Steve Jobs

aesthetic desires and various design whims. “When we took it to the engineers,” Jobs said, “they came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn’t do it. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of grudgingly did it.”
    Jobs asked Lee Clow and Ken Segall and others from the TBWA\Chiat\Day ad team to fly up to see what he had in the works. He brought them into the guarded design studio and dramatically unveiled Ive’s translucent teardrop-shaped design, which looked like something from
The Jetsons
, the animated TV show set in the future. For a moment they were taken aback. “We were pretty shocked, but we couldn’t be frank,” Segall recalled. “We were really thinking, ‘Jesus, do they know what they are doing?’ It was so radical.” Jobs asked them to suggest names. Segall came back with five options, one of them “iMac.” Jobs didn’t like any of them at first, so Segall came up with another list a week later, but he said that the agency still preferred “iMac.” Jobs replied, “I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it.” He tried silk-screening it on some of the prototypes, and the name grew on him. And thus it became the iMac.
    As the deadline for completing the iMac drew near, Jobs’s legendary temper reappeared in force, especially when he was confronting manufacturing issues. At one product review meeting, he learned that the process was going slowly. “He did one of his displays of awesome fury, and the fury was absolutely pure,” recalled Ive. He went around the table assailing everyone, starting with Rubinstein. “You know we’re trying to save the company here,” he shouted, “and you guys are screwing it up!”
    Like the original Macintosh team, the iMac crew staggered to completion just in time for the big announcement. But not before Jobs had one last explosion. When it came time to rehearse for the launch presentation, Rubinstein cobbled together two working prototypes. Jobs had not seen the final product before, and when he looked at it onstage he saw a button on the front, under the display. He pushed itand the CD tray opened. “What the fuck is this?!?” he asked, though not as politely. “None of us said anything,” Schiller recalled, “because he obviously knew what a CD tray was.” So Jobs continued to rail. It was supposed to have a clean CD slot, he insisted, referring to the elegant slot drives that were already to be found in upscale cars. “Steve, this is exactly the drive I showed you when we talked about the components,” Rubinstein explained. “No, there was never a tray, just a slot,” Jobs insisted. Rubinstein didn’t back down. Jobs’s fury didn’t abate. “I almost started crying, because it was too late to do anything about it,” Jobs later recalled.
    They suspended the rehearsal, and for a while it seemed as if Jobs might cancel the entire product launch. “Ruby looked at me as if to say, ‘Am I crazy?’” Schiller recalled. “It was my first product launch with Steve and the first time I saw his mind-set of ‘If it’s not right we’re not launching it.’” Finally, they agreed to replace the tray with a slot drive for the next version of the iMac. “I’m only going to go ahead with the launch if you promise we’re going to go to slot mode as soon as possible,” Jobs said tearfully.
    There was also a problem with the video he planned to show. In it, Jony Ive is shown describing his design thinking and asking, “What computer would the Jetsons have had? It was like, the future yesterday.” At that moment there was a two-second snippet from the cartoon show, showing Jane Jetson looking at a video screen, followed by another two-second clip of the Jetsons giggling by a Christmas tree. At a rehearsal a production assistant told Jobs they would have to remove the clips because Hanna-Barbera had not given permission to use them. “Keep it in,” Jobs barked at him. The assistant explained that there were rules against that. “I don’t care,” Jobs said. “We’re using it.” The clip stayed in.
    Lee Clow was preparing a series of colorful magazine ads, and when he sent Jobs the page proofs he got an outraged phone call in response. The blue in the ad, Jobs insisted, was different from that of the iMac. “You guys don’t know what you’re doing!” Jobs shouted. “I’m going to get