Steve Jobs

The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in their current design the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way. The whole device felt too masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled.

The new design ended up with just a thin stainless steel bezel that allowed the gorilla glass display to go right to the edge. Every part of the device seemed to defer to the screen. The new look was austere, yet also friendly. You could fondle it. It meant they had to redo the circuit boards, antenna, and processor placement inside, but Jobs ordered the change. “Other companies may have shipped,” said Fadell, “but we pressed the reset button and started over.”

One aspect of the design, which reflected not only Jobs’s perfectionism but also his desire to control, was that the device was tightly sealed. The case could not be opened, even to change the battery. As with the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs did not want people fiddling inside. In fact when Apple discovered in 2011 that third-party repair shops were opening up the iPhone 4, it replaced the tiny screws with a tamper-resistant Pentalobe screw that was impossible to open with a commercially available screwdriver. By not having a replaceable battery, it was possible to make the iPhone much thinner. For Jobs, thinner was always better. “He’s always believed that thin is beautiful,” said Tim Cook. “You can see that in all of the work. We have the thinnest notebook, the thinnest smartphone, and we made the iPad thin and then even thinner.”

The Launch

When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a special sneak preview. He called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and began with his typical superlative: “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” He wanted to give Time the exclusive, “but there’s nobody smart enough at Time to write it, so I’m going to give it to someone else.” Huey introduced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer (and novelist) at Time. In his piece Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made these features a lot more usable. “But that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. . . . When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.”

For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited back Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team, as he had done when he launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling product presentations, this may have been his best. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he began. He referred to two earlier examples: the original Macintosh, which “changed the whole computer industry,” and the first iPod, which “changed the entire music industry.” Then he carefully built up to the product he was about to launch: “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” He repeated the list for emphasis, then asked, “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”

When the iPhone went on sale five months later, at the end of June 2007, Jobs and his wife walked to the Apple store in Palo Alto to take in the excitement. Since he often did that on the day new products went on sale, there were some fans hanging out in anticipation, and they greeted him as they would have Moses if he had walked in to buy the Bible. Among the faithful were Hertzfeld and Atkinson. “Bill stayed in line all night,” Hertzfeld said. Jobs waved his arms and started laughing. “I sent him one,” he said. Hertzfeld replied, “He needs six.”

The iPhone was immediately dubbed “the Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s the most expensive phone in the world,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC interview. “And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” Once again Microsoft had underestimated Jobs’s product. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cell phone market.

“Steve understands desire,” said Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC pioneer who had envisioned a “Dynabook” tablet computer forty years earlier. Kay was good at making prophetic assessments, so Jobs asked him what he thought of the iPhone. “Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world,” Kay said. He did not know that the design of the iPhone had started with, and would someday lead to, ideas for a tablet computer that would fulfill—indeed exceed—his vision for the Dynabook.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

ROUND TWO

The Cancer Recurs

The Battles of 2008

By the beginning of 2008 it was clear to Jobs and his doctors that his cancer was spreading. When they had taken out his pancreatic tumors in 2004, he had the cancer genome partially sequenced. That helped his doctors determine which pathways were broken, and they were treating him with targeted therapies that they thought were most likely to work.

He was also being treated for pain, usually with morphine-based analgesics. One day in February 2008 when Powell’s close friend Kathryn Smith was staying with them in Palo Alto, she and Jobs took a walk. “He told me that when he feels really bad, he just concentrates on the pain, goes into the pain, and that seems to dissipate it,” she recalled. That wasn’t exactly true, however. When Jobs was in pain, he let everyone around him know it.

There was another health issue that became increasingly problematic, one that medical researchers didn’t focus on as rigorously as they did cancer or pain. He was having eating problems and losing weight. Partly this was because he had lost much of his pancreas, which produces the enzymes needed to digest protein and other nutrients. It was also because both the cancer and the morphine reduced his appetite. And then there was the psychological component, which the doctors barely knew how to address: Since his early teens, he had indulged his weird obsession with extremely restrictive diets and fasts.