
regarding that reflection,
asking myself what, in buying
and using this product, I am doing?
What is the full nature
of my transaction
with the maker of this magical
and intimate machine?
Once I wanted to be the greatest
Greatest, greatest, greatest
No wind or waterfall could stall me
And then came the rush of the flood
Stars at night turned deep to dust
Melt me down into big, black armor
Leave no trace of grace
Just in your honor
Lower me down to culprit south
Make 'em wash a space in town
For the lead and the dregs of my bed
I've been sleeping
Lower me down
Pin me in, secure the grounds
For the later parade