Steve Jobs

Otellini. At the beginning, we were doing wonderful things together. They wanted this big joint project to do chips for future iPhones. There were two reasons we didn’t go with them. One was that they are just really slow. They’re like a steamship, not very flexible. We’re used to going pretty fast. Second is that we just didn’t want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.
     
    According to Otellini, it would have made sense for the iPad to use Intel chips. The problem, he said, was that Apple and Intel couldn’t agree on price. Also, they disagreed on who would control the design. It was another example of Jobs’s desire, indeed compulsion, to control every aspect of a product, from the silicon to the flesh.
    The Launch, January 2010
    The usual excitement that Jobs was able to gin up for a product launch paled in comparison to the frenzy that built for the iPad unveiling on January 27, 2010, in San Francisco. The
Economist
put him on its cover robed, haloed, and holding what was dubbed “the Jesus Tablet.” The
Wall Street Journal
struck a similarly exalted note: “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”
    As if to underscore the historic nature of the launch, Jobs invited back many of the old-timers from his early Apple days. Morepoignantly, James Eason, who had performed his liver transplant the year before, and Jeffrey Norton, who had operated on his pancreas in 2004, were in the audience, sitting with his wife, his son, and Mona Simpson.
    Jobs did his usual masterly job of putting a new device into context, as he had done for the iPhone three years earlier. This time he put up a screen that showed an iPhone and a laptop with a question mark in between. “The question is, is there room for something in the middle?” he asked. That “something” would have to be good at web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and ebooks. He drove a stake through the heart of the netbook concept. “Netbooks aren’t better at anything!” he said. The invited guests and employees cheered. “But we have something that is. We call it the iPad.”
    To underscore the casual nature of the iPad, Jobs ambled over to a comfortable leather chair and side table (actually, given his taste, it was a Le Corbusier chair and an Eero Saarinen table) and scooped one up. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop,” he enthused. He proceeded to surf to the
New York Times
website, send an email to Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller (“Wow, we really are announcing the iPad”), flip through a photo album, use a calendar, zoom in on the Eiffel Tower on Google Maps, watch some video clips (
Star Trek
and Pixar’s
Up
), show off the iBook shelf, and play a song (Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which he had played at the iPhone launch). “Isn’t that awesome?” he asked.
    With his final slide, Jobs emphasized one of the themes of his life, which was embodied by the iPad: a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street. “The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he concluded. The iPad was the digital reincarnation of the
Whole Earth Catalog
, the place where creativity met tools for living.
    For once, the initial reaction was not a Hallelujah Chorus. The iPad was not yet available (it would go on sale in April), and some who watched Jobs’s demo were not quite sure what it was. An iPhone on steroids? “I haven’t been this let down since Snooki hooked up with The Situation,” wrote
Newsweek
’s Daniel Lyons (who moonlightedas “The Fake Steve Jobs” in an online parody). Gizmodo ran a contributor’s piece headlined “Eight Things That Suck about the iPad” (no multitasking, no cameras, no Flash . . . ). Even the name came in for ridicule in the blogosphere, with snarky comments about feminine hygiene products and maxi pads. The hashtag “#iTampon” was the number-three trending topic on Twitter that day.
    There was also the requisite dismissal from Bill Gates. “I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard—in other words a netbook—will be the mainstream,” he told Brent Schlender. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with the iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but