Steve Jobs

and he listed Jobs’s accomplishments during his tenure. Mickey Drexler added that watching Jobs transform Apple was “the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in business,” and Art Levinson praised Jobs’s diligence in ensuring that there was a smooth transition. Campbell said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes as the formal resolutions transferring power were passed.
    Over lunch, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller came in to display mockups of some products that Apple had in the pipeline. Jobs peppered them with questions and thoughts, especially about what capacities the fourth-generation cellular networks might have and what features needed to be in future phones. At one point Forstall showed off a voice recognition app. As he feared, Jobs grabbed the phone in the middle of the demo and proceeded to see if he could confuse it. “What’s the weather in Palo Alto?” he asked. The app answered. After a few more questions, Jobs challenged it: “Are you a man or a woman?” Amazingly, the app answered in its robotic voice, “They did not assign me a gender.” For a moment the mood lightened.
    When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that HP had suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber and declared that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands,” he said. “But now it’sbeing dismembered and destroyed. It’s tragic. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple.” As he prepared to leave, the board members gathered around to give him a hug.
    After meeting with his executive team to explain the news, Jobs rode home with George Riley. When they arrived at the house, Powell was in the backyard harvesting honey from her hives, with help from Eve. They took off their screen helmets and brought the honey pot to the kitchen, where Reed and Erin had gathered, so that they could all celebrate the graceful transition. Jobs took a spoonful of the honey and pronounced it wonderfully sweet.
    That evening, he stressed to me that his hope was to remain as active as his health allowed. “I’m going to work on new products and marketing and the things that I like,” he said. But when I asked how it really felt to be relinquishing control of the company he had built, his tone turned wistful, and he shifted into the past tense. “I’ve had a very lucky career, a very lucky life,” he replied. “I’ve done all that I can do.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

     

LEGACY
     
    The Brightest Heaven of Invention
     

     
    At the 2006 Macworld, in front of a slide of him and Wozniak from thirty years earlier
     
    FireWire
    His personality was reflected in the products he created. Just as the core of Apple’s philosophy, from the original Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad a generation later, was the end-to-end integration of hardware and software, so too was it the case with Steve Jobs: His passions, perfectionism,demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business and the products that resulted.
    The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity was charming, in a geeky way, such as when he was explaining the profundity of Bob Dylan’s music or why whatever product he was unveiling at that moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made. At other times it could be terrifying, such as when he was fulminating about Google or Microsoft ripping off Apple.
    This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world. Colleagues referred to the hero/shithead dichotomy. You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day. The same was true of products, ideas, even food: Something was either “the best thing ever,” or it was shitty, brain-dead, inedible. As a result, any perceived flaw could set off a rant. The finish on a piece of metal, the curve of the head of a screw, the shade of blue on a box, the intuitiveness of a navigation screen—he would declare them to “completely suck” until that moment when he suddenly pronounced them “absolutely perfect.” He thought of himself as an artist, which he was, and he indulged in the temperament of one.
    His quest for