Steve Jobs

After mulling over the options, Jobs realized what he wanted. Not humor, nor a celebrity, nor a demo. “It’s got to make a statement,” he said. “It needs to be a manifesto. This is big.” He had announced that the iPad would change the world, and he wanted a campaign that reinforced that declaration. Other companies would come out with copycat tablets in a year or so, he said, and he wanted people to remember that the iPad was the real thing. “We need ads that stand up and declare what we have done.”

He abruptly got out of his chair, looking a bit weak but smiling. “I’ve got to go have a massage now,” he said. “Get to work.”

So Vincent and Milner, along with the copywriter Eric Grunbaum, began crafting what they dubbed “The Manifesto.” It would be fast-paced, with vibrant pictures and a thumping beat, and it would proclaim that the iPad was revolutionary. The music they chose was Karen O’s pounding refrain from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’” Gold Lion.” As the iPad was shown doing magical things, a strong voice declared, “iPad is thin. iPad is beautiful. . . . It’s crazy powerful. It’s magical. . . . It’s video, photos. More books than you could read in a lifetime. It’s already a revolution, and it’s only just begun.”

Once the Manifesto ads had run their course, the team again tried something softer, shot as day-in-the-life documentaries by the young filmmaker Jessica Sanders. Jobs liked them—for a little while. Then he turned against them for the same reason he had reacted against the original Pottery Barn–style ads. “Dammit,” he shouted, “they look like a Visa commercial, typical ad agency stuff.”

He had been asking for ads that were different and new, but eventually he realized he did not want to stray from what he considered the Apple voice. For him, that voice had a distinctive set of qualities: simple, declarative, clean. “We went down that lifestyle path, and it seemed to be growing on Steve, and suddenly he said, ‘I hate that stuff, it’s not Apple,’” recalled Lee Clow. “He told us to get back to the Apple voice. It’s a very simple, honest voice.” And so they went back to a clean white background, with just a close-up showing off all the things that “iPad is . . .” and could do.

Apps

The iPad commercials were not about the device, but about what you could do with it. Indeed its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of delightful activities. There were thousands—and soon hundreds of thousands—of apps that you could download for free or for a few dollars. You could sling angry birds with the swipe of your finger, track your stocks, watch movies, read books and magazines, catch up on the news, play games, and waste glorious amounts of time. Once again the integration of the hardware, software, and store made it easy. But the apps also allowed the platform to be sort of open, in a very controlled way, to outside developers who wanted to create software and content for it—open, that is, like a carefully curated and gated community garden.

The apps phenomenon began with the iPhone. When it first came out in early 2007, there were no apps you could buy from outside developers, and Jobs initially resisted allowing them. He didn’t want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity.

Board member Art Levinson was among those pushing to allow iPhone apps. “I called him a half dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” he recalled. If Apple didn’t allow them, indeed encourage them, another smartphone maker would, giving itself a competitive advantage. Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller agreed. “I couldn’t imagine that we would create something as powerful as the iPhone and not empower developers to make lots of apps,” he recalled. “I knew customers would love them.” From the outside, the venture capitalist John Doerr argued that permitting apps would spawn a profusion of new entrepreneurs who would create new services.

Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all of the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers. He wanted focus. “So he didn’t want to talk about it,” said Schiller. But as soon as the iPhone was launched, he was willing to hear the debate. “Every time the conversation happened, Steve seemed a little more open,” said Levinson. There were freewheeling discussions at four board meetings.

Jobs soon figured out that there was a way to have the best of both worlds. He would permit outsiders to write apps, but they would have to meet strict standards, be tested and approved by Apple, and be sold only through the iTunes Store. It was a way to reap the advantage of empowering thousands of software developers while retaining enough control to protect the integrity of the iPhone and the simplicity of the customer experience. “It was an absolutely magical solution that hit the sweet spot,” said Levinson. “It gave us the benefits of openness while retaining end-to-end control.”

The App Store for the iPhone opened on iTunes in July 2008; the billionth download came nine months later. By the time the iPad went on sale in April 2010, there were 185,000 available iPhone apps. Most could also be used on the iPad, although they didn’t take advantage of the bigger screen size. But in less than five months, developers had written twenty-five thousand new apps that were specifically configured for the iPad. By July 2011 there were 500,000 apps for both devices, and there had been more than fifteen billion downloads of them.

The App Store created a new industry overnight. In dorm rooms and garages and at major media companies, entrepreneurs invented new apps. John Doerr’s venture capital firm created an iFund of $200 million to offer equity financing for the best ideas. Magazines and newspapers that had been giving away their content for free saw one last chance to put the genie of that dubious business model back into the bottle. Innovative publishers created new magazines, books, and learning materials just for the iPad. For example, the high-end publishing house Callaway, which had produced books ranging from Madonna’s Sex to Miss Spider’s Tea Party, decided to “burn the boats” and give up print altogether to focus on publishing books as interactive apps. By June 2011 Apple had paid out $2.5 billion to app developers.

The iPad and other app-based digital devices heralded a fundamental shift in the digital world. Back in the 1980s, going online usually meant dialing into a service like AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy that charged fees for access to a carefully curated walled garden filled with content plus some exit gates that allowed braver users access to the Internet at large. The second phase, beginning in the early 1990s, was the advent of browsers that allowed everyone to freely surf the Internet using the hypertext transfer protocols of the World Wide Web, which linked billions of sites. Search engines arose so that people could easily find the websites they wanted. The release of the iPad portended a new model. Apps resembled the walled gardens of old. The creators could charge fees and offer more functions to the users who downloaded them. But the rise of apps also meant that the openness and linked nature of the web were sacrificed. Apps were not as easily linked or searchable. Because the iPad allowed the use of both apps and web browsing, it was not at war with the web model. But it did offer an alternative, for both the consumers and the creators of content.