Steve Jobs on Innovation

The commercial that introduced the Macintosh was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and Lee Clow at the Chiat/Day agency, produced by Fairbanks Films in New York, and directed by Ridley Scott, on a budget reported between $370,000 and $900,000. A reference to George Orwell's 1949 novel of a dystopia ruled by a televised Big Brother, the sixty-second spot opens on rows of bald, grey-clad workers marching through a blue-gray tunnel of telescreens, intercut with a full-color athlete in red shorts and a white tank top bearing a Picasso-style drawing of the Macintosh, sprinting from four black-uniformed pursuers and hurling a brass-headed sledgehammer through the screen of Big Brother's rant. English athlete Anya Major played the heroine, and David Graham supplied Big Brother's voice. The ad closes by promising that the viewer will see why 1984 will not be like the novel's 1984 — Apple casting itself explicitly as the antidote to conformity.

Toy Story, the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was directed by John Lasseter from a story by Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Joe Ranft, released November 22, 1995, on a $30 million budget against a $401.2 million worldwide gross. The road there ran through Jobs's gamble: Lasseter had been fired from Disney after pitching The Brave Little Toaster as a computer-animated film, joined Lucasfilm's graphics group, and became a founding member of Pixar in 1986, creating short films to demonstrate the Image Computer. His 1988 short Tin Toy won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short, the first computer-generated film to do so, and drew Disney back. When Disney's Eisner and Katzenberg tried to rehire Lasseter, he chose to stay, telling co-founder Edwin Catmull he could go to Disney and be a director, or stay and make history. Katzenberg then structured the production deal that became Pixar's first feature.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, remembered as the two Steves, first met in mid-1971 when mutual friend Bill Fernandez introduced twenty-one-year-old Wozniak to sixteen-year-old Jobs. Their first partnership was the blue-box business: Wozniak built the tone devices after reading an Esquire article, once using one to call the Vatican while posing as Henry Kissinger, and Jobs managed to sell some two hundred of them at $150 apiece, splitting the profit evenly. By 1975 both had left their universities and were attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings, where machines like the Altair 8800 inspired Wozniak to build a microprocessor into his video terminal design. Priced-out of the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 chips, he waited until MOS Technology released its $20 6502 in 1976, wrote a BASIC for it, and adapted his paper design; by March 1, 1976, the machine that became the Apple I was working, and Jobs immediately saw its commercial potential where Wozniak had intended to share schematics for free.

The iPod's development history credits Tony Fadell, who had shopped a music-player concept elsewhere before finding support at Apple and was hired in 2001 to run the project, code-named P-68. Jon Rubinstein had already secured the crucial component, discovering Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive during a supplier meeting in Japan and purchasing rights to it for Apple, where rivals' players relied on 2.5-inch drives; he had also progressed the screen and battery. With most Apple engineers busy on the iMac line, Fadell hired veterans from General Magic and Philips, partnered with PortalPlayer on the software, and had a working prototype within eight months. The physical design drew on Dieter Rams's 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio, the wheel interface on Bang & Olufsen's BeoCom telephone. Jobs set an exacting standard for the device's physical design, contracting Pixo to build the user interface under his direct supervision. Copywriter Vinnie Chieco named it, inspired by the pod-bay line from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The iPhone began in 2000 with Jobs's objection to the stylus. Envisioning an Apple touchscreen product a user could operate directly with fingers, he decided the device required a triple-layered capacitive multi-touch screen, then a very new and advanced technology, which would eliminate both the physical keyboard and the mouse, and he recruited a group of Apple engineers to investigate the idea as a side project. When Jobs reviewed the prototype and its interface, he saw the potential to turn the concept into a mobile phone competing in the emerging touchscreen market. The full effort, called Project Purple 2, began in 2005; Apple had quietly registered the iphone.org domain in December 1999. The development history records an eight-month secret collaboration with Cingular Wireless, estimated at $150 million over thirty months, in which Apple rejected the design-by-committee approach that had produced the failed Motorola ROKR E1 and instead was given liberty to develop the hardware and software entirely in-house.

The Apple Store chain was founded by Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson, with its first two locations opened on May 19, 2001. The move followed years of failed store-within-a-store concepts: seeing the need for better retail presentation of Apple's products, Jobs began an effort in 1997 to revamp the retail program and build a direct relationship with consumers, hiring Johnson from Target in 2000 to build the division. Media speculation at launch held that Apple would fail at retail; instead the stores bypassed the sales of competing nearby outlets and within three years reached $1 billion in annual sales, the fastest retailer in history to that mark. The stores sell, service, and repair Apple products, with the Genius Bar providing technical advice and same-day repairs as the signature service innovation. Apple has received design patents and architectural awards for the chain, notably its glass staircases and cubes, and rival consumer-electronics retailers lost traffic and margins to the format's perceived quality of service.

In 1979 Xerox granted Apple access to its Palo Alto Research Center in exchange for the right to buy $1 million of Apple stock ahead of the IPO. Jobs and Apple colleagues visited PARC twice, in November and December 1979, and he was greatly impressed by the graphical user interface of the Xerox Alto, deciding on the spot to implement what he had seen in the Apple Lisa, the business machine under development since that July. Jobs led the Lisa effort from early 1980 until excessive technical demands disrupted it and he was removed from the project that September, which pushed him toward the Macintosh. Released in January 1983 at $9,995, the Lisa offered genuine innovation, windows and icons and a mouse, but its price and software isolation drove buyers away: more than $150 million went into development while only about 10,000 units sold, teaching Apple the cost lesson the Macintosh then had to solve.

NeXT unveiled its first computer at what observers treated as Jobs's comeback moment, a lavish invitation-only gala at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on October 12, 1988, described by attendees as a multimedia extravaganza. NeXT workstations first shipped in 1990 at $9,999 each, technologically advanced machines aimed at the education sector but largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive, a rerun of the Lisa's pricing problem. The workstation was known for technical strengths, chiefly its object-oriented software development system, and Jobs marketed it to financial, scientific, and academic buyers by highlighting experimental technologies like the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. The second-generation NeXTcube arrived in 1990, touted by Jobs as the first interpersonal computer that would replace the personal computer, its NeXTMail system sharing voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time.

NeXT's modest sales understated its influence. Using a NeXT computer at CERN in Switzerland in 1990, the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, creating on that machine the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, while the NeXT environment also served as the development platform for the first web server, CERN httpd, and later for the video games Doom and Quake. The object-oriented NeXTSTEP development environment made rapid prototyping of exactly such applications practical, which is why the machine kept appearing at the origin points of 1990s software. Jobs's marketing of the NeXTcube as an interpersonal computer built for revolutionizing human communications and groupwork, a claim that looked like puffery when the hardware failed to sell, reads in retrospect as a description of what developers actually did with the platform — they built the internet's first generation on it.

While shutting down Apple's licensing of its operating system to clone manufacturers, one of Jobs's first moves as acting chief executive was to develop the iMac, which bought the company time to restructure. Introduced in 1998, the original iMac integrated the display and processor in a streamlined translucent plastic body and became a sales smash, moving roughly one million units each year. The machine reintroduced Apple to media and public and announced the company's new emphasis on design and aesthetics — its maker boasted that the back of their computer looked better than the front of anyone else's. It also made hard technical choices that rippled across the industry, dropping the floppy disk drive and standardizing on USB, which popularized USB among peripheral makers who began shipping translucent-plastic accessories to match. The iMac was the first proof, ahead of the iPod and iPhone, that Jobs's design-led product philosophy could be a mass-market financial engine rather than a niche taste.

Jobs took over the Macintosh project in 1981 from Jef Raskin, who had conceived it, exploiting Wozniak's leave after a plane crash to seize control of the program. On January 22, 1984, Apple aired the Ridley Scott-directed commercial titled 1984 during the Super Bowl, and two days later an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh at the Flint Auditorium shareholders meeting to what engineer Andy Hertzfeld described as pandemonium, the first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface and mouse, priced at $2,495 and bundled with MacWrite and MacPaint. Initial acclaim and strong early sales collapsed in the second half of 1984 on low performance and a thin software library. The machine's redemption came in 1985 through desktop publishing: paired with the LaserWriter, the first laser printer with vector PostScript graphics, and Aldus PageMaker, the Macintosh launched an entire industry and kept Apple the second-largest personal computer maker into the 1990s.

Jobs's design aesthetic drew on the Zen Buddhism he studied in India and under Kobun Chino Otogawa, and on his stated ambition, echoing Edwin Land, to stand where humanities meet sciences. Wozniak insisted Jobs never coded and did no original engineering; early employee Daniel Kottke likewise cast Wozniak as the innovator and Jobs as the marketing mind. Yet Jobs is named as inventor or co-inventor on 346 United States patents and applications spanning devices, touch interfaces, keyboards, adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, and packaging, with roughly 200 shared with design chief Jonathan Ive, and his contributions concentrated on the look and feel of products rather than utility-patent engineering. Even hospitalized and terminally ill he sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed and redrew an oxygen monitor for simplicity. Since his death he has been granted 141 further patents, bringing his total beyond 450.