Steve Jobs

that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs’s dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname “the beige toaster,” which did not enhance its popularity. It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”
    At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation. He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the “Macintosh XL.” Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted, it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in. “I was furious because the Mac XL wasn’t real,” said Hoffman. “It was just to blowthe excess Lisas out the door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned.”
    The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which was supposed to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant “1984” ad. Unfortunately there was a fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but the storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat for the new ad, titled “Lemmings,” showed dark-suited, blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to their death. From the beginning both Jobs and Sculley were uneasy. It didn’t seem as if it would convey a positive or glorious image of Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who had bought an IBM.
    Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. “You guys didn’t want to run ‘1984’ last year,” one of them said. According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, “I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial.” When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the
Snow White
song “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,” and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. “I can’t believe you’re going to insult businesspeople across America by running that,” Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she hated it. “I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop publishing.”
    Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency’s entreaties and ran the commercial during the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford Stadium with Sculley’s wife, Leezy (who couldn’t stand Jobs), and Jobs’s new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the commercial was shown near the end of the fourth quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the overhead screen and had little reaction. Across the country, most of the response was negative. “It insulted the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the president of a market research firm told
Fortune
. Apple’s marketing manager suggested afterward that the company might want to buy an ad in the
Wall Street Journal
apologizing. Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page and apologize for the apology.
    Jobs’s discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was on display when he traveled to New York in January to do another round of one-on-one press interviews. Andy Cunningham, from Regis McKenna’s firm, was in charge of hand-holding and logistics at the Carlyle. When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin the next day. The piano was not in the right place; the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that he didn’t like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. “We got into a