Table Of ContentDedication
For Patrick
Contents
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue: I Used to Rule the World
1 The Disappearing Visionary
2 Reality Distortion
3 Vertical
4 Attila the Hun of Inventory
5 The Next Lily Pad
6 Ghost and Cipher
7 Joy City
8 Into the Fire
9 Looks Like Rain
10 Thermonuclear
11 The Innovator’s Dilemma
12 Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies
13 Fight Club
14 Typhoon
15 Revolt
16 Velvin
17 Critical Mass
18 Holy Grail
19 The Red Chair
20 Manifesto
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
This is a work of nonfiction, based on five years of reporting, including three
years that I spent covering Apple for the Wall Street Journal. All of the names
and details described are real.
When I embarked on this project before Steve Jobs’s death, I had planned to
chronicle how the CEO and his team had rescued Apple from near bankruptcy
and turned it into a breathtakingly successful empire. About a year into my
reporting, however, I realized that a more compelling story about the company’s
leadership transition was unfolding right in front of me. Having previously
covered Sony and seen its decline following the departure of its founder, I was
particularly interested in how Apple would handle these challenging first years
in an increasingly complex business environment. And so I started over again
with one question—can a great company stay great without its visionary leader?
I thought that if any company could, it would be Apple.
Although I had access to the company’s media events and some of its
executives during my reporting for the newspaper, Apple chose not to grant any
further access apart from one shareholders’ meeting. Even so, I was able to draw
from more than two hundred interviews with nearly two hundred sources who
have firsthand knowledge of Apple’s world in the United States, Europe, and
Asia. They include Apple executives and employees—past and present—as well
as business partners, lawyers, friends, and acquaintances who have come into
close contact with Apple’s inner circle at various points in the company’s
history. I also interviewed former Foxconn and Samsung employees, executives,
consultants, and business partners. Because of the secretive nature of all three of
these corporate giants, most of these sources asked not to be named for fear of
repercussions. A couple of sources feared reprisals from the Chinese
government.
In pursuit of this story, I traveled around the world, starting with the
company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, before heading for Chicago,
Boston, London, Frankfurt, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo. I visited
Tim Cook’s hometown of Robertsdale, Alabama, interviewing the CEO’s former
teachers, driving by his high school, and having fried chicken at Mama Lou’s
restaurant. I attended the Apple v. Samsung trial in San Jose, visited a black
market in Shenzhen, and watched the waves of workers entering the gates of
Foxconn’s massive complex in Longhua. In Taipei, I went to Hon Hai’s
headquarters in the industrial Tucheng district, where stern-looking guards
forbade me from taking photos of the building from their side of the road. I also
scoured public records of Apple’s corporate dealings and reviewed thousands of
pages of court transcripts, internal memos, company emails, and other
documents, all of which helped me piece together parts of the story.
Though I witnessed some of the scenes and dialogue in the book firsthand or
watched them on videos, other sections are reconstructed from interviews,
transcripts, and research. By necessity, some details are based on the
recollections of my sources. Mindful of the vagaries of memory, I have made
every attempt to confirm their accuracy. When I mention someone by name,
readers should not assume that the subject granted me an interview. Many of the
statements or occurrences unfolded before an audience or became widely known
quickly as they were shared inside Apple.
In many sections, I consulted experts in various fields for help in providing
background and context on technical subjects such as patent law, corporate
governance, and software design. I also drew on the insights, observations, and
reporting by esteemed journalist colleagues around the world, who generously
provided material to supplement my reporting and are mentioned by name in the
acknowledgments.
To tell this truly global story, I relied extensively on news articles and books
written not just in English but also in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Having
been partly educated in Japan, I had no trouble reading the Japanese articles. For
the Chinese and Korean materials, I relied on assistants fluent in those
languages.
For specifics on how each chapter was reported, please see the endnotes.
Prologue
I Used to Rule the World
That Wednesday, the empire went silent.
Across the country, from Boston to San Francisco, Apple stores shooed away
customers in the middle of the day and locked their doors. In Chicago, the staff
hung a white curtain across its glass storefront. In Washington, D.C., a security
guard stood watch in front of the entrance. In Manhattan, the lights and
computers were still on, but the floor was eerily vacant.
Inside all of these stores, employees gathered around video monitors for the
start of the memorial service to honor the untimely death of their visionary
leader. Steve Jobs had been battling cancer for years, so his passing in early
October 2011 had not been surprising, but it was no less devastating. In Apple’s
Tokyo store, employees openly cried. It was the middle of the night, but they
had come in just for this occasion. They had been present when Jobs had stopped
by a few years before, and it was inconceivable for them not to bear witness to
his last gathering.
On the other side of the world, at Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters in
Northern California, it was morning. Fans from near and far had made a
pilgrimage to the campus, placing flowers, balloons, and notes in a makeshift
memorial alongside the sidewalk in front of Jobs’s office building. As
employees headed to the courtyard for the ceremony, they passed a colorful
string of a thousand paper cranes hanging on a tree in a Japanese symbol of
peace. The American, Californian, and Apple flags at the entrance flew at half-
staff. Posted signs asked employees to refrain from putting up photos online.
Secrecy was law at Apple, but it was particularly important on this day. The
company wanted to mourn the loss of its CEO quietly, away from the public’s
gaze.
One enterprising television station dispatched a helicopter that hovered over
the campus with a video camera that captured the scene. The live footage
showed people packed around the company’s outdoor amphitheater. Fall was
coming, and the leaves on the trees were blushing red. Thousands of employees
filled the courtyard. More lined up outside as shuttle buses delivered workers
from Apple’s satellite offices. Jobs’s widow, Laurene, sat discreetly to the left of
the stage. Dressed in black, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses, she flashed the
barest of smiles.
Apple employees whose offices faced the courtyard looked out from their
balconies. Next to them, draped on the buildings, were massive black-and-white
photos of Jobs two stories high. The deification of the fallen emperor had begun.
In one photo, a young Jobs sat in lotus position, cradling an original Macintosh
computer in his lap. In another shot from 2004, Jobs clasped his hands, a hint of
a smile suggesting a quiet confidence, almost as if he foresaw Apple’s coming
ascendency. The third image would adorn the cover of his biography—a bearded
Jobs with his hand touching his chin—a portrait of a man who knew he had
changed the world.
Nearby lay stacks of white program books with the title “Remembering
Steve.” Inside was a copy of a commencement speech that Jobs had given at
Stanford University in 2005.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” it said.
“Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s
thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
Lost in the inspirational messages was the hubristic side of Jobs: arrogant and
controlling, an obsessive-compulsive tyrant. Now that he was gone, these
complexities only added to his myth.
Although Apple’s faithful were gathered to celebrate their CEO’s
extraordinary life, many in attendance were eager to prove that Apple would
endure without him. The executive team had been running the company for
some time, but they were painfully conscious of the immense challenge ahead.
The world would be watching for any sign of faltering. Former vice president Al
Gore, a member of Apple’s board of directors, told the crowd to have faith. Jobs
had prepared them for this moment, instilling the passion and drive to dream up
transformative products. “Keep on skating to where the puck will be,” he said,
repeating the Wayne Gretzky line that Jobs used to quote.
The crowd was comforted when Jonathan Ive, Apple’s lead industrial
designer, appeared onstage. He and Jobs had created Apple’s beautifully
designed products. He was Jobs’s closest colleague.
“He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so
powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts so easily missed, so
easily compromised, so easily just squished,” Ive said. “His, I think, was a
victory for beauty, for purity, and . . . for giving a damn.”
Now it would be up to Ive to keep those ideals from slipping away. The same
was true of Jobs’s other lieutenants. Each shouldered the responsibility for
Apple’s continued success.
Tim Cook, the company’s new CEO, was known as a stoic. But as he stepped
to the microphone to talk about Apple’s loss, his voice cracked.
“The last two weeks for me have been the saddest of my life by far,” Cook
admitted. Jobs, he said, had been called “a visionary, a creative genius, a rebel, a
nonconformist, an original, the greatest CEO ever, the best innovator of all time,
the ultimate entrepreneur. He had the curiosity of a child and the mind of a
genius. All of these are true and the fact that all of them were embodied in one
man is amazing. But for those of us who knew and loved him, none of these
words, by themselves or in total, adequately define who Steve was.”
Cook summarized Jobs’s thinking eloquently, quoting some of Jobs’s most
famous credos.
“Simple can be harder than complex. . . . You have to work hard to get your
thinking clean, to make it simple. . . . Just figure out what’s next.”
Knowing what to do next was one thing. Executing it was another. Apple’s
business in the past few years had become much more complex. Bigger, more
global, and higher profile, the company now had much to lose. Apple was
engaged in a fierce global battle against rivals in the smartphone and tablet
markets, and it was under greater scrutiny from the government. Cook had to
manage a sprawling supply chain in Asia, while also satisfying the public’s
insatiable appetite for “insanely great” products. Jobs’s stupendous feats had
built their expectations to stratospheric levels, and each success made the next
one that much harder to achieve.
Jobs didn’t expect Cook to do what he would have done. He didn’t even want
Cook to ask that question.
“Just do what’s right,” he had advised.
After working side by side with Jobs for almost fifteen years, Cook found his
absence inconceivable. How would Cook make his mark in a company so
infused with Jobs’s persona that even the bottle of water placed at his side was
Glacéau Smartwater—Jobs’s brand of choice? Apple was Jobs and Jobs was
