When he came onstage at the San Francisco Convention Center, he was wearing a VONROSEN black cashmere sweater on top of his usual Issey Miyake black turtleneck, and he had thermal underwear beneath his blue jeans. But he looked more gaunt than ever. The crowd gave him a prolonged standing ovation—“That always helps, and I appreciate it,” he said—but within minutes Apple’s stock dropped more than $4, to $340. He was making a heroic effort, but he looked weak.
He handed the stage over to Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall to demo the new operating systems for Macs and mobile devices, then came back on to show off iCloud himself. “About ten years ago, we had one of our most important insights,” he said. “The PC was going to become the hub for your digital life. Your videos, your photos, your music. But it has broken down in the last few years. Why?” He riffed about how hard it was to get all of your content synced to each of your devices. If you have a song you’ve downloaded on your iPad, a picture you’ve taken on your iPhone, and a video you’ve stored on your computer, you can end up feeling like an old-fashioned switchboard operator as you plug USB cables into and out of things to get the content shared. “Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he said to great laughter. “We have a solution. It’s our next big insight. We are going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device, and we are going to move the digital hub into the cloud.”
Jobs was well aware that this “big insight” was in fact not really new. Indeed he joked about Apple’s previous attempt: “You may think, Why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe.” The audience laughed nervously. “Let me just say it wasn’t our finest hour.” But as he demonstrated iCloud, it was clear that it would be better. Mail, contacts, and calendar entries synced instantly. So did apps, photos, books, and documents. Most impressively, Jobs and Eddy Cue had made deals with the music companies (unlike the folks at Google and Amazon). Apple would have eighteen million songs on its cloud servers. If you had any of these on any of your devices or computers—whether you had bought it legally or pirated it—Apple would let you access a high-quality version of it on all of your devices without having to go through the time and effort to upload it to the cloud. “It all just works,” he said.
That simple concept—that everything would just work seamlessly—was, as always, Apple’s competitive advantage. Microsoft had been advertising “Cloud Power” for more than a year, and three years earlier its chief software architect, the legendary Ray Ozzie, had issued a rallying cry to the company: “Our aspiration is that individuals will only need to license their media once, and use any of their . . . devices to access and enjoy their media.” But Ozzie had quit Microsoft at the end of 2010, and the company’s cloud computing push was never manifested in consumer devices. Amazon and Google both offered cloud services in 2011, but neither company had the ability to integrate the hardware and software and content of a variety of devices. Apple controlled every link in the chain and designed them all to work together: the devices, computers, operating systems, and application software, along with the sale and storage of the content.
Of course, it worked seamlessly only if you were using an Apple device and stayed within Apple’s gated garden. That produced another benefit for Apple: customer stickiness. Once you began using iCloud, it would be difficult to switch to a Kindle or Android device. Your music and other content would not sync to them; in fact they might not even work. It was the culmination of three decades spent eschewing open systems. “We thought about whether we should do a music client for Android,” Jobs told me over breakfast the next morning. “We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy.”
A New Campus
When Jobs was thirteen, he had looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book, called him to score a part he needed for a frequency counter he was trying to build, and ended up getting a summer job at the instruments division of Hewlett-Packard. That same year HP bought some land in Cupertino to expand its calculator division. Wozniak went to work there, and it was on this site that he designed the Apple I and Apple II during his moonlighting hours.
When HP decided in 2010 to abandon its Cupertino campus, which was just about a mile east of Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters, Jobs quietly arranged to buy it and the adjoining property. He admired the way that Hewlett and Packard had built a lasting company, and he prided himself on having done the same at Apple. Now he wanted a showcase headquarters, something that no West Coast technology company had. He eventually accumulated 150 acres, much of which had been apricot orchards when he was a boy, and threw himself into what would become a legacy project that combined his passion for design with his passion for creating an enduring company. “I want to leave a signature campus that expresses the values of the company for generations,” he said.
He hired what he considered to be the best architectural firm in the world, that of Sir Norman Foster, which had done smartly engineered buildings such as the restored Reichstag in Berlin and 30 St. Mary Axe in London. Not surprisingly, Jobs got so involved in the planning, both the vision and the details, that it became almost impossible to settle on a final design. This was to be his lasting edifice, and he wanted to get it right. Foster’s firm assigned fifty architects to the team, and every three weeks throughout 2010 they showed Jobs revised models and options. Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives.
When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building was shaped like a huge winding racetrack made of three joined semicircles around a large central courtyard. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the interior had rows of office pods that allowed the sunlight to stream down the aisles. “It permits serendipitous and fluid meeting spaces,” he said, “and everybody gets to participate in the sunlight.”
The next time he showed me the plans, a month later, we were in Apple’s large conference room across from his office, where a model of the proposed building covered the table. He had made a major change. The pods would all be set back from the windows so that long corridors would be bathed in sun. These would also serve as the common spaces. There was a debate with some of the architects, who wanted to allow the windows to be opened. Jobs had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. “That would just allow people to screw things up,” he declared. On that, as on other details, he prevailed.