Steve Jobs

Most of the debate over the iPad centered on the issue of whether its closed end-to-end integration was brilliant or doomed. Google was starting to play a role similar to the one Microsoft had played in the 1980s, offering a mobile platform, Android, that was open and could be used by all hardware makers. Fortune staged a debate on this issue in its pages. “There’s no excuse to be closed,” wrote Michael Copeland. But his colleague Jon Fortt rebutted, “Closed systems get a bad rap, but they work beautifully and users benefit. Probably no one in tech has proved this more convincingly than Steve Jobs. By bundling hardware, software, and services, and controlling them tightly, Apple is consistently able to get the jump on its rivals and roll out polished products.” They agreed that the iPad would be the clearest test of this question since the original Macintosh. “Apple has taken its control-freak rep to a whole new level with the A4 chip that powers the thing,” wrote Fortt. “Cupertino now has absolute say over the silicon, device, operating system, App Store, and payment system.”

Jobs went to the Apple store in Palo Alto shortly before noon on April 5, the day the iPad went on sale. Daniel Kottke—his acid-dropping soul mate from Reed and the early days at Apple, who no longer harbored a grudge for not getting founders’ stock options—made a point of being there. “It had been fifteen years, and I wanted to see him again,” Kottke recounted. “I grabbed him and told him I was going to use the iPad for my song lyrics. He was in a great mood and we had a nice chat after all these years.” Powell and their youngest child, Eve, watched from a corner of the store.

Wozniak, who had once been a proponent of making hardware and software as open as possible, continued to revise that opinion. As he often did, he stayed up all night with the enthusiasts waiting in line for the store to open. This time he was at San Jose’s Valley Fair Mall, riding a Segway. A reporter asked him about the closed nature of Apple’s ecosystem. “Apple gets you into their playpen and keeps you there, but there are some advantages to that,” he replied. “I like open systems, but I’m a hacker. But most people want things that are easy to use. Steve’s genius is that he knows how to make things simple, and that sometimes requires controlling everything.”

The question “What’s on your iPad?” replaced “What’s on your iPod?” Even President Obama’s staffers, who embraced the iPad as a mark of their tech hipness, played the game. Economic Advisor Larry Summers had the Bloomberg financial information app, Scrabble, and The Federalist Papers. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had a slew of newspapers, Communications Advisor Bill Burton had Vanity Fair and one entire season of the television series Lost, and Political Director David Axelrod had Major League Baseball and NPR.

Jobs was stirred by a story, which he forwarded to me, by Michael Noer on Forbes.com. Noer was reading a science fiction novel on his iPad while staying at a dairy farm in a rural area north of Bogotá, Colombia, when a poor six-year-old boy who cleaned the stables came up to him. Curious, Noer handed him the device. With no instruction, and never having seen a computer before, the boy started using it intuitively. He began swiping the screen, launching apps, playing a pinball game. “Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction,” Noer wrote. “If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.”

In less than a month Apple sold one million iPads. That was twice as fast as it took the iPhone to reach that mark. By March 2011, nine months after its release, fifteen million had been sold. By some measures it became the most successful consumer product launch in history.

Advertising

Jobs was not happy with the original ads for the iPad. As usual, he threw himself into the marketing, working with James Vincent and Duncan Milner at the ad agency (now called TBWA/Media Arts Lab), with Lee Clow advising from a semiretired perch. The commercial they first produced was a gentle scene of a guy in faded jeans and sweatshirt reclining in a chair, looking at email, a photo album, the New York Times, books, and video on an iPad propped on his lap. There were no words, just the background beat of “There Goes My Love” by the Blue Van. “After he approved it, Steve decided he hated it,” Vincent recalled. “He thought it looked like a Pottery Barn commercial.” Jobs later told me:

It had been easy to explain what the iPod was—a thousand songs in your pocket—which allowed us to move quickly to the iconic silhouette ads. But it was hard to explain what an iPad was. We didn’t want to show it as a computer, and yet we didn’t want to make it so soft that it looked like a cute TV. The first set of ads showed we didn’t know what we were doing. They had a cashmere and Hush Puppies feel to them.

James Vincent had not taken a break in months. So when the iPad finally went on sale and the ads started airing, he drove with his family to the Coachella Music Festival in Palm Springs, which featured some of his favorite bands, including Muse, Faith No More, and Devo. Soon after he arrived, Jobs called. “Your commercials suck,” he said. “The iPad is revolutionizing the world, and we need something big. You’ve given me small shit.”

“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.”

Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.

When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Oh, great, let me write that on my brief for my creative people: I’ll know it when I see it.”

Vincent got so frustrated that he slammed his fist into the wall of the house he was renting and put a large dent in it. When he finally went outside to his family, sitting by the pool, they looked at him nervously. “Are you okay?” his wife finally asked.

It took Vincent and his team two weeks to come up with an array of new options, and he asked to present them at Jobs’s house rather than the office, hoping that it would be a more relaxed environment. Laying storyboards on the coffee table, he and Milner offered twelve approaches. One was inspirational and stirring. Another tried humor, with Michael Cera, the comic actor, wandering through a fake house making funny comments about the way people could use iPads. Others featured the iPad with celebrities, or set starkly on a white background, or starring in a little sitcom, or in a straightforward product demonstration.