Steve Jobs

your left hand so your palm covered the tiny gap, you could lose your connection. It occurred with perhaps one in a hundred calls. Because Jobs insisted on keeping his unreleased products secret (even the phone that Gizmodo scored in a bar had a fake case around it), the iPhone 4 did not go through the live testing that most electronic devices get. So the flaw was not caught before the massive rush to buy it began. “The question is whether the twin policies of putting design in front of engineering and having a policy of supersecrecy surrounding unreleased products helped Apple,” Tony Fadell said later. “On the whole, yes, but unchecked power is a bad thing, and that’s what happened.”
    Had it not been the Apple iPhone 4, a product that had everyone transfixed, the issue of a few extra dropped calls would not have made news. But it became known as “Antennagate,” and it boiled to a head in early July, when
Consumer Reports
did some rigorous tests and said that it could not recommend the iPhone 4 because of the antenna problem.
    Jobs was in Kona Village, Hawaii, with his family when the issue arose. At first he was defensive. Art Levinson was in constant contact by phone, and Jobs insisted that the problem stemmed from Google and Motorola making mischief. “They want to shoot Apple down,” he said.
    Levinson urged a little humility. “Let’s try to figure out if there’s something wrong,” he said. When he again mentioned the perception that Apple was arrogant, Jobs didn’t like it. It went against his black-white, right-wrong way of viewing the world. Apple was a company of principle, he felt. If others failed to see that, it was their fault, not a reason for Apple to play humble.
    Jobs’s second reaction was to be hurt. He took the criticism personally and became emotionally anguished. “At his core, he doesn’t do things that he thinks are blatantly wrong, like some pure pragmatists in our business,” Levinson said. “So if he feels he’s right, he will justcharge ahead rather than question himself.” Levinson urged him not to get depressed. But Jobs did. “Fuck this, it’s not worth it,” he told Levinson. Finally Tim Cook was able to shake him out of his lethargy. He quoted someone as saying that Apple was becoming the new Microsoft, complacent and arrogant. The next day Jobs changed his attitude. “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” he said.
    When the data about dropped calls were assembled from AT&T, Jobs realized there was a problem, even if it was more minor than people were making it seem. So he flew back from Hawaii. But before he left, he made some phone calls. It was time to gather a couple of trusted old hands, wise men who had been with him during the original Macintosh days thirty years earlier.
    His first call was to Regis McKenna, the public relations guru. “I’m coming back from Hawaii to deal with this antenna thing, and I need to bounce some stuff off of you,” Jobs told him. They agreed to meet at the Cupertino boardroom at 1:30 the next afternoon. The second call was to the adman Lee Clow. He had tried to retire from the Apple account, but Jobs liked having him around. His colleague James Vincent was summoned as well.
    Jobs also decided to bring his son Reed, then a high school senior, back with him from Hawaii. “I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I want you to be in every single one because you’ll learn more in those two days than you would in two years at business school,” he told him. “You’re going to be in the room with the best people in the world making really tough decisions and get to see how the sausage is made.” Jobs got a little misty-eyed when he recalled the experience. “I would go through that all again just for that opportunity to have him see me at work,” he said. “He got to see what his dad does.”
    They were joined by Katie Cotton, the steady public relations chief at Apple, and seven other top executives. The meeting lasted all afternoon. “It was one of the greatest meetings of my life,” Jobs later said. He began by laying out all the data they had gathered. “Here are the facts. So what should we do about it?”
    McKenna was the most calm and straightforward. “Just lay out the truth, the data,” he said. “Don’t appear arrogant, but appear firm andconfident.” Others, including Vincent, pushed Jobs to be more apologetic, but McKenna said no. “Don’t go into the press conference