Steve Jobs

He began his demo of the iPad 2 by showing off the new cover. “This time, the case and the product were designed together,” he explained. Then he moved on to address a criticism that had been rankling him because it had some merit: The original iPad had been better at consuming content than at creating it. So Apple had adapted its two best creative applications for the Macintosh, GarageBand and iMovie, and made powerful versions available for the iPad. Jobs showed how easy it was to compose and orchestrate a song, or put music and special effects into your home videos, and post or share such creations using the new iPad.

Once again he ended his presentation with the slide showing the intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. And this time he gave one of the clearest expressions of his credo, that true creativity and simplicity come from integrating the whole widget—hardware and software, and for that matter content and covers and salesclerks—rather than allowing things to be open and fragmented, as happened in the world of Windows PCs and was now happening with Android devices:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing. Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. Folks are rushing into this tablet market, and they’re looking at it as the next PC, in which the hardware and the software are done by different companies. Our experience, and every bone in our body, says that is not the right approach. These are post-PC devices that need to be even more intuitive and easier to use than a PC, and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to be intertwined in an even more seamless way than they are on a PC. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in our organization, to build these kinds of products.

It was an architecture that was bred not just into the organization he had built, but into his own soul.

After the launch event, Jobs was energized. He came to the Four Seasons hotel to join me, his wife, and Reed, plus Reed’s two Stanford pals, for lunch. For a change he was eating, though still with some pickiness. He ordered fresh-squeezed juice, which he sent back three times, declaring that each new offering was from a bottle, and a pasta primavera, which he shoved away as inedible after one taste. But then he ate half of my crab Louie salad and ordered a full one for himself, followed by a bowl of ice cream. The indulgent hotel was even able to produce a glass of juice that finally met his standards.

At his house the following day he was still on a high. He was planning to fly to Kona Village the next day, alone, and I asked to see what he had put on his iPad 2 for the trip. There were three movies: Chinatown, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Toy Story 3. More revealingly, there was just one book that he had downloaded: The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since.

Midway through the morning he decided he wanted to eat something. He was still too weak to drive, so I drove him to a café in a shopping mall. It was closed, but the owner was used to Jobs knocking on the door at off-hours, and he happily let us in. “He’s taken on a mission to try to fatten me up,” Jobs joked. His doctors had pushed him to eat eggs as a source of high-quality protein, and he ordered an omelet. “Living with a disease like this, and all the pain, constantly reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to your brain if you’re not careful,” he said. “You don’t make plans more than a year out, and that’s bad. You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.”

An example of this magical thinking was his plan to build a luxurious yacht. Before his liver transplant, he and his family used to rent a boat for vacations, traveling to Mexico, the South Pacific, or the Mediterranean. On many of these cruises, Jobs got bored or began to hate the design of the boat, so they would cut the trip short and fly to Kona Village. But sometimes the cruise worked well. “The best vacation I’ve ever been on was when we went down the coast of Italy, then to Athens—which is a pit, but the Parthenon is mind-blowing—and then to Ephesus in Turkey, where they have these ancient public lavatories in marble with a place in the middle for musicians to serenade.” When they got to Istanbul, he hired a history professor to give his family a tour. At the end they went to a Turkish bath, where the professor’s lecture gave Jobs an insight about the globalization of youth:

I had a real revelation. We were all in robes, and they made some Turkish coffee for us. The professor explained how the coffee was made very different from anywhere else, and I realized, “So fucking what?” Which kids even in Turkey give a shit about Turkish coffee? All day I had looked at young people in Istanbul. They were all drinking what every other kid in the world drinks, and they were wearing clothes that look like they were bought at the Gap, and they are all using cell phones. They were like kids everywhere else. It hit me that, for young people, this whole world is the same now. When we’re making products, there is no such thing as a Turkish phone, or a music player that young people in Turkey would want that’s different from one young people elsewhere would want. We’re just one world now.

After the joy of that cruise, Jobs had amused himself by beginning to design, and then repeatedly redesigning, a boat he said he wanted to build someday. When he got sick again in 2009, he almost canceled the project. “I didn’t think I would be alive when it got done,” he recalled. “But that made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to do, and maybe I have a shot at being alive when it’s done. If I stop work on the boat and then I make it alive for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I’ve kept going.”

After our omelets at the café, we went back to his house and he showed me all of the models and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and minimalist. The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements. As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high. He had gotten the chief engineer of the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural support.

By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders Feadship, but Jobs was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat,” he said. “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”