It had been a long way until the day of the official introduction of the Macintosh on January 24th, 1984. Five years earlier, in spring 1979, Apple chairman Mike Markkula wondered whether his company should bring a 500 dollar computer to market. Markkula then charged Jef Raskin with the secret “Annie” project.

Raskin was a “philosophical guy who could be both playful and ponderous”, writes Walter Isaacson in his book “Steve Jobs”. Raskin had studied computer science, taught music and visual arts, conducted a chamber opera company, and organized guerrilla theater. His 1967 doctoral thesis at U.C. San Diego argued that computers should have graphical rather than text-based interfaces.

Jef Raskin

In fall 1979, Raskin wrote his article “Computers by the Millions“, in which he drafted his version of a computer for the masses. Markkula insisted on the report to be treated as a confidential internal report. The essay was not published until 1982 in the SIGPC Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 2.

Raskin had chosen a completely new approach, because until then, the “technically feasible” is what defined a computer’s design. The academic computer scientist, who had kept secret his diploma from the Apple founders at the time of his appointment (as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs approached academics extremely distrustfully), wanted to design a computer for the normal person in the street – which of course could not to be unattainable.

The expression of the “Person in the Street” formed by Raskin became a dictum at Apple – abbreviated as PITS. Raskin’s first draft envisioned a closed computer including monitor, keyboard and printer able to work without any external wires – and all that for 500 dollars. In return, the Macintosh should only be equipped with a tiny five inch display, a cheap CPU (6809) and a main memory calculated extremely tight at 64 kilobytes.

Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin

At that time, Steve Jobs had not taken particular interest in the Macintosh project – and due to some dim apprehension, Raskin tried everything to exclude the Apple co-founder. Yet in the summer of 1980, a serious conflict between Jobs and Apple’s president Mike Scott was brewing as Scott intended to edge Jobs out of the concrete development of the new Lisa. With his capricious and at times fairly aggressive management style, Jobs had snubbed many developers. In addition, Scott did not think him capable of a major management role and thus planned to assign him the less important role of a company spokesman and promoter in advance of Apple’s initial public offering on December 12th, 1980.

So Jobs left the Lisa project – and looked at Jef Raskin’s baby. The Apple co-founder liked the concept of a cheap machine for the mass market but he didn’t like Raskin’s design. “Jobs was enthralled by Raskin’s vision, but not by his willingness to make compromises to keep down the cost,” writes Isaacson. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told him instead to focus on building what he repeatedly called an “insanely great” product. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” Jobs told him. Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo. It spelled out everything you would want in the proposed computer: a high-resolution color display, a printer that worked without a ribbon and could produce graphics in color at a page per second, unlimited access to the ARPA net, and the capability to recognize speech and synthesize music, “even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon tabernacle choir, with variable reverberation.” The memo concluded, “Starting with the abilities desired is nonsense. We must start both with a price goal, and a set of abilities, and keep an eye on today’s and the immediate future’s technology.” In other words, Raskin had little patience for Jobs’s belief that you could distort reality if you had enough passion for your product.

Jobs wanted to switch to the more powerful Motorola 68000 CPU. Rasin demanded a cheaper processor, and lost again. He had to brood and recalculate the cost of the Mac. The disagreements were more than just technical or philosophical; they became clashes of personality. “I think that he likes people to jump when he says jump,” Raskin once said. “I felt that he was untrustworthy, and that he does not take kindly to being found wanting. He doesn’t seem to like people who see him without a halo.” Jobs was equally dismissive of Raskin. “Jef was really pompous,” he said Isaacson. “He didn’t know much about interfaces. So I decided to nab some of his people who were really good, like Atkinson, bring in some of my own, take the thing over and build a less expensive Lisa, not some piece of junk.”

Jobs asserted his control of the Macintosh group by canceling a brown-bag lunch seminar that Raskin was scheduled to give to the whole company in February 1981. Raskin happened to go by the room anyway and discovered that there were a hundred people there waiting to hear him; Jobs had not bothered to notify anyone else about his cancellation order. So Raskin went ahead and gave a talk, writes Isaacson.

That incident led Raskin to write a blistering memo to Mike Scott, who once again found himself in the difficult position of being a president trying to manage a company’s temperamental cofounder and major stockholder. It was titled “Working for/with Steve Jobs,” and in it Raskin asserted:

He is a dreadful manager. . . . I have always liked Steve, but I have found it impossible to work for him. . . . Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well-known as to be almost a running joke. . . . He acts without thinking and with bad judgment. . . . He does not give credit where due. . . . Very often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid, and tell you that it was a waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea is a good one he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own.

That afternoon Scott called in Jobs and Raskin for a showdown in front of Markkula. After a short dog fight Raskin was told to take a leave of absence. “They wanted to humor me and give me something to do, which was fine,” Jobs said Isaacson. “It was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was in control.”

It is somehow ironic that Jef Raskin was the person who convinced Steve Jobs to visit the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The scientist over there pioneered the concept of a graphical user interface (GUI). Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC’s prototype computers, such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Jef Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing. So he began urging Jobs and other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC. The rest of the story is well known. Jobs tried everything to improve the GUI he had seen at PARC for the new Apple Macintosh.

In 1982, Jef Raskin founded the company Information Appliance, Inc. in order to realize his original concept of the Macintosh project. The company brought the “SwyftCard” to market, which is a firmware card for the Apple II. The card featured a program package which was also offered on disk as SwyftWare. With the Swyft, Information Appliance later offered a laptop computer, which, however, experienced only moderate commercial success. Raskin licensed the Swyft design to Canon, which constructed the “Canon Cat” on its basis in 1987.

Jef Raskin with a design model of the Canon Cat

In his book “The Humane Interface”, Raskin later described his vision of a computer interface constructed for the human being and oriented to human needs – rather than to technology.

On February 26th, 2005, Jef Raskin died at the age of 61 years.

By Christoph Dernbach

Steve Jobs (March 2011)

Steve Jobs' highschool photo

Steve Jobs must already have been charismatic as a twelve year old school boy. Or was it just cockiness with which he would later take his business partners by surprise time and again? As an eighth grade student, he wanted to build a frequency counter for his school project and needed some parts. He contacted non other than Bill Hewlett, who was the legendary co-founder of computer group Hewlett-Packard (HP).

In the 60s, the Silicon-Valley pioneer’s contact information could still be found in the phone book. The lanky boy did not just coax the needed parts free of charge from the group boss. “He answered and chatted with me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters,” Jobs told book author Walter Isaacson for his biography.

Steve Jobs worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. obs worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. “My dad would drive me in the morning and pick me up in the evening.” He found himself at the right place at the right time. Still, Steve Jobs’ fate as the most successful entrepreneur of America was not handed to him at birth.

“He was a boy who had no money,” recalls his friend and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. “He had nothing except his intellect. But he brought us things that became a challenge for all of us.” Paul Otellini, CEO of chip giant Intel, said: “True genius is measured by the ability to touch every person on the planet. Steve did that, not just once, but many, many times over his amazing life.” In contrast to industry titans like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs came not from a wealthy home, but from a lower-class background.

Steve Jobs with his father Paul Jobs (1958)

His biological parents, the Syrian student Abdulfattah John Jandali and his American girlfriend Joanne Simpson, gave him up for adoption after his birth. In 1955, the still unmarried couple, both 23, was studying at the University of Wisconsin and found themselves unable to care for the child without a proper income. Actually, his parents insisted on giving him away to an academic family, which could guarantee that he could one day attend university. But the desired family got cold feet and cancelled the adoption in the last minute.

Finally, the child ended up in the house of Paul and Clara Jobs. Steve’s adoptive parents were simple people. His father worked as a car mechanic and his mother as an office employee. When Steve was five years old, his parents moved with him from San Francisco to Mountain View, in the middle of booming Silicon Valley. Author Walter Isaacson relates in his biography of Steve Jobs that in the new neighborhood Jobs told a girl that he was an adopted child. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand. We specifically picked you out.” This key scene described the tension between the terms “abandoned”, “chosen”, and “special” at a very early age for Steve Jobs.

Steve gets it

Who knows where Steve Jobs’ journey through life would have brought him if he had not met electronics enthusiast Steve Wozniak, who was four classes above him in school. Despite the age difference, the two Steves got along very well. “It seemed as if we had a lot in common,” recalled Woz later in his autobiography. “Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff worked on, but Steve got it right away. And I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.”

Steve Jobs (circled) at Homestead High School Electronics Club (1969)

Jobs, like Wozniak before him, attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, a solidly middle-class school in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. Homestead was progressive, with an innovative electronics program that shaped Wozniak’s life. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for some time. They met in 1971 when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced then 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. After hours, the two Steves would often meet at Hewlett-Packard lectures in Palo Alto.

As a teenager, Jobs and his older friend “Woz” cavorted in the “phone-phreaking” scene. Hackers such as “Captain Crunch” found out how one could manipulate the systems of telecommunications giant AT&T in order to make free calls with the help of a plastic whistle from a cornflakes package. Both Steves were electrified.

Wozniak and Jobs Blue Box (1972)

Woz constructed a crammed box from inexpensive electronic parts and a small speaker, which enabled them to produce tone sequences in a more precise and delicate way than with the toy whistle. “There used to be a way to fool the entire telephone system – they were thinking you were a telephone-computer,” recalled Steve Jobs later. “You could call anyone in the world for free. In matter of fact, you could call from a pay phone, go to White Plains, New York, take a satellite to Europe, take a cable to Turkey, come back to Los Angeles. You could go around the world – three, four times and call the pay phone next door. If you shouted into the phone, about 30 seconds later it came out the other end of the other phone.”

The manipulation of the telephone system was of course illegal. That did not stop Woz and Jobs from building and selling blue boxes within their circle of friends. “It was the magic of the fact, that two teenagers could build this box for a hundred dollars worth of parts and control hundred of billions of dollars of infrastructure in the entire telephone network of the whole world from Los Altos and Cupertino, California. That was magical,” said Jobs.

His friend “Woz” had even mor fun:

So we’re sitting in the payphone trying to make a blue box call. And the operator comes back on the line. And we’re all scared and we’d try it again. … And she comes back on the line; we’re all scared so we put in money. And then a cop car pulls up. And Steve was shaking, you know, and he got the blue box back into my pocket. I got it– he got it to me because the cop turned to look in the bushes for drugs or something, you know? So I put the box in my pocket. The cop pats me down and says, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s an electronic music synthesizer.” Wasn’t too musical. Second cop says, “What’s the orange button for?” “It’s for calibration,” says Steve.
— Steve Wozniak, lecture at Computer History Museum, 2002

With the “Blue Box” episode the business savvy of Steve Jobs began to sparkle for the first time. While Woz wanted to impress especially his geek pals, for his younger friend it was also about earning money and understanding that one can win big bets with small investment.

“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas, the power of understanding that you could build this box, you could control hundreds of millions dollars worth of telephone infrastructure around the world. This is a powerful thing,” Jobs told many years later to Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into production.

In 1972 Jobs wanted to study at Reed College in the neighboring state of Oregon, although it was clear that his parents could not afford the university fees. “All savings of my working-class parents went for my college fees,” recalled Steve Jobs in June 2005 during his legendary commencement address at Stanford University.” After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”

Search for the meaning of life

Jobs broke off his studies and made his way as a person making the best of things. Now and then he would get a hot meal at the local Hare Krishna temple. He sneaked into the calligraphy course, which was offered at Reed College. ” I learned about serif and I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.” This episode as well would later influence computer history:

Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

Steve Jobs was looking for the meaning of life. He experimented with mind-expanding drugs. At the time when he worked for Atari in 1975, he profited from a business trip to Europe to go to India on his own. At that time, Jobs was studying extensively the teachings of the Harvard professor Richard Alpert, who had converted to Hinduism and taught in India as Guru Ram Dass (“servant of God”). In India, however, Jobs found no enlightenment, but ended up with a scammer who was just playing the role of a guru. Disillusioned, he returned to California.

The Homebrew Computer Club newsletter

Meanwhile, his friend Steve Wozniak tried to impress a “strange, geeky group of people” who called themselves “Homebrew Computer Club.” “This was a group fascinated with technology and the things it could do. Most of these people were young, a few were old, we all looked like engineers; no on was actually good looking. Ha. Well, we’re talking about engineers, remember?”, Wozniak wrote in his book “iWoz”. Steve Wozniak developed a kit for the geeks from the club that would later be known as the Apple I. At that time, Steve Jobs was forging much bigger plans, as he had observed that very few people from Homebrew had the time or skills to build computers on their own. “Why don’t we build and then sell the printed circuit boards to them?”, he asked Woz. (iWoz, Page 172)

Homebrew Computer Club meeting (1978)

With a sense of humor, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer on “April Fools Day”, the 1st of April, 1976. For the necessary initial investment of $1,000 Wozniak sold his programmable HP 65 calculator for $500. “The guy who bought it only paid the half, though, and never paid the rest”, wrote Steve Woziak in his book “iWoz”. “I didn’t feel to bad because I knew HP’s next generation calculator, the HP 67, was coming out in a month and would cost me only $370 with the employee discount. And Steve sold his VW van for another few hundred dollars. He figured he could ride around on his bicycle if he had to. That was it. We were in business.”

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak using Apple 1 computer system, ca. 1976

The third founder, Ron Wayne, who was an adult with experience, was to provide a proper accounting. He received a 10 percent share of the company, while the two Steves had their shares of 45 percent each. But Wayne dropped out after a few weeks, because the family man was not comfortable with the unclear liability risk as he had much more to lose than the two Steves.

Later on, the millionaire Mike Markkula took over the role of the adult supervisor. He invested a quarter million dollars in the start-up to finance the production and marketing of the Apple II.

Steve and I get a lot of credit, but Mike Markkula was probably more responsible for our early success, and you never hear about him.

— Steve Wozniak, Failure Magazine, July 2000

Breakthrough with Apple II

Steve Wozniak was the hardware genius. The driving force of the marketing was Woz’s dynamic companion, Steve Jobs. He was fascinated by Woz’s technical skills, partly because he would never have been able to construct a computer like the Apple II himself. But he viewed his friend also with a critical eye: “Woz is very bright in some areas, but he’s almost like a savant, since he was so stunted when it came to dealing with people he didn’t know,” said Jobs and conceded in his biographer Isaacson’s account: “We were a good pair.” Wozniak was however impressed with the business sense of his friend: “I never wanted to deal with people and step on toes, but Steve could call up people he didn’t know and make them do things,” said Wozniak. “He could be rough on people he didn’t think were smart, but he never treated me rudely, even in later years when maybe I couldn’t answer a question as well as he wanted.”

Woz would have been happy to market the Apple II as a kit. But Jobs demanded a complete product in a smooth bright plastic body, similar to a Cuisinart food processor. Jobs also asked for an expensive switching power supply, which made a fan unnecessary, He bothered Wozinak by demanding that the lines on the board of the Apple II should run straight. The huge effort paid off: The Apple II developed by Woz was the first personal computer, which found a mass audience.

The sales success has been driven by VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software for a microcomputer. “From 1,000 units a month we went to 10,000 a month,” remembers Woz. “Good god, it happened so. Through 1978 and 1979, we just got more and more successful. In 1980, we were the first company to sell one million computers.” (iWoz, page 220)

A screenshot of Visicalc

On 12 December 1980, Apple Computer Inc. went public. With Apple going public, Steve Jobs became a multi-millionaire as the company was now valued at $1.8 billion. Forgotten were the difficult times in which Jobs had taken advantage of his friend Woz and denied him the fair share of the royalties for a programming job for Atari.

Jobs now had 7.5 million Apple shares worth 217 million dollars. Woz could also forget all economic problems as he received four million shares (116 million dollars). Markkula’s cut of seven million shares were worth $203 million. “I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five,” Jobs said in an interview in 1995. “It wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”

Steve Jobs celebrating Apple's IPO (1980)

Going public had bitter consequences as well for Steve Jobs. Unlike Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the co-founder of Apple was no longer the leading decision-maker in “his” company. On the one hand he had an enormous amount of money, but on the other hand he no longer held the majority of company shares. Now Apple was lead by a management defined by investors. At that time, the main character of the top management of Apple was the “angel investor” Mike Markkula, who took over the job of managing director from Mike Scott in the summer of 1981. However Markkula and Jobs agreed, that the new Apple management director should be a charismatic figure who was familiar with the methods of modern marketing in the field of consumer goods and could apply it to Apple. Jobs and Markkula’s search paid off. On the east coast of the United States they found someone at the management level of Coca-Cola’s rival PepsiCo.

Dynamic Duo

Apple's Dynamic Duo (1984)

“Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” With this famous sentence Steve Jobs convinced the Pepsi manager John Sculley in 1983 to enter the computer industry and move to California. But the “Dynamic Duo” did not last long. It quickly became obvious that the Apple co-founder Jobs and the new manager Sculley did not come to an agreement in key issues such as the marketing strategy for the Macintosh. It began in the time before Apple went public: In 1979, Markkula and Scott had hired the talented engineer Jef Raskin to construct a “people’s computer.”

The new model should reduce the company’s dependence on mega-seller Apple II. However the project progressed very slowly, partly because Steve Wozniak did not play an active role in its development anymore. After a plane crash with his Beechcraft Bonanza in February 1981, Woz had largely withdrawn from Apple. Therefore, it was Steve Jobs who at this stage provided strategic directions in Apple’s technology. He was neither an inventor, nor an engineer or programmer. But Jobs was able to estimate the implications of new technology concepts much better then anyone else.

The Enlightenment in Xerox PARC

Steve Jobs’ masterpiece in technology scouting took off during the event of Xerox PARC. As early as 1979 he had visited with a small team of Apple developers the legendary California research center in nearby Palo Alto. He had the chance to look into the future. “They showed me really three things,” Jobs said in 1995 in a TV interview. “But I was so blinded by the first one I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system…they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life, ” Jobs said in an TV interview in 1995.

At Xerox PARC Steve Jobs had seen the light. Now, he also wanted to build an Apple computer that was easy to operate. Apple had bought admission to the Xerox Research Center PARC through a stock deal that appeared to be very lucrative to the narrow-minded Xerox managers on the East Coast. Xerox was allowed to buy 100,000 shares of the Apple start-up company stock before the public offering for a million dollars. In the short term, this deal was worth it: By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares were already worth $17.6 million. But in the long term, Xerox lost the chance to become an industry giant like Microsoft or IBM because the work of their researchers in California had been ignored internally.

Larry Tesler, who was then a Xerox employee at the presentation of the GUI to the colorful Apple group, was fascinated by the visitors who looked like hippies, “After an hour looking at demos they understood our technology, and what it meant more than any Xerox executive understood after years of showing it to them.” Steve Jobs took a similar view: “Remember, it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they’d done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn’t know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea was there and they’d done it very well. Within ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.” He was right. Ten years later, when it dawned on the Xerox managers that they had served the intellectual property of their researchers at PARC to Apple on a silver plate for such a small sum of money, they went to court. In December 1989, Xerox sued Apple Computer and demanded $150 million in damages. The case never went to court as potential claims from Xerox were now time-barred. In 1983 Apple made the first attempt to introduce the graphical user interface to the mass market by launching the model Lisa. In ads the new computer was promoted with remarkable software such as “Maserati for your brain”. However, it never came to be a financial success. The price of $10,000 was far too high to convince the many prospective buyers to purchase the computer.

Pirates of Macintosh

Steve Jobs was quick to distance himself from the failure of the Apple Lisa, since in 1980 the then managing director Mike Scott denied him the management of the Lisa team. In an internal competition with the Lisa team, Jobs subsequently acquired the fledgling Macintosh project from Jef Raskin and bet $5,000 that he would bring the Mac to the market before Lisa. Initially, Jobs hounded Raskin out of the group. Then he positioned his team within Apple as rebel troop. They wanted to prove the Lisa team, which enjoyed the confidence of the management, that they could do it.

The pirate flog on building Bandley III

Above the building of the Mac developers “Bandley III”, a skull and crossbones flag fluttered. “It is better to be a pirate than to go to the Navy,” Jobs said to his developers. Apple investor Arthur Rock became really agitated by this action, “Flying that flag was really stupid. It was telling the rest of the company they were no good.” But Jobs loved it, and he made sure it waved proudly all the way through to the completion of the Mac project. “We were the renegades, and we wanted people to know it,” he recalled. (Isaacson, page 186)

Jobs had assembled a dream team of genius programmers and engineers, whom he urged like a cult leader with flattery and verbal attacks to continually new heights. But the ever-changing demands of Jobs delayed the Mac project, so that the Apple co-founder finally lost his bet against the Lisa team. It was not until the 24th of January 1984, that the Mac was finally ready.

At the public presentation of the new computer model, Jobs recited the song “The Times They Are A-Changin” by Bob Dylan:

Come writers and critics

Who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide

The chance won’t come again

And don’t speak too soon

For the wheel’s still in spin

And there’s no tellin’ who

That it’s namin’

For the loser now

Will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin’

At this performance, it played a minor role that the launch party of the Mac was officially a shareholder meeting. The 29-year-old entrepreneur was able to take the liberty of doing so. His concept of the enemy was IBM. The East Coast group wanted to conquer the personal computer market by launching the IBM-PC personal computer, which was first developed by companies such as Atari, Commodore, and of course Apple. The Apple co-founder compared IBM to “Big Brother” from George Orwell’s novel “1984”, who by all means wanted to retain his former dominance of the mainframe era in the initially fully underestimated age of the personal computer.

In their most famous television commercials of all time, director Ridley Scott evoked this vision of enslaved IBM users who would be released through the Mac. The Mac would make clear in the clip, why Big Brother IBM would not dominate the world; why “1984 would not be 1984″. Jobs was visibly proud of the achievements they made, and attributes this to his broadly talented employees. “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world,” Jobs said in a 1995 documentary on the U.S. television network PBS.

Difficult start for the Mac

With the Macintosh, Steve Jobs had set a new milestone in computer development. But Apple had to first overcome a long dry spell in order to make a commercial breakthrough. This was also due to the fact that the first Mac model was only equipped with 128 kilobytes of main memory which was far too little. At that time, Apple Fellow Alan Kay described the Mac as a “Honda with a one-gallon gas tank.”

Furthermore, applications such as Aldus Pagemaker or peripheral devices such as laser printers, which could use the advantages of Mac GUI in desktop publishing, did not exist yet.

“The original 128K Mac had too many problems to list,” wrote Jack Schofield from the Guardian 20 years later in an article about the 20th anniversary of the apple Macintosh. “It had too little software, you couldn’t expand it (no hard drive, no SCSI port, no ADB port, no expansion slots), it was horribly underpowered and absurdly overpriced. The way MacWrite and MacPaint worked together was brilliant, but producing anything more than a short essay was a huge struggle. Just copying a floppy was a nightmare.”

In the fall of 1984, Apple CEO John Sculley accused Jobs of ignoring Mac sales problems, which also had technical causes. Poor features of the first Mac model caused it to be slow. In addition, users had to constantly change between the system and program disks, because the Mac did not have a second floppy drive or hard disk. “I had given greater power than he had ever had and I created a monster,” Sculley later wrote in his book “Odyssey.” In April 1985 the conflict escalated.

In a two-day marathon meeting, Sculley demanded that Jobs should give up his position as Apple vice president and general manager of the Macintosh team. Sculley wanted Steve Jobs to become Apple’s new chairman and represent the company on the outside, without having influence on the core business. When Jobs got wind of Sculley’s plan to disempower him, he attempted to organize a coup in the Apple board. Sculley defended himself and told the board: “I said look, it’s Steve’s company, I was brought in here to help you know, if you want him to run it that’s fine with me but you know we’ve at least got to decide what we’re going to do and everyone has got to get behind it.” The majority of the board stood behind the former Pepsi manager and turned away from Steve Jobs.

Jobs loses the showdown

In the end of May 1985, Job lost his responsibilities and was demoted to the post of the chairman. In September 1985, the Apple co-founder, left with a handful of people in order to found NeXT Computer. Jobs “I’m only 30 years old and I want to have the chance to continue creating things.” Jobs wrote in his farewell to Mike Markkula:

Dear Mike,

This morning’s papers carried suggestions that Apple is considering removing me as Chairman. I don’t know the source of these reports, but they are both misleading to the public and unfair to me.

You will recall that at last Thursday’s board meeting I stated that I had decided to start a new venture, and tendered my resignation as Chairman.

The board declined to accept my resignation and asked me to defer it for a week. I agreed to do so in light of the encouragement the Board offered with regard to the proposed new venture and the indications that Apple would invest in it. On Friday, after I told John Sculley who would be joining me, he confirmed Apple’s willingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration between Apple and my new venture.

Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture toward me and the new venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate acceptance of resignation. I would hope that in any statement it feels it must issue, the Company will make it clear the decision to resign as Chairman was mine.

I find myself both saddened and perplexed by the management’s conduct in this matter which seems to me contrary to Apple’s best interests. Those interests remain a matter of deep concern to me, both because of my past association with Apple and the substantial investment I retain in it.

I continue to hope that calmer voices within the Company may yet be heard. Some Company representatives have said they fear I will use proprietary Apple technology in my new venture. There is no basis for any such concern. If that concern is the real source of Apple’s hostility to the venture, I can allay it. As you know, the company’s recent reorganization left me with no work to do and no access even to regular management reports. I am but 30 and want still to contribute and achieve.

After what we have accomplished together, I would wish our parting to be both amicable and dignified.

Yours sincerely,

Steven P. Jobs

The reactions of the Apple employees on the de facto sacking of Jobs revealed both sides of him. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the founders of Macintosh, mourned Jobs although he as well had been driven by his crude methods. “Apple never recovered from losing Steve. Steve was the heart and soul and driving force. It would be quite a different place today. They lost their soul.,” said the software developer, who left Apple after Job’s departure and recently grabbed the headlines by designing Google+.

Larry Tesler, who came to Apple from Xerox also openly brought up the dark side of the co-founder: “People in the company had very mixed feelings about it. Everyone had been terrorized by Steve Jobs at some point or another and so there was a certain relief that the terrorist had gone but on the other hand I think there was an incredible respect for Steve Jobs by the very same people and we were all very worried – what would happen to this company without the visionary, without the founder without the charisma… ”

In 1985 Jobs sold all but one of his Apple shares, and had around 70 million dollars on his account. By chance he became aware of the sale of the animation department of George Lucas. The Star Wars director had divorced his wife in 1983 and was broke. At least Lucas could no longer afford to put millions of dollars into the innovative but economically not very successful “Graphics Group” of Lucasfilm year after year.

Jobs bought the department from Lucas for five million dollars and invested another five million more into the company, which was now named Pixar. While developing the Macintosh, Jobs had taken care of even the smallest detail, and his unwillingness to compromise had repeatedly gotten on the nerves of his employees. At Pixar, however, he gave much freedom to his management department. But initially this freedom did not pay off. Sales of the core product, the Pixar Image Computer used for the animation of film sequences, were slow. But the short films of genius Pixar employee, John Lasseter, received one award after the other, even though th film strips were only meant to demonstrate the performance of Pixar’s hardware. For that reason, in the early nineties Pixar focused on the movies themselves and no longer on the hardware.

Becoming a billionaire with ”Toy Story”

The breakthrough was made by Lasseter’s team with the computer-animated cartoon “Toy Story”, which Pixar got produced for Disney. With a production budget of $30 million, the cartoon brought over 360 million dollars at the box office and in the secondary market. On 29th of November 1995, shortly after the release of “Toy Story”, Pixar went public.

Steve Jobs, who had by now nearly exhausted his fortune from the first Apple era through ongoing donations to NeXT and Pixar, became a billionaire. “The magic of Steve was that while others simply accepted the status quo, he saw the true potential in everything he touched and never compromised on that vision,” said George Lucas after the death of Jobs.

Jobs’ new computer company NeXT had a very different structure than Pixar, as it was fully focused on the boss. Here Jobs wanted to create a computer he was not allowed to build at Apple. When the cash reserves ran low and still no product was in sight, he coaxed 20 million dollars out of multi-millionaire Ross Perot to build a modern factory for the production of NeXT. He commissioned the legendary designer Paul Rand, who had previously designed the IBM logo, to design a NeXT logo, and the German designer Hartmut Esslinger created the legendaryblack cube housing. Steve Jobs took care of details that could hardly be communicated to his employees.

Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT cube at CERN

For example, he demanded that the screws for the computer got an expensive coating and that the matt black paint was applied on the inside of the body as well, although the user would never get to see this. “He was not familiar with compromise,” said Esslinger. Anyone who tried a NeXT cube was usually enthusiastic about it. But the price of $6,500 for the NeXT cube was still too much for most of the potential clients. There was also at that time very little software available for this powerful workstation, so that a total of only about 50,000 systems were sold. Therefore, similar to the first Macintosh, Jobs found only few buyers for his expensive hardware. Nevertheless, among the European users of NeXT was the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the concept of the World Wide Web and the first browser on a black NeXT cube at the CERN Research Center in Geneva.

During this time, Archibald Horlitz, head of Germany’s largest Apple retailer Gravis, met Steve Jobs. Horlitz had heard about the new project and during a trip to California spontaneously knocked on the door of NeXT, in order to have the system demonstrated by the head of the company himself. “Steve Jobs had several facets. If he wanted something, he could be one of the most charming people in the world,” recalls Horlitz. “I’ve heard from a colleague at NeXT, how typical interviews were carried out. He took the people literally into his arms and went with them for one or two hours around the Stanford campus.

“When they came back, they were enlightened and could imagine nothing better than to work for him.” In this way Jobs could retain a great number of big talents such as Avie Tevanian or Scott Forstall. But there was no sign of NeXT’s economic recovery. The company burned through an alarming amount of money and Jobs financial reserves (before Pixar’s initial public offering) were slowly running out. In 1993 he put on the emergency brake at NeXT, fired many employees, and stopped the hardware production. From that moment on, NeXT focused solely on the software development. And, it sounds like a staircase wit of history: Through this strategic decision, Steve Jobs came back into the game at his first company Apple.

NeXT saves Apple

In the mid-nineties, Apple was in the worst possible condition. In the late eighties and early nineties, John Sculley had indeed been successful in the publishing industry. Products such as the PowerBook family boosted sales for some time, but with the Macintosh, Apple never managed to approach the sales figures of Microsoft, the manufacturer of IBM-compatible PCs with the DOS operating system. When the Mac was launched in 1984, Bill Gates had publicly praised Apple computers as an innovative PC platform.

But behind the back of Steve Jobs, the founder of Microsoft went about stealing the ideas of Macintosh for his Windows system. Jobs got wind of it and put Gates angrily to task: “You’re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” The Microsoft boss just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

After the departure of Jobs, even Sculley was not able to prevent Microsoft from constantly developing the Windows system and step by step adopting details from the Mac’s graphical user interface in to their software. Apple was vulnerable to blackmail, as Microsoft made important applications for the Mac. After Bill Gates had threatened to discontinue the development of Microsoft Office for Mac if Apple acted against Windows, Apple’s CEO licensed certain elements of the Mac GUI to the competitor from Redmond in 1986. Sculley had to look on helplessly as the Microsoft Company shamelessly shifted agreement limits in their favor with each new version of Windows.

Even Apple’s lawsuit in 1988 could not stop the software giant. In 1992, the court ruled that Apple could not claim any copyright on the graphical user interface or protect the idea of the virtual desktop as a patent. Apple ultimately failed in stopping Windows from copying at the US Supreme Court in 1994. Declining revenues and increased difficulties in the development department of aggravated the sense of crisis at Apple. In June 1993, the management board of Apple lost patience.

Around this time Steve Jobs was asked in an oral history interview about the shape of Apple. Jobs didn’t blame Microsoft for the crisis but only John Sculley and his team:

When I left Apple it was a two billion dollar company. We were Fortune 300 and something. We were 350. When the Mac was introduced we were a billion dollar corporation; so Apple grew from nothing to two billion dollars while I was there. That’s a pretty high growth rate. It grew five times since I left basically on the back of the Macintosh. I think what’s happened since I left in terms of growth rate has been trivial compared with what it was like when I was there. What ruined Apple wasn’t growth. What ruined Apple was values. John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place–which was making great computers for people to use.
They didn’t care about that anymore. They didn’t have a clue about how to do it and they didn’t take any time to find out because that’s not what they cared about. They cared about making a lot of money so they had this wonderful thing that a lot of brilliant people made called the Macintosh and they got very greedy and instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision–which was to make this thing an appliance, to get this out there to as many people as possible–they went for profits and they made outlandish profits for about four years. Apple was one of the most profitable companies in America for about four years.

What that cost them was the future. What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share, which was what we always tried to do. Macintosh would have had a thirty- three percent market share right now, maybe even higher, maybe it would have even been Microsoft but we’ll never know. Now its got a single digit market share and falling. There’s no way to ever get that moment in time back. The Macintosh will die in another few years and its really sad. The problem is this: no one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made–or any other product at Apple. They’ve just been living off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened to that. It’s kind of tragic, but as unemotionally as I can be, that’s what’s happening. Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed bases. But Apple is just gliding down this slope and they’re loosing market share every year. Things start to spiral down once you get under a certain threshold. And when developers no longer write applications for your computer, that’s when it really starts to fall apart.

"The Diesel" - Michael Spindler

BeOS finally lost the race. In February 1997, Apple paid just under 430 million dollars for NeXT and the know-how of the company. Bill Gates only had to spare scorn and ridicule for the change in direction at Apple. “Do you really think Steve Jobs has anything there?” Gates asked the still reigning Apple CEO Amelio. “I know his technology, it’s nothing but a warmed-over UNIX, and you’ll never be able to make it work on your machines.” (…) “What the hell are you buying that garbage for?” Gates did not take NextStep for a serious rival. He suspected already that it was not just about a new operating system, but a coup that would bring Steve Jobs back in charge at Apple. Five months later, Amelio was actually fired from the board of directors. And in September 1997, Jobs took over the post of an interim CEO. At that time, Apple was about 90 days away from bankruptcy.

Help from the archenemy

"Bill, thank you" - Steve Jobs on the cover of Time Magazine

The change induced by Steve Jobs had radical impacts. He brutally cleaned up the Apple management, dramatically reduced the product range, killed John Sculley’s ambitious Newton project, cancelled the agreements with producers of Macintosh clones, and brought non other than his adversary Bill Gates as savior on board. At the 1997 MacWorld Expo in Boston, the Microsoft CEO proclaimed on a giant video screen that the world’s largest software maker would buy Apple shares worth 150 million dollars, and would continue to develop the Office suite for the Mac.

The Apple fan community was shocked and there were loud choruses of boos against Jobs and Gates, but Jobs remained on his course: “If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy again, we have to let go of a few things here,” Jobs told the audience. “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.” . . . I think if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude.”

After he regained power at Apple Jobs then fired those whom he considered as losers and rip-off artists who had brought the company to the edge of bankruptcy. However, not everyone suffered from the rage of the iCEO: “Apple was about 90 days away from going bankrupt – back then in the early days,” the Apple CEO said 13 years later in retrospect at the conference D8 AllThingsD.

It was much worse than I thought when I went back initially. But there were people there who — I expected all the good people would’ve left. I found these miraculous people, this great people. And I said: ‘What? – I tried to ask this as tactful as possible – Why are you still here? And you know, a lot of them had this phrase: They said, because I bleed in colors – which was the old six color apple logo.

The young designer Jony Ive was one of these frustrated and undiscovered geniuses of Apple at that time. “He was sick of the company’s focus on profit maximization rather than product design,” writes Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs’ official biography. The Briton, who was then 30-years old, said: “I remember very clearly Steve announcing that our goal is not just to make money but to make great products.” Ive worked at Apple since 1992, but had been fully ignored by the Apple bosses Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio.

Less is more

Ive brought to Apple the ideas of the German industrial designer Dieter Rams, who had developed key stylistic elements while working for the electric equipment manufacturer Braun. “Less is more” – Rams’ policy became then the design credo of Jony Ive and Steve Jobs. With the first iMac G3, Ive converted the typical beige PC box into a semitransparent, candy-like design-statement. With the PowerBook made of Titanium and Aluminum, Ive paid homage to his role model Dieter Rams, who had designed a similar-looking aluminum case for the legendary World Receiver T1000 as early as in 1963. In 2007, the first iPhone was created, and the calculator app on the first iPhone was nothing else than a copy of the ET44 calculator body, which Rams had designed for Braun 20 years ago.

Apple borrowed from the Braun design

1998, Steve Jobs summarized the spiritual foundation of Apple’s new design basic law as follows: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” (Isaacson, Page 387) For Jobs it was not about cheap fashion effects. “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later,” Jobs said to his biological sister Mona. “Art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.” Now Apple computers were not only physically different, but the software of the Mac now had a new foundation as well.

In September 2000 Apple released the first public beta version of the new operating system Mac OS X, which was based on the NeXTStep software. The Apple designers put the new Aqua user interface over the UNIX core. This user interface was inspired by the design of the iMac G3 and was characterized by transparent menus, bright pinstripe patterns, and large icons. In the past eleven years, Mac OS X has been constantly developed and improved, and is now available as version 10.7 “Lion”. The mobile system iOS for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad was also derived from Mac OS X. Apple probably would not have turned things around with a new Apple operating system alone.

There lacked a suite of carefully coordinated multimedia programs. Steve Jobs received aid from Germany, and in April 2000 took over the small software company named Astarte in Karlsruhe. The group led by Freddie Geier also made sure that Apple came out with no major damage from a class action lawsuit by disappointed customers of OS9, which lacked a functioning DVD player. Years later, members from the Astarte team reported how both fascinating and exhausting it was to work for Jobs. “He knew about every detail. Almost each time when he had taken apart our suggestions and then presented his own brilliant ideas, I thought to myself ‘Damn, I could have come up with this myself”,” said Geier.

The iPod-Revolution

With the founding and rescuing of Apple and the Macintosh alone, Steve Jobs would have already earned himself a prominent place in computer history. But his pioneering developments went far beyond the world of personal computers. Mid-October 2001, a selected group of technology journalists in the United States received an invitation to an event on the corporate campus in Cupertino where a “breakthrough digital device” should be unveiled. “Note: It is not a Mac.” Jobs had summoned to present the first iPod, which he had developed with his team for over a year. Six weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, people in the US were still in a state of shock.

No wonder that the presentation of the first iPod initially attracted little public attention. Only few had the power to imagine that a device smaller than a cigarette package with a built-in hard drive, a click wheel, and the associated iTunes software, could turn the entire music industry upside down. Some time later, when the iPod started to work with Windows computers, one could see the white Apple headphones in public more and more often. For Jobs it was not just about a portable device on which one could play one’s music collection on the go. To the music lover and Bob Dylan fan it was clear that illegal file-sharing services like Napster and Kazaa were ruining the music industry, particularly because there were few legal alternatives to easily download the songs.

Steve Jobs and iPod on the cover of Newsweek

Therefore, he went on a pilgrimage to stars such as Bono from U2, and spoke to leaders in the music industry such as Paul Vidich, head of AOL Time Warner. He asked them for a license for the digital music distribution and demanded to apply a rather simple pricing model (“99 cents per song”). After long hesitation, the record company executives gave in. Many managers in the music and film industries have still not understood that Jobs was the savior and not the gravedigger for the music industry, even though proceeds through iTunes could not compensate for all the losses of record, CD, or DVD sales.

With iPod and iTunes, Steve Jobs changed the laws of the music industry and Hollywood for good and significantly improved the foundation of Apple’s revenue. He was particularly pleased with the fact that he was able to solve the legal conflict with the music label Apple Records during his lifetime and could include his beloved Beatles in the iTunes catalog.

Secret project “Purple 2″

Even more serious consequences for Apple and the industry came with the next major project, which was developed under the code name “Purple 2″. Shortly after the presentation of the first iPod, the Apple leadership dealt with the question of whether Apple should launch a (mobile) phone. In a secret operation, a development group was founded, which remained largely unknown within the company. As part of secret work on a predecessor of the iPad, the engineers in Cupertino had built up a considerable knowledge of touch-screen technology that could be transferred to a smaller screen.

Moreover, a microprocessor ARM11 chip, which could provide sufficient power for complex smart phone applications, finally came on the market. As of 2005, the Apple smartphone designed by Jony Ive gradually materialized. At the MacWorld Expo in January 2007, Steve Jobs boasted, “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” Jobs repeated this list many times until it began to dawn on even the last visitor at the Moscone Center what he meant: “These are not three separate devices – this is one device… and we are calling it iPhone!” The old archrivals from Microsoft attempted to ridicule Apple’s advance. “It’s the most expensive mobile phone in the world,” barked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a TV interview. “The business customer will reject it because it has no keyboard.” Ballmer was very much mistaken. By the end of the first fiscal quarter 2012 (end of December 2011), Apple had sold 183 million iPhones.

Sales figures Apple iPhone

Only Google could keep up with the iPhone, thanks to its Google Android mobile operating system. Until his death Steve Jobs was convinced that the success of Android was only possible because of a betrayal of the long-standing Google boss Eric Schmidt. Between 2006 and 2009, Schmidt was on the Apple Board, where he had seen the development of the iPad and iPhone. His obligations to Apple did not prevent him from pushing Google to develop a competing system. Only when his conflict of interest became very obvious, Schmidt resigned from the Apple board. In January 2010, when the Taiwanese company HTC introduced a new Android-powered smartphone, which dominated many of iPhone’s features, Jobs became furious. “Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” said Jobs to book author Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty.” Apple and many Android OEMs like Samsung and HTC have been fighting for months in court. Despite victories in some points, Apple was not able to stop the winning run of Android. Jobs could take comfort in the fact that two-thirds of the profits of the entire smartphone industry are noted in the books of Apple, and other manufacturers excluding Samsung, are financially getting nowhere.

Steve Jobs had put the first stages of his personal suffering already behind him when he presented the first iPhone in January 2007. In October 2003 he was diagnosed with cancer, which for months he initially wanted to combat without methods of conventional medicine. Finally end of July 2004, he underwent an operation to have a tumor removed from his pancreas. While in the summer of 2007, at the sales launch of the first iPhone, Jobs again seemed quite well, one year later he appeared at the developer conference WWDC 2008, looking decidedly thinner. In early 2009 he retired from public life and underwent a liver transplant.

He returned to the stage two more times, to present both the first and second iPad. It must have been a big victory for Jobs that under his leadership Apple brought a digital tablet to the market, which at the same time established a new device category. His old adversary Bill Gates had presented tablet PCs on shows such as CES over the past ten years, but the devices were too complicated to use, too expensive and flawed, so nobody bought them. At his last public appearance, Steve Jobs fought for a building permit before Cupertino City council for the futuristic new Apple Campus 2, which was designed by British architect Norman Foster.

Legacy

Over the next few years, a monument of a giant circular building will emerge, as Silicon Valley has not yet seen. For Steve Jobs it was not only about converting his legacy into glass, steel and concrete and making it visible for future generations. The most important “product” on which he worked during the past few years, was Apple itself. For Freddie Geier, who worked for Apple in California and managed the operations of Apple Germany and Central Europe for almost two years, Steve Jobs was an “infinite source of inspiration, a visionary and a genius.” “He was the God of style who could make things beautiful and simple and provide products with emotion at the same time”

Jony Ive at WWDC 2010

At the end, the products always benefited from Jobs’ perfectionism. Under the motto “think different”, he succeeded in finding new ways and celebrating the presentation of secret developments in a masterly manner. It was clear to Jobs that there was nobody in the company who was able to take over all these challenges alone. During the past years, he therefore set up a management team and distributed the heavy burden on the shoulders of several successors. Apple CEO Tim Cook is responsible for ensuring that the company works logistically and is making money. During the memorial service for Steve Jobs at the Apple campus in Cupertino, Cook radiated sovereignty and authority, which is now expected from him by the Apple employees, customers and shareholders.

Tim Cook said Jobs had told him that Apple employees, should not ask what he would have done. “Just do what’s right.” He had seen Disney going into crisis after the death of founder Walt Disney, where “everyone spent all their time thinking and talking about what Walt would do.” In the future, the soul of Apple will probably be represented by Jony Ive. The chief designer has to guarantee that Apple will continue to bring products to market, which are desirable solely because of their elegant appearance.

Meanwhile, rumors have also vanished that the Briton was homesick for the UK, – among others because he saw his twin sons in better hands there. His poised presence at the funeral service, with which he freed himself from his (superior) father Steve Jobs, has not only moved the people on the campus. Jony Ive is also trusted to preserve the high level of Apple’s designs without yelling and strong criticism of the employees.

Scott Forstall

The software expert Scott Forstall will also take a key role in the management team of Apple. Steve Jobs took him in 1992 from Stanford University to NeXT. In 1997 Forstall followed his boss to Apple. He is now responsible for the iOS platform.

“Scott is a gifted genius like Steve. He is in love with every detail, too,” says a former Apple manager. But like Jobs, Forstall is also often difficult and maintained a catastrophic communication culture. The Bloomberg Business Week called Forstall the ” Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Apple” and quoted former Apple software developer Mike Lee: “I once referred to Scott as Apple’s chief a–hole. And I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I meant it as a compliment. You could say the same thing about Steve Jobs.” In such an area of tension, Tim Cook will have the task of softening Forstall’s emotional outbursts and call his younger fellow board member to reason.

In the fine adjustment of the tasks on the management level, Cook, Ive, Forstall, as well as marketing chiefs Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue, who are responsible for the iCloud line at Apple, can count on help: In the end of 2008, seriously ill Steve Jobs lured away the management professor Joel M. Podolny, Dean of the elite Yale School of Management, to found an in-house university at Apple. “Steve was looking to his legacy. The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees,” said an employee to the “Los Angeles Times”. “No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful.”

After all, Podolny had almost three years of direct experience with Steve Jobs. Whether and how he will succeed to transfer Steve Jobs’ success formula to future generations of managers from Apple is yet to be seen. ” While there are many great companies, I cannot think of one that has had as tremendous personal meaning for me as Apple.” Podolny wrote in his goodbye to his Yale students. Steve Jobs advised his successors to rely on their own intuition and not on market research.

Steve Jobs quoted Henry Ford, who reportedly said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Jobs said, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. “That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

The Classics

“1984” – The famous Super Bowl Ad

“Computer for the rest of us”			Nightmare before Christmas
Office Lemmings			Apple Lisa (1983) with Kevin Costner

Current Campaigns

Get a Mac (2006-2009)			Switch Campaign (2002-2003)
iPhone Spots			iPod Spots

Commercials 1978 – 2000

“iMac Commercials”

Power Mac Commercials

(more to come …)

Viruses PC has caught a new virus (represented as a cold) and warns Mac to stay away from him, citing the “114,000 known viruses for PCs.” Mac states that the viruses that affect PCs don’t affect him, and PC announces that he’s going to ‘crash’ before collapsing onto the floor in a faint.			Work vs. Home Mac describes how he enjoys doing ‘fun stuff’ such as podcasts and movies, leading PC to claim that he also does “fun stuff” such as timesheets, spreadsheets and pie charts. After Mac responds that it is difficult to capture a family vacation using a pie chart, PC rebuts by showing a pie chart representing “hangout time” and “just kicking it” with different shades of gray.
Touché Right after PC introduces himself, the Mac character replies, “And I’m a PC too”. Mac explains to the confused PC that he can run both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, calling himself “the only computer you’ll ever need.” PC mutters, “Oh…touché.” The Mac character, referring to the rules of fencing, explains that one only says “touché” after he or she makes a point and someone else makes a counterpoint, but the PC character continues to misuse the word. A similar conversation occurred in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, a film which Justin Long (Mac) appeared in.			Out of the Box Mac (in a white box) and PC (in a brown box doing some exercises) are in boxes discussing what they will do when they are unpacked. Whereas Mac says that he can get started right away, PC is held up by the numerous activities he must complete before being useful. Mac eventually leaves to get right to work, whereas PC is forced to wait for parts that are still in other boxes.
Trust Mac PC, in an attempt to hide from spyware, is wearing a trench coat with dark glasses and a false mustache. PC offers Mac a disguise, but Mac declines, saying he doesn’t have to worry about the normal PC spyware and viruses with Mac OS X.			Angel/Devil Mac gives PC an iPhoto book to view. Suddenly, angel and devil versions of PC appear behind him. The angel encourages PC to compliment Mac, while the devil prods PC to destroy the book. In the end, PC says the book is good, and then turns around, feeling the air where the angel and devil versions of PC were.
Accident A wheelchair-bound PC, who is wearing casts on his arms, explains that he fell off his desk when someone tripped over his power cord, thus prompting Mac to point out that the MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s magnetic power cord prevents such an occurrence.			Better Results PC and Mac discuss making home movies, and show each other their efforts. Supermodel Gisele Bündchen enters, representing Mac’s movie, while PC’s movie is represented by a man with a hairy chest and a blonde wig wearing a dress similar to Bündchen’s. PC states that there’s some work in progress with his movie.
Self Pity Mac, for once, is wearing a suit, and explains that he “does work stuff too” and has been running Microsoft Office for years. Upon hearing this, PC becomes despondent and collapses on the floor, begging to be left alone to depreciate.			Counselor PC and Mac visit a counselor to resolve their differences. However, while Mac finds it easy to compliment PC (“you are a wizard with numbers and you dress like a gentleman”), PC’s resentment is too deep for him to reciprocate (“I guess you are better at creating stuff, even though it’s completely juvenile and a waste of time.”). The counselor suggests them coming in twice a week.
Meant for Work PC, looking haggard and covered in stickers, complains about the kids who use him and their activities, such as making movies and blogging, which are wearing him out and makes him “cry to sleep mode.” He complains that, unlike Mac, he is meant more for office work. PC then trudges off because his user wants to listen to some Emo (represented by the Anarchy sign on his back).			Sales Pitch Although Mac introduces himself as usual, PC says “… and buy a PC.” He explains that Mac’s increasing popularity is forcing him to be more forward in his self-promotion, and is reduced to holding up red signs with various pitches on them.
Gift Exchange Mac and PC exchange gifts for Christmas; PC, who is hoping for a C++ GUI programming guide, is disappointed to receive a photo album of previous Get a Mac ads made on iPhoto, and Mac receives from PC a C++ GUI programming guide.			Goodwill Mac and PC agree to put aside their differences because of the Christmas season. Although PC momentarily slips and states that Mac “wastes his time with frivolous pursuits like home movies and blogs,” the two agree to, as Mac says, “pull it into hug harbor” and the each wish each other a good holiday.
WSJ Mac is reading a favourable review of himself by Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. Jealous, PC then claims that he also received a great review, but is caught offguard when Mac asks for specific details. This ad is currently not available online at the Apple site. But you can see it here.

2007

Surgery PC appears in the garb of a patient awaiting surgery, and explains that he is upgrading to Windows Vista but requires “surgery” to upgrade (specifically, upgrading such items as graphics cards, processors, memory, etc). In reference to perceived difficulties in upgrading, PC admits that he is worried about going through it and bequeaths his peripherals to Mac should he not survive. Mac ask PC if, like him, his upgrade is just straight forward.			Sabotage In this advert, PC is present, but a different actor appears in Mac’s place, obviously reciting poorly memorized lines to flatter PC. The real Mac arrives soon after, and while PC sheepishly denies anything is happening, ‘impostor’ Mac tells ‘real’ Mac that he’s “a big fan.”
Tech Support A technician is present to ‘install’ a webcam to PC (using masking tape to attach it to his head). PC is extremely pleased by his new upgrade, but on hearing from the technician that Mac has a built-in webcam, he storms off without waiting for the camera to be fully ‘installed’.			Security In a reference to criticisms of Windows Vista’s security features, PC is a joined by a tall United States Secret Service-style bodyguard representing Vista’s new security feature, who intrusively demands that he “cancel or allow” every incoming or outgoing interaction he has with Mac.
Computer Cart PC and 3 other men in suits are on a computer cart. When Mac asks why, PC says that he gets an error with a Windows Media Player Dynamic-link library file (WMP.DLL), and that the others suffer from similar errors (The man in the beige suit represents error 692, the man in the grey suit represents a Syntax error, and the man in the bottom of the cart represents Fatal error in which PC whispers along with “he’s a goner” after the commercial). Mac explains that Macs don’t get cryptic error messages.			Flashback Mac asks PC if he would like to see a website and home movie that he made. This prompts PC to flashback to a time when both he and Mac were children; when the younger Mac asks the younger PC if he would like to see some artwork he did, the younger PC takes out a calculator and calculates “the time we’ve just wasted.” (This may be a reference to the time when PC’s were text-based, while Macs were slower but had GUI’s) Returning from the flashback, PC does the same thing.
Stuffed PC enters slowly, with a ballooned torso, explaining that all the trial software is slowing him down. Mac replies that Macs only come with the software “you want” (namely, the iLife package). As PC finally gets on his mark, Mac begins his intro again, but PC realizes that he’s forgotten something and begins to slowly leave.			Party is Over PC unhappily throws a party celebrating the release of Windows Vista. He complains to Mac that he had to upgrade his hardware, and now can’t use some of his old software and peripherals. He then talks with one of the party members about throwing another in 5 years, which turns into 5 years and a day, and so on.
Genius Mac introduces PC to one of the Apple Geniuses from the Apple Retail Store’s Genius Bar. PC tests the Genius, starting with math questions and culminating in asking her, on a scale of one to ten, how much does he loathe Mac, to which she answers eleven which is correct, and PC says “She’s good. Very good.”			Choose a Vista Confused about which of the six versions of Windows Vista to get, PC spins a big game wheel. PC spins “Lose a Turn” and Mac questions why PC put that space on the wheel.
Boxer PC is introduced as if he were in a Boxing match, stating that he’s not going down without a fight. Mac says back that it’s not a competition, but rather people switching to a computer that’s simpler and more intuitive. The ring announcer admits his brother-in-law got a Mac and loves it.			Podium PC, in the style of a political candidate, is standing at a podium making declarations about Windows Vista, urging those who are having compatibility problems with existing hardware to simply replace them and to ignore the new features of Mac OS X Leopard – however, he privately admits to Mac that he himself has downgraded to Windows XP three weeks ago. His key slogan is “It’s not about what Vista can do for you, it’s what you can buy for Vista.”
PR Lady Mac and PC are joined by a public relations representative (played by Mary Chris Wall), who has been hired by PC to place a positive spin on the reaction to Windows Vista and claims that many people are even downgrading back to Windows XP, but her response to claims that more people are switching to Mac instead is a sheepish “No comment.”			Misprint PC is on the phone with PCWorld attempting to report a misprint. He explains how they said, “The fastest Windows Vista notebook we tested this year is a Mac.” PC goes on to argue how impossible it is for a Mac to run Vista faster than a PC while Mac tries to explain that it is true. While arguing with PCWorld over the phone, PC says he’ll put Mac on the line to set things straight. However, he instead lowers his voice and talks ‘cool’ in an attempt to impersonate Mac saying that PCs are faster.

Now What PC begins by showing off his new, long book, I Want to Buy a Computer — Now What?, to help customers deal with all the difficult computer-buying decisions, with no one out there to help. Mac then replies that buying a computer is in fact “really easy,” explaining that at Apple Stores there are “personal shoppers” to help you find the perfect Mac. Mac goes on to say that there are even workshops there to teach people about using the computers. Upon hearing this, PC says that he also thought of this and brings out the companion volume, I Just Bought a Computer — Now What?.			Santa Claus An animated Get a Mac commercial featuring Santa Claus and Christmas caroling by both PC and Mac. PC spoils the song by inserting “Buy a PC and not a Mac this holiday season or any other time for goodness sake”. The animation style is similar to the Rankin/Bass television specials Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.
Referee A referee is present, according to PC, to make sure that Mac doesn’t go on saying that Leopard is better and faster than Vista. When Mac defends himself saying that it was The Wall Street Journal who compared the two, PC complains, and the referee sides with Mac. Upon insulting the referee, PC gets ejected, but PC rebuts, saying that he has nowhere to go (in the ad’s area).

2008

Time Machine In the typical introduction of Mac and PC, instead of there being one Mac, there is a line of 10. PC is shocked, so the various Macs explain that it is simply “Time Machine,” a feature in Leopard which makes regular backups of the hard drive. PC is forced to admit that such a feature is “pretty awesome,” followed by thanks from the various Macs.			Breakthrough Mac and PC’s therapist (see “Counselor” below) suggest that PC’s problems are simply a result of software and hardware coming from various places, whereas Mac gets all his hardware and software from one place. “It’s not my fault!” PC keeps repeating with support of Mac and the therapist. Then PC concludes, “It’s Mac’s fault, it’s Mac’s fault,” with Mac and the therapist disappointed in PCs conclusion. PC ends with the comment: “What a Breakthrough!”.
Tech Support A technician is present to ‘install’ a webcam to PC (using masking tape to attach it to his head). PC is extremely pleased by his new upgrade, but on hearing from the technician that Mac has a built-in webcam, he storms off without waiting for the camera to be fully ‘installed’.			Yoga Mac is watching PC have a yoga session where the yoga instructor (Judy Greer) is coaching PC in “expelling bad Vista energy” and forgetting Vista’s problems, but when the yoga instructor goes on to complain that Vista screwed up the yoga billing, PC considers switching to pilates.
Office Stress Mac’s new Microsoft Office 2008 program has just come out. In the box that PC gives him, is a stress toy for Mac to use when he gets stressed from doing lots more work, which PC begins using as he complains that Microsoft Office is too compatible with Mac and that he wants to switch his files over and he is getting less work then Mac, eventually breaking the toy.			Group PC is at a help group for “PCs living with Vista”. The other PC’s there tell him to take it one day at a time and that he is facing the biggest fact of all, that Vista isn’t working as it should. They all wish the Vista problems will go away sooner and a lot easier. One of them says pleasingly that he has been error-free for a week and starts to repeat himself uncontrollably and the others get disappointed.
Pep Rally PC is introduced by a cheerleading squad. When asked to explain, PC explains that Mac’s number 1 status on college campuses with his built in iSight camera, his Stable operating system, and being able to run Microsoft Office so well, so he is trying to win students back with a pep rally. The cheerleaders cheer, “Mac’s Number One!,” and upon PC’s complaint, they cheer, “PC’s Number Two!”			Sad Song PC sings a short country-blues style song because Vista has gotten him feeling down. The song is about people ‘leaving him’ for Mac and that Vista’s got issues. A hound dog then howls and Mac claims the song is touching.
Sad Song (extended Version) PC sings a short country-blues style song because Vista has gotten him feeling down. The song is about people ‘leaving him’ for Mac and that Vista’s got issues. A hound dog then howls and Mac claims the song is touching. This longer version ends with PC asking Mac if the dog is his, which it’s not.			Calming teas PC announces calming teas and bath soaps to make Vista’s annoyances easier to live with.
Throne PC appears in a king’s robe and throne saying that even though switching computers can be difficult, his “subjects” won’t leave him and that he’s still king. Mac then begins talking about how PC’s subjects can just bring their PC into an Apple Store where they’ll transfer all the files over to a new Mac, at which PC declares Mac ‘banished’.			Pizza Box PC tries to attract college students by posing as a free box of pizza. Note that this ad was aired during Apple’s 2008 back-to-school promotion.
Off the Air Mac and PC show up with a Mac Genius who says that it is now “easier than ever” to switch to a Mac and that a Mac Genius can switch over a PCs files to a new Mac for free. PC then protests that it is fear which keeps people from switching and that people don’t need to hear about the Mac Genius, pulling a cover over the camera and declaring them to be “off the air”.			Bean Counter PC is “doing a little budgeting”. He admits that Vista’s problems are frustrating PC users and that it’s time to take “drastic action”: spending almost all of the money on advertising. When Mac asks PC why he thinks the small amount of money left will fix Vista, PC reallocates it to advertising.
V Word PC declares that “we’re going to stop referring to my operating system ([Vista]) by name”. He says using the word “doesn’t sit well with frustrated PC users. From now on, we’re going to use a word with a lot less baggage: Windows”. He is holding a black box with a large red button that sounds a buzzer when pressed. PC presses the button whenever Mac says “Vista”. After pointing out that not using the word isn’t the same as fixing the operating system’s problems, Mac ends the ad by saying “Vista” several times in rapid succession, thwarting PC’s attempts to sound the buzzer.			Bake Sale PC is seen having a bake sale. When Mac questions PC regarding the occasion, PC replies that he is trying to raise money by himself in order to fix Vista’s problems. Mac decides to contribute by buying a cupcake and as soon as he takes a bite, PC wants Mac to pay ten million dollars for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHO3eWlmWNc

Tree Trimming – A holiday animated Get a Mac commercial. Mac and PC set aside their disagreements and decide to trim a Christmas tree by hanging ornaments and stringing lights. Mac tells PC that they are good friends while PC gets nervous. When they are finished, PC does not want to light the lights on the tree. Mac persuades him to do so. PC plugs the trees lights in and they light up and say: “PC RULES”. He apologies to Mac and says that it just sort of happened. The animation is like the Get a Mac Santa Claus ad in Rankin/Bass clay animation style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J0JVU3bpDE

I Can Do Anything – A holiday animated Get a Mac commercial. PC asks Mac why he loves the holidays so much. Mac says it is the season for Peace on Earth. PC says that they get to be animated and they can do anything. PC demonstrates by floating in the air, building a snowman in fast motion, and talking to animals. PC asks a bunny hopping by where he is going. The bunny replies by saying he’s going to the Apple Store for some last minute gifts. PC then purposely tips the snowman’s head off making it fall on the bunny and apologies. The animation is like the Get a Mac Santa Claus ad in Rankin/Bass clay animation style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9QAkW12DZY

Time Traveler—PC uses a time machine to travel to the year 2150 to see if any major issues (such as freezing and crashing) have been removed from the PC and to see if PCs are as hassle-free as Macs. Promptly after PC arrives at 2150, future PC literally freezes, which answers the question.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0VvbpJR-Y0

Stacks—PC is searching through all of his pictures, trying to find a photograph of his friend. He searches one picture at a time, but Mac states that iPhoto has a feature called Faces, in which you tag the face of a person and iPhoto finds other pictures of the same person, putting them all into the same folder and saving search time. PC responds to the facial-recognition technology as expensive and tells Mac to sort the pictures instead because he has the technology to make it easier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR487qnNKCk

Legal Copy—Every time PC says something positive about himself, the legal copy that appears on the screen increases. He finally states that PCs are now 100% trouble-free, and the legal copy covers the whole screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWaagCttaPo

Biohazard Suit—PC first appears wearing a biohazard suit to protect himself from PC viruses and malware, of which PC says there are 20,000 discovered every day. Mac asks PC if he is going to live in the suit for the rest of his life, and PC cannot hear him because he is too protected by his virus-proof mask, and takes it off. PC then shrieks and struggles to place it on again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afa9C98gZ7w

Elimination—PC attempts to find Megan, a new laptop hunter, the perfect PC. Unfortunately, no PCs are ‘immune’ to viruses, which is Megan’s #1 concern, so PC leaves her with Mac.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6SCc6A6Kck

PC Choice Chat—PC has his own radio talk show called PC Choice Chat, and people begin to call in asking for advice on which computer to get. All the callers ask for advice on a computer that would qualify as a Mac but not a PC, as one caller asks for a computer that is for people who hate getting viruses. One other caller asks for PC help like Mac genius, and another wants to switch to Mac. PC ignores these calls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Y0Arp-MYI

Customer Care—Mac is seen again with an Apple Genius, a real-life person who can help you with your Mac problems. PC then has a short montage of endless automated customer-support messages, never reaching a real person, which is not to PC’s liking, and he then says that his source of help is ‘the same’ as Mac Genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM649iQ0ass

Surprise—Mac appears alongside a customer (Andree Vermeulen), with PC notably absent. The customer says she’s looking to buy a great computer. Mac tries to convince her that she should get a PC, telling her that they’re much better and more stable. The customer seems skeptical, tells Mac she’ll “think about it”, and leaves. A frustrated Mac pulls off a mask and his clothes, revealing himself to be PC in disguise. The real Mac then appears, sees PC’s discarded mask and clothes, and says “I don’t even wanna ask.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkrdy1p9BYI

Top of the Line—PC and Mac appear with a customer who’s looking for a new computer. PC introduces her to the “top of the line” PC (Patrick Warburton), a handsome and overly slick PC in a suit. She asks him about screen size and speed, to which Top of the Line says he’s the best, but he then balks when she says she doesn’t want to deal with any viruses or hassle. She decides to go with Mac, so Top of the Line hands her his business card and tells her to give him a call “when she’s ready to compromise.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh1O0piBDm0

Trainer—The commercial starts off traditionally, but PC is doing sit-ups with a trainer in a striped shirt (Robert Loggia), saying fierce things to make PC improved. PC suggests the trainer try some ‘positive reinforcement’, and is a little angry and shocked when the trainer compliments Mac instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUZqANYD7zY

PC Innovations Lab—PC, who has wrapped another PC in Bubble Wrap, is saying that the Bubble Wrap is actually a security shield. Mac tries to speak, but PC cuts him off, showing another PC who apparently has cupholders on his shoulders. The cupholders are full of foam coffee cups, and PC takes a full coffee cup, pretending to toast the cup and saying, “Cheers to innovation”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYWmDag3ruM

Broken Promises—PC tells Mac how excited he is about the launch of Windows 7 and assures him it won’t have the same problems as Vista. However, Mac feels like he heard this before, and has a series of flashbacks about PC assuring Mac about Windows Vista, XP, Me, 98, 95, and 2.0. On the last flashback, he says “Trust me.” Back in the present, he says this time it’s going to be different, then says “Trust me.” in an almost identical way to the flashback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XosJw6bEzzY

Teeter Tottering—A woman who had a PC has a box of things that were in her PC and says she’s switching to Mac, but PC tries to convince her to stay while she just goes over to Mac every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiU1Gu14xG0

PC News—PC is sitting at a news desk and turns it over to a correspondent at what seems to be a launch party for Windows 7 until a person being interviewed reveals that he is switching to a Mac. PC is surprised by this and asks why, and more people speak of how Mac is #1 with customer satisfaction and PC finally says to cut the feed. This is one of two commercials where Mac and PC acknowledge that they are in a commercial. PC: “Let’s go to a commercial.” Mac: “We are a commercial”. PC: “Let’s go to another commercial”.

Source (Text):

“Get a Mac.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 11 Sep 2008, 22:32 UTC. 14 Sep 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Get_a_Mac&oldid=237810498>.

This article is published under the GNU General Public License

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