Steve Jobs

pulled out a bottle of mineral water and symbolically christened the prototype onstage. Down the hall, Atkinson heard the loud cheer, and with a sigh joined the group. The ensuing party featured skinny-dipping in the pool, a bonfire on the beach, and loud music that lasted all night, which caused the hotel, La Playa in Carmel, to ask them never to come back.
    Another of Jobs’s maxims at the retreat was “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them behave like swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing to commandeer from others. As Susan Kare put it, “He meant, ‘Let’s have a renegade feeling to our group. We can move fast. We can get things done.’” To celebrate Jobs’s birthday a few weeks later, the team paid for a billboard on the road to Apple headquarters. It read: “Happy 28th Steve. The Journey is the Reward.—The Pirates.”
    One of the Mac team’s programmers, Steve Capps, decided this new spirit warranted hoisting a Jolly Roger. He cut a patch of black cloth and had Kare paint a skull and crossbones on it. The eye patch she put on the skull was an Apple logo. Late one Sunday night Capps climbed to the roof of their newly built Bandley 3 building and hoistedthe flag on a scaffolding pole that the construction workers had left behind. It waved proudly for a few weeks, until members of the Lisa team, in a late-night foray, stole the flag and sent their Mac rivals a ransom note. Capps led a raid to recover it and was able to wrestle it from a secretary who was guarding it for the Lisa team. Some of the grown-ups overseeing Apple worried that Jobs’s buccaneer spirit was getting out of hand. “Flying that flag was really stupid,” said Arthur Rock. “It was telling the rest of the company they were no good.” But Jobs loved it, and he made sure it waved proudly all the way through to the completion of the Mac project. “We were the renegades, and we wanted people to know it,” he recalled.
    Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they could stand up to Jobs. If they knew what they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire it. By 1983 those most familiar with his reality distortion field had discovered something further: They could, if necessary, just quietly disregard what he decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would appreciate their renegade attitude and willingness to ignore authority. After all, that’s what he did.
    By far the most important example of this involved the choice of a disk drive for the Macintosh. Apple had a corporate division that built mass-storage devices, and it had developed a disk-drive system, code-named Twiggy, that could read and write onto those thin, delicate 5¼-inch floppy disks that older readers (who also remember Twiggy the model) will recall. But by the time the Lisa was ready to ship in the spring of 1983, it was clear that the Twiggy was buggy. Because the Lisa also came with a hard-disk drive, this was not a complete disaster. But the Mac had no hard disk, so it faced a crisis. “The Mac team was beginning to panic,” said Hertzfeld. “We were using a single Twiggy drive, and we didn’t have a hard disk to fall back on.”
    The team discussed the problem at the January 1983 retreat, and Debi Coleman gave Jobs data about the Twiggy failure rate. A few days later he drove to Apple’s factory in San Jose to see the Twiggy being made. More than half were rejected. Jobs erupted. With his face flushed, he began shouting and sputtering about firing everyone who worked there. Bob Belleville, the head of the Mac engineering team,gently guided him to the parking lot, where they could take a walk and talk about alternatives.
    One possibility that Belleville had been exploring was to use a new 3½-inch disk drive that Sony had developed. The disk was cased in sturdier plastic and could fit into a shirt pocket. Another option was to have a clone of Sony’s 3½-inch disk drive manufactured by a smaller Japanese supplier, the Alps Electronics Co., which had been supplying disk drives for the Apple II. Alps had already licensed the technology from Sony, and if they could build their own version in time it would be much cheaper.
    Jobs and Belleville, along with Apple veteran Rod Holt (the guy Jobs enlisted to design the first power supply for the Apple II), flew to Japan to figure out what to do. They took the bullet train from Tokyo to visit the