Steve Jobs

responding to Apple’s complaint, raided the house of the reporter, it raised the question of whether control freakiness had combined with arrogance.
    Jon Stewart was a friend of Jobs and an Apple fan. Jobs had visited him privately in February when he took his trip to New York to meet with media executives. But that didn’t stop Stewart from going after him on
The Daily Show.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way! Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one!” Stewart said, only half-jokingly. Behind him, the word “appholes” appeared on the screen. “You guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. But now, are you becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”
    By late spring the issue was being discussed among board members. “There is an arrogance,” Art Levinson told me over lunch just after he had raised it at a meeting. “It ties into Steve’s personality. He can react viscerally and lay out his convictions in a forceful manner.” Such arrogance was fine when Apple was the feisty underdog. But now Apple was dominant in the mobile market. “We need to make the transition to being a big company and dealing with the hubris issue,” said Levinson. Al Gore also talked about the problem at board meetings. “The context for Apple is changing dramatically,” he recounted. “It’s not hammer-thrower against Big Brother. Now Apple’s big, and people see it as arrogant.” Jobs became defensive when the topic was raised. “He’s still adjusting to it,” said Gore. “He’s better at being the underdog than being a humble giant.”
    Jobs had little patience for such talk. The reason Apple was being criticized, he told me then, was that “companies like Google and Adobe are lying about us and trying to tear us down.” What did he think of the suggestion that Apple sometimes acted arrogantly? “I’m not worried about that,” he said, “because we’re not arrogant.”
    Antennagate: Design versus Engineering
    In many consumer product companies, there’s tension between the designers, who want to make a product look beautiful, and the engineers, who need to make sure it fulfills its functional requirements. At Apple, where Jobs pushed both design and engineering to the edge, that tension was even greater.
    When he and design director Jony Ive became creative coconspirators back in 1997, they tended to view the qualms expressed by engineers as evidence of a can’t-do attitude that needed to be overcome. Their faith that awesome design could force superhuman feats of engineering was reinforced by the success of the iMac and iPod. When engineers said something couldn’t be done, Ive and Jobs pushed them to try, and usually they succeeded. There were occasional small problems. The iPod Nano, for example, was prone to getting scratched because Ive believed that a clear coating would lessen the purity of his design. But that was not a crisis.
    When it came to designing the iPhone, Ive’s design desires bumped into a fundamental law of physics that could not be changed even by a reality distortion field. Metal is not a great material to put near an antenna. As Michael Faraday showed, electromagnetic waves flow around the surface of metal, not through it. So a metal enclosure around a phone can create what is known as a Faraday cage, diminishing the signals that get in or out. The original iPhone started with a plastic band at the bottom, but Ive thought that would wreck the design integrity and asked that there be an aluminum rim all around. After that ended up working out, Ive designed the iPhone 4 with a steel rim. The steel would be the structural support, look really sleek, and serve as part of the phone’s antenna.
    There were significant challenges. In order to serve as an antenna, the steel rim had to have a tiny gap. But if a person covered that gap with a finger or sweaty palm, there could be some signal loss. The engineers suggested a clear coating over the metal to help prevent this, but again Ive felt that this would detract from the brushed-metal look. The issue was presented to Jobs at various meetings, but he thoughtthe engineers were crying wolf. You can make this work, he said. And so they did.
    And it worked, almost perfectly. But not totally perfectly. When the iPhone 4 was released in June 2010, it looked awesome, but a problem soon became evident: If you held the phone a certain way, especially using