Steve Jobs

hotel’s technician. He said he had looked at all the machines, and this was the one he would be buying.
    To produce the fully packaged Apple II would require significant capital, so they considered selling the rights to a larger company. Jobs went to Al Alcorn and asked for the chance to pitch it to Atari’s management. He set up a meeting with the company’s president, Joe Keenan, who was a lot more conservative than Alcorn and Bushnell. “Steve goes in to pitch him, but Joe couldn’t stand him,” Alcorn recalled. “He didn’t appreciate Steve’s hygiene.” Jobs was barefoot, and at one point put his feet up on a desk. “Not only are we not going to buy this thing,” Keenan shouted, “but get your feet off my desk!” Alcorn recalled thinking, “Oh, well. There goes that possibility.”
    In September Chuck Peddle of the Commodore computer company came by the Jobs house to get a demo. “We’d opened Steve’s garage to the sunlight, and he came in wearing a suit and a cowboy hat,” Wozniak recalled. Peddle loved the Apple II, and he arranged a presentation for his top brass a few weeks later at Commodore headquarters. “You might want to buy us for a few hundred thousand dollars,” Jobs said when they got there. Wozniak was stunned by this “ridiculous” suggestion, but Jobs persisted. The Commodore honchos called a few days later to say they had decided it would be cheaper to build their own machine. Jobs was not upset. He had checked out Commodore and decided that its leadership was “sleazy.” Wozniak didnot rue the lost money, but his engineering sensibilities were offended when the company came out with the Commodore PET nine months later. “It kind of sickened me. They made a real crappy product by doing it so quick. They could have had Apple.”
    The Commodore flirtation brought to the surface a potential conflict between Jobs and Wozniak: Were they truly equal in what they contributed to Apple and what they should get out of it? Jerry Wozniak, who exalted the value of engineers over mere entrepreneurs and marketers, thought most of the money should be going to his son. He confronted Jobs personally when he came by the Wozniak house. “You don’t deserve shit,” he told Jobs. “You haven’t produced anything.” Jobs began to cry, which was not unusual. He had never been, and would never be, adept at containing his emotions. He told Steve Wozniak that he was willing to call off the partnership. “If we’re not fifty-fifty,” he said to his friend, “you can have the whole thing.” Wozniak, however, understood better than his father the symbiosis they had. If it had not been for Jobs, he might still be handing out schematics of his boards for free at the back of Homebrew meetings. It was Jobs who had turned his ingenious designs into a budding business, just as he had with the Blue Box. He agreed they should remain partners.
    It was a smart call. To make the Apple II successful required more than just Wozniak’s awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs’s role.
    He began by asking their erstwhile partner Ron Wayne to design a case. “I assumed they had no money, so I did one that didn’t require any tooling and could be fabricated in a standard metal shop,” he said. His design called for a Plexiglas cover attached by metal straps and a rolltop door that slid down over the keyboard.
    Jobs didn’t like it. He wanted a simple and elegant design, which he hoped would set Apple apart from the other machines, with their clunky gray metal cases. While haunting the appliance aisles at Macy’s, he was struck by the Cuisinart food processors and decided that he wanted a sleek case made of light molded plastic. At a Homebrew meeting, he offered a local consultant, Jerry Manock, $1,500 to produce such a design. Manock, dubious about Jobs’s appearance, asked for the money up front. Jobs refused, but Manock took the job anyway.Within weeks he had produced a simple foam-molded plastic case that was uncluttered and exuded friendliness. Jobs was thrilled.
    Next came the power supply. Digital geeks like Wozniak paid little attention to something so analog and mundane, but Jobs decided it was a key component. In particular he wanted—as he would his entire career—to provide power in a way that avoided the need for a fan. Fans inside computers were not Zen-like; they distracted. He dropped by Atari to consult