After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

Prologue

The artist loitered in the dimly lit corridor of a San Jose theater, waiting for his cue. He knew his lines, understood what was expected. Knowing that others were studying him, he wore a face that betrayed nothing.

It was early June 2019, and Jony Ive’s presence was required at a product demonstration event after one of Apple’s annual gatherings, the ritual performances where the secretive company unveiled its newest wonders, all of which Ive had been instrumental in designing. Dressed rich casual in loose-fitting linen pants, a T-shirt, and a woven cardigan, he was fifty-two years old now and had nothing left to prove. It was no exaggeration to say that his way of seeing, his love of pure, simple lines, had already redrawn the world. Yet he was never satisfied with his own creations, noticing imperfections invisible to others such as a watch he considered a millimeter too thick or the infinitesimal gap where iPhone parts intersected. He saw poetry inside the machine. He found inspiration in the curve of flowers and the color of tropical waters. He considered imitation to be lazy theft, not flattery. When he stood among the members of his team, they felt as though any problem were solvable, any breakthrough possible.

Yet here he was, waiting like a bit player for his moment under the lights, passing time before an oak table that held a newly made Mac Pro. He knew its every detail. He had been in the studio as his design team had discussed the holes of deep-sea coral that brought ocean reefs to life. He had watched as that conversation helped create an aluminum computer frame with a series of overlapping holes that could breathe air and heat into and out of the machine. The result was a computer that looked unlike any other in the world.

Standing before his latest marvel, Ive looked bored.

Then a buzz rippled from the theater’s entryway. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, strode into the room flanked by incoming CBS Evening News host Norah O’Donnell. Journalists and photographers backpedaled before him with boom microphones and cameras capturing his every move. The fifty-eight-year-old Cook was trim and muscular, the product of predawn workouts and a lifelong diet of grilled chicken and steamed vegetables. He had been at the helm of the world’s largest publicly traded company for nearly a decade, overseeing a period of tremendous revenue growth that had lifted its valuation to $1 trillion. His ascent to that corporate pinnacle was a remarkable journey for the product of a small Alabama town, where a future managing a Denny’s would have been more probable than a rise to become one of the world’s most admired CEOs.

In many ways, Cook was Ive’s opposite. He had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize margins, squeezing some suppliers and persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions. Though he had started as a wizard of spreadsheets, he was rapidly distinguishing himself as a master politician who had forged global alliances with the presidents of both the United States and the People’s Republic of China. A single sentence from his mouth could send the world’s stock markets into free fall.

The clicks of cameras that saluted him were deafening. Ive stepped into the commotion and greeted Cook. Then they both turned toward the computer to play their parts in a set piece of contrived spontaneity.

Ive acted as though he were showing his CEO something he had never seen before. Cook feigned earnest curiosity as though he were unaware that this was all a ritual of marketing. The staginess of it left some in the audience smirking.

The moment was so awkward that Ive could hardly stand it. He lingered under the lights for only a few minutes, until he’d finished his lines, and then stepped away as the cameras zoomed in on Cook. Almost no one noticed as Ive glided through the crowd and slipped out a side door, disappearing.

The truth was, Ive had been slipping out of focus for years. Apple was no longer his beautiful creation. He was no longer the star of the show. The cameras no longer clicked for him, and news anchors no longer invited him to wax poetically about design. The outside world wanted to know what the company was going to do about tariffs, immigration, and privacy. They wanted Cook. The creative soul of Apple had been eclipsed by the machine.

Chapter 1

One More Thing

Jony Ive steeled himself outside the stately two-story home in Palo Alto. It was early Tuesday morning, October 4, 2011, and a storm system shrouded Silicon Valley’s usually sunny flatlands with heavy clouds. In better circumstances, Ive would have been arriving in Cupertino. Apple was hosting a special event there that day to introduce a new iPhone that he had designed. Instead, he was skipping the show to see his boss, friend, and spiritual partner, Steve Jobs.

Ive entered a house that had become a hospital. Doctors and nurses shuffled around inside where Jobs, sick with pancreatic cancer, was confined to bed. In the study-turned-bedroom where he lay, a TV was wired to provide the world’s only video stream of Apple’s product event, a private screening for Apple’s longtime showman.

Visiting the home weighed heavily on Ive. Since Jobs had gone on medical leave at the start of the year, he had continued to summon Ive and other leaders from Apple’s design, software, hardware, and marketing teams to the house. Inside, the passing of time could be measured by the CEO’s weight loss and diminished movement. His face had grown gaunt, and his legs had atrophied into rigid branches. He seldom left the bed where he was surrounded by photographs of family, prescription bottles, stacks of paper, monitors, and machines. Still he refused to stop working.

Apple’s not a job for me, he would tell them. It’s part of my life. I love this stuff.

On that day, as Ive headed for the room where Jobs lay, he passed an image by the photographer Harold Edgerton, the man who froze time. The photograph showed a red apple suspended against a space-blue background the instant after it had been shot by a bullet, exploding its core.

ABOUT FIFTEEN MILES AWAY, Tim Cook pulled into the asphalt parking lot outside Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop. The company’s thirty-two-acre campus, a ring of six off-white buildings, was located in Cupertino, just off Interstate 280 and behind BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse, a national chain and an unassuming base of operation for a company racking up yearly profits of nearly $26 billion.

It was perhaps the most important Tuesday of Cook’s career. Two months earlier, Jobs had elevated him from chief operating officer to chief executive officer. The timing of the promotion had caught the world by surprise. Apple and Jobs had concealed the severity of Jobs’s illness and deprived staff, investors, and the media of insight into his deteriorating health. When he ceded power to his longtime lieutenant, he assured employees and investors that he would remain involved in product development and corporate strategy but said that Cook would lead the business, a position that thrust the company’s back-office manager to the forefront of its product release events.

In a few hours, about three hundred journalists and special guests would descend on Apple’s campus for Cook’s first keynote address. Such events were usually held in large auditoriums or convention centers in San Francisco, but this one was being hosted in a cramped lecture room known as Town Hall on the back side of its campus. Apple’s showrunners had chosen the small venue, close to home, intentionally. Jobs was the ultimate showman. Cook was not. Apple’s cofounder had turned corporate presentations into product theater, winding up the audience with carefully crafted stories that framed the purpose of a new device with a simplicity that excited potential customers and fueled sales. He had hyped the iPhone as being three things: a phone, a music player, and an internet communication device. He had turned the slender MacBook Air into a silver rabbit so thin it could be pulled out of a brown office envelope. And he had persuaded the world that iPods weren’t about playing songs but about changing the way people discovered and enjoyed music. Cook was more comfortable evaluating supply chain logistics than standing in front of an audience. When he had taken the stage at previous events, it had been in a secondary role to detail the number of computers sold or stores opened. But with Apple’s leading man ill, the time had come for Cook, the understudy, to step into a starring role.

Holding the meeting in Town Hall reduced the risks of Cook’s debut. The venue was the equivalent of Off Broadway, with fewer seats for journalists and critics who might pen bad reviews. It was also on campus, so Cook had been able to walk over to the venue from his office throughout the week for repeated rehearsals. He had spent hours going through his scripted remarks in a bid to become desensitized to potential stage fright. The size of the venue meant that there were fewer cameras, a smaller crew, and less noise. The familiarity of the surroundings focused his attention on the most important task: delivering his lines.

STAFF NICKNAMED THE PHONE coming out that day For Steve.

Over the past three decades, Jobs had cemented his place as a man of such original vision that he had drawn comparisons to both Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. Working from his parents’ ranch home in Los Altos, California, he and his friend Steve Wozniak, a self-taught engineer, developed one of the first computers for the masses, a gray box with a keyboard and power supply that could display graphics. In 1977, their company became formally incorporated as Apple Computer Inc., a name inspired by Jobs’s favorite band, the Beatles, and their record label, Apple Records. Jobs’s brazen salesmanship of their computers was dismissed by some as all pitch, no substance, but the Apple II computer became one of the first commercially successful PCs, earning the company $117 million in annual sales before it went public in 1980. It made Jobs and Wozniak millionaires and secured their place in Silicon Valley mythology with a rags-to-riches tale that had begun in a garage.

A masterful marketer with an eye for design, Jobs redefined the PC category in 1984 with the Macintosh, a computer for the masses that could be controlled by the click of a mouse rather than by pecking on a keyboard. He pitched it as a machine that would democratize technology and dethrone the largest computer maker, IBM. Working with the advertising agency Chiat/Day, he developed an Orwellian Super Bowl spot titled 1984 that cast the Macintosh and Apple as a sledgehammer-wielding Olympic sprinter who shatters a giant screen projecting Big Brother. He unveiled the computer a week later at one of Apple’s first signature events, captivating the audience in a darkened auditorium in Cupertino by turning the computer on and allowing it to speak for itself, saying, Hello, I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

But a sales slump in 1985 led the board to oust Jobs in favor of John Sculley, a former PepsiCo executive. Sculley pushed Apple to new sales heights until Microsoft’s Windows software began whittling away at Apple’s market share. The company was a late entrant to the laptop market, and infighting led to Sculley’s ouster. His successor, Michael Spindler, who joined the company in 1993, flooded the market with Apple computers, a strategy that only deepened its woes. The company lost nearly $2 billion in two years and was on the cusp of bankruptcy in 1996 when it struck a deal to buy a desktop computer company called NeXT that Jobs had launched while in exile.

Jobs returned to Apple and ignited one of the most remarkable business comebacks in history. He culled its product lineup, used NeXT’s operating system as the foundation of OS X, a faster, more modern software system, and spearheaded the development of a translucent, candy-colored desktop called the iMac that returned the company to sales growth. He then pushed Apple beyond computers into consumer electronics with the iPod, which came out in 2001 and put thousands of ninety-nine-cent songs into people’s pockets. The iPhone followed in 2007, introducing a touch-screen system that changed communication and became one of the best-selling products in history. Its successor, the iPad, which came out in 2010, redefined tablet computing. The string of product successes turned Jobs into a cult hero.

Apple’s most ardent customers were as fervent about and protective of the company as members of a religious cult. Some tattooed its corporate logo or advertising phrases onto their wrists. As CEO, Jobs assumed an almost messianic hold over them, and his daily uniform—a black turtleneck, Levi’s 501 jeans, and New Balance sneakers—added to his ecclesiastical bearing. He could distort reality. He refused to accept limits in engineering or manufacturing that might impede one of his ideas, and he could persuade his team of designers and engineers that they could achieve what seemed impossible. He was so convincing that some believed he might even outlive death.

THOUGH JOBS HADN’T ATTENDED rehearsals ahead of that day’s event, some of Apple’s leadership arrived at Town Hall that morning wondering: Will he show up?

Staff saved an aisle seat at the front of the lecture room for him, draping a black piece of cloth with the word Reserved in white over the back of a tan-colored chair. Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, who sat in the adjacent seat, knew that the odds were against Jobs filling it. Jobs’s health had worsened in recent days, but he had surprised everyone before and even some of his closest advisers had not given up hope that the empty seat would be filled by the time the event began.

The lights were low when Tim Cook slipped into the front of the room from behind a dark screen with a white Apple logo. His thin lips formed a flat grin as a few people applauded politely. In a Brooks Brothers spin on Jobs’s casual and fashionable Issey Miyake turtleneck, Cook wore a black broadcloth button-down shirt and spun a presentation remote in his hands as he paced in front of the crowd.

Good morning, he said. This is my first product launch since being named CEO. I’m sure you didn’t know that.

He smirked, hoping that his dry humor would take some tension out of the room. A strained chuckle rippled through the audience. Though the joke hadn’t landed, Cook pushed forward. I love Apple, he said. I consider it the privilege of a lifetime to have worked here for almost fourteen years, and I am very excited about this new role.

His voice grew confident as he shifted his focus to Apple’s growing retail business. The company had just opened two amazing stores in China, he said. The one in Shanghai had set a record by welcoming a hundred thousand visitors in its first weekend, a total that Apple’s flagship store in Los Angeles had taken a month to achieve after its debut. Cook transitioned to business highlights from Apple’s Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad products, complete with line graphs and pie charts. I’m pleased to tell you this morning that we have passed the quarter of a billion unit sales mark, he said. Today, we’re taking it to the next level!

Cook ceded the stage to Jobs’s other top lieutenants. Mobile software chief Scott Forstall detailed new messaging capabilities, services head Eddy Cue followed with a demonstration of iCloud, and marketing chief Phil Schiller revealed the iPhone 4S, which featured longer battery life and a better camera but looked like its predecessor. The event culminated with Forstall doing a live demonstration of Apple’s new virtual assistant, Siri, that with the push of a button and a vocal question pulled up the weather, showed stock prices, and listed nearby Greek restaurants.

It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? Cook asked as he reclaimed the stage. Only Apple could make such amazing hardware, software, and services and bring them together in such a powerful yet integrated experience.

His enthusiasm failed to win over the hardened tech press. The journalists and technology analysts in the audience were unimpressed. One technology analyst told the Wall Street Journal that the presentation had been underwhelming. Another expressed disappointment that Apple had stuck with a 3.5-inch iPhone screen instead of pushing it to 4 inches. Fans grumbled on Twitter. Investors dumped shares, sending Apple’s stock price down as much as 5 percent and erasing billions of dollars in market value. It was a box-office rejection.

Cook and the rest of Apple’s leadership had no time to process the public reaction. As the event ended, Jobs’s wife, Laurene, texted some of his top lieutenants—Cook, Phil Schiller, Eddy Cue, and Katie Cotton, the vice president of worldwide communications—to say they should come to the house. As the group huddled, they were gripped by fear: either Jobs didn’t like the event and wanted to chew them out, or his health had worsened.

They sped to the house, some fifteen minutes away, hopeful that Jobs’s wrath awaited. It was easier to imagine him angry than process their unspoken despair that his health had prevented him from attending.

When they arrived at the Tudor-style home, Jony Ive had already departed after spending time alone with Jobs that morning. Laurene told the parade of business executives that Jobs was doing poorly and wanted to speak with each of them individually. He wouldn’t be reprimanding them. He wanted to say goodbye.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, October 5, 2011, a symphony of notification dings rang across Infinite Loop. An alert appeared atop Apple employees’ iPhones, delivering the news Steven P. Jobs, Apple co-founder, dead at 56. It was among the first times in history that a founder-led company’s employees had learned about their longtime chief executive’s death on the revolutionary product he had created and they had brought to life.

A group of two dozen software engineers were in the middle of a meeting about product plans when the notification hit manager Henri Lamiraux’s iPhone. He stopped the meeting to share the news and watched as fellow programmers pulled out their phones to confirm what few wanted to believe. Without speaking, they shuffled out of the room in silence.

Less than fifteen miles away, Ive sat in the garden outside Jobs’s home. The October sky above was hazy that day and his shoes were too tight. Cook joined him and they sat together for a long time. Ive felt numb as he recalled the last words Jobs told him: I will miss our talks together.

Farther up the peninsula, General Counsel Bruce Sewell, who had left immediately after the show for a business trip, was stuck in the cabin of a plane that had just landed at San Francisco International Airport. People’s phones began to buzz, and hushed gasps reverberated around him. Nearby, someone whispered, Did you see that? Sewell hadn’t turned his phone on yet but knew immediately that his boss had died. Though the people in the cabin around him didn’t have a personal relationship with Jobs, they felt a connection to him through the Apple devices they held in their hands. Now they were wrestling with a question he’d been anticipating the entire flight: What would Jobs’s death mean for Apple and the world?

Obituaries of Jobs dominated the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He was credited with having transformed the fruit orchards of the San Francisco peninsula into a global innovation hub. Though he wasn’t a hardware engineer or software programmer, he had defined Apple’s product goals, assembled its talent, and prodded its teams to deliver what many initially considered to be impossible. He had enabled all of that through his charismatic leadership style and willingness to take big risks that had inspired loyalty even in the face of his occasionally caustic demeanor. Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being, Cook said in a letter to employees. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much. He reassured them that Apple was not going to change.

JOBS HAD ANTICIPATED the pitfalls ahead. He had been troubled by how the Walt Disney Company had floundered after its cofounder’s death; he had lectured Polaroid’s leadership after it had forced its founder, Edwin Land, out of the company; and he had become alarmed as Sony had lost its way without the direction of Akio Morita, the marketing virtuoso behind the Walkman. He believed that once-great companies often declined after they became monopolies, innovation slowed, and the products they made became an afterthought. Eventually, they put salespeople in charge and prioritized how much they sold instead of what they sold. Companies such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard were different. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be, he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. (In 2015, Hewlett-Packard was split up after a seventy-five-year run. By 2020, Intel was falling behind rivals in manufacturing more compact and powerful silicon chips.)

Much like Jobs, Walt Disney had built an empire through a combination of vision, ambition, and chance. He had grown up on a Missouri farm and dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. In 1923, he had moved to Hollywood and founded Disney Brothers Studio with his older brother Roy. Disney had concentrated on storytelling and helped come up with the brothers’ first hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The distribution contract gave the rights to Oswald to the distributor, Universal Pictures, so Disney recast the rabbit as a big-eared character named Mickey Mouse. The character had taken off when Disney had added sound, a novelty that had made it a global sensation. He had hired animators and developed new characters such as Goofy and Donald Duck before pushing into feature-length films with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Disney had structured his company much as Jobs structured Apple. It had been flat, staff members hadn’t had titles, and everyone had been called by their first name. If you’re important to the company, Disney said, you’ll know it.

The philosophy at Apple was the same. The company had only three C-suite titles before Jobs’s death: chief executive officer, chief operating officer, and chief financial officer. Another seven people served as senior vice presidents on the executive team. There were about ninety vice presidents, who developed and managed the products the company sold. Below them, there were senior directors and directors. On paper, everyone reported to the finance chief. The structure eliminated bureaucracy, a feature Jobs disdained and disregarded by communicating directly with some of Apple’s most talented employees.

Walt Disney had created a similar informality by building a company where everything flowed through him. After he had died of lung cancer in 1966, the company’s output flatlined as people began asking What would Walt do? rather than taking their own creative leaps. By the 1980s, the company’s share of the film market had dropped to 4 percent. It hadn’t regained its box-office or financial footing until Michael Eisner had become CEO in 1984 and backed a string of film hits.

Polaroid was another Jobs obsession. He considered its co-founder, Edwin Land, to be one of America’s greatest inventors. Land had been defined by many of the traits later associated with Jobs, such as vision, drive, and salesmanship. He had preceded Jobs in championing the idea of a company that sat at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. He had started Polaroid after creating a process for coating products with polarized film to reduce glare, including sunglasses. He had later invented a process to create instant photographs. From the introduction of its first camera in 1948 until Kodak developed a similar product in 1976, Polaroid had been the world’s preeminent camera maker. Land’s next invention, an instant home movie camera, had flopped, and he had been pushed out of the company. After his departure, Polaroid had refined its existing products rather than introducing new ones, leading Jobs to upbraid its management during a visit to the company around 1983 that it had become irrelevant.

Sony was the company Jobs knew best of all. In the 1980s, he had visited its headquarters in Japan and met with its cofounder Akio Morita. Like Jobs, Morita and cofounder Masaru Ibuka had relied on their instincts when making product decisions. The Walkman had been born out of Ibuka’s request for a portable music player to take along on international flights. Morita had tested an early prototype and brought it to market four months later with clever print ads that showed the device beneath the banner Why man learned to walk. The product had exploded in popularity, and over the next decade, Sony had developed eighty models. Under Morita’s direction, Sony had acquired record labels and movie studios in the belief that the company would benefit from controlling the songs and films that played on its music players and TVs. Morita had ceded his chairmanship in 1994. The company had tapped one of its star marketers as chief executive officer, and he had aimed to make Sony behave more like a traditional corporate titan than a company that acted on its founders’ intuition. Instead, the company’s electronics business had languished, and it had failed to deliver another hit.

Three great companies, led by three creative founders; none was the same without them.

JOBS WANTED APPLE to defy the fate of Disney, Polaroid, and Sony. In 2008, he hired Joel Podolny, the Yale School of Management dean, to create Apple University. He wanted a curriculum that would teach Apple newcomers what differentiated the company from its peers. When Podolny asked during the interview process how many classes should be offered and how large the faculty could be, Jobs scoffed. If I knew the answers to those questions, I wouldn’t need to hire someone like you, he said. Podolny persevered in creating a curriculum with classes such as Communicating at Apple, which emphasized clarity and simplicity in products and presentations. There were also case studies on important decisions such as Apple’s to make the iPod and iTunes compatible with Microsoft Windows.

But it would take more than codifying Jobs’s thinking to ensure that Apple succeeded. The CEO wasn’t preoccupied with Harvard Business School concepts of organizational behavior. The company he had built operated like a starfish. He sat at the intersection of legs that focused on excellence in marketing, design, engineering, and supply-chain management. He would crawl out to the end of a leg when he wished to and get personally involved, directing each division as he saw fit.

Before his death, Jobs pressed to keep the legs of Apple’s starfish together. He approached members of the executive team individually and pushed them to commit to remaining several more years at the company. Tim’s going to need you, he told them. He urged the board of directors to give the executive team retention stock grants, a request it fulfilled in an emergency meeting days after his death. Each executive received 150,000 restricted stock units with half becoming available in 2013 and half in 2016. Valued at the time at about $60 million each, the grants went to Sewell, Forstall, Schiller, finance chief Peter Oppenheimer, hardware chief Bob Mansfield, and supply-chain guru Jeff Williams. Cue, who had recently joined the executive team on a trial basis, received a smaller grant. Ive was believed to have been granted more than $60 million, but his award was not disclosed because he had arranged to avoid being classified as an officer of the company to keep his compensation secret. The largest allocation went to Cook, who received 1 million shares valued at $375 million, not just elevating Cook in the eyes of Wall Street but also putting him above the rest by giving him the kind of wealth typically reserved for one of Silicon Valley’s deified corporate founders.

THE MORNING AFTER JOBS DIED, Cook brought the executive team together in the company board room on the fourth floor of 1 Infinite Loop. Jobs’s chair, which was second from the end, remained empty. Cook sat to its right and Schiller to its left, as they always had. They would keep the empty chair between them at meetings for some time, a visual reminder that he was always present.

Cook encouraged everyone to share memories of Jobs. For many of them, losing Jobs was like losing a parent. Jobs had approved almost every business decision they had made for more than a decade. They shared stories and personal memories about him. Cook had assured the group that he wanted to preserve the heart and soul of the company Jobs had created and signaled that he had no intention of making any immediate changes. As they told stories, there was a collective sense that the greatest mark of respect they could give Jobs was not only to keep the company alive but to keep it at the forefront of technology by making great products.

TWO WEEKS LATER, thousands of Apple employees filled the grass courtyard inside Infinite Loop for a memorial service celebrating Jobs’s life. Stores around the empire were closed for an official day of mourning so that employees worldwide could tune in for a livestream of the event. The crowd on campus roared as Cook came onto a stage flanked by billboard-size black-and-white portraits of Jobs. Cook described Jobs as a visionary, a nonconformist, an original, the greatest CEO and most outstanding innovator of all time. He didn’t tell any personal stories about their relationship. Though Jobs had entrusted the company to Cook, he had considered his longtime chief operating officer to be an enigma. To those who worked alongside them, their connection was their corporate devotion. Cook’s dispassionate words reflected their businesslike bond.

I know Steve, and Steve would have wanted this cloud to lift for Apple and our focus to return to the work that he loved so much, Cook said. He put his hand over his heart before ticking off the principles that Jobs had made central to the company’s identity: the conviction that a team, not individuals, achieve great things in business; the imperative that staff refuse to accept work that was good enough and always push to deliver the insanely great; and the commitment that every product they create be beautiful.

He thought about Apple until his last day, Cook said, and among his last advice for me and for all of you was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right,’ he said.

Jobs’s guidance gave Cook stature. It showed that Cook was among the last to have spoken with the visionary and reminded staff that the late CEO had chosen Cook to lead them. Cook’s speech warned them that the company’s future would be connected with but not chained to its past. Without Jobs, its identity would have to change.

Ive followed Cook to the lectern and tucked his sunglasses into the neck of his black T-shirt. He laid his notes down and looked out at the mourners gathered before him, a terrifying sight for someone who loathed public speaking.

The crowd looking up at Ive had seen him regularly eating lunch with Jobs on the edge of the very courtyard where they stood. They knew that Jobs considered Ive the second most important person at Apple after only the CEO himself. They recalled that when Jobs hadn’t been in his office, he could often be found in the nearby design studio, where Ive’s insular team of about twenty industrial designers had sketched the Apple products that reignited the company’s business and earned Ive more operational power than anyone else at the company. In recent days, Ive had agonized over finding the right words to capture their deep working relationship and longtime friendship.

You know Steve used to say to me a lot, ‘Hey, Jony, here’s a dopey idea,’ he began. And sometimes they were really dopey.

The crowd laughed.

Sometimes they were truly dreadful, he continued. He paused. The silver watch on his left wrist sparkled in the sun as he moved his index finger to the next line. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet, simple ones which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.

Entranced, the crowd fell silent as Ive explained that Jobs had treated the creative process with reverence and appreciated that ideas were fragile, susceptible to being squashed before they took flight. The two had often traveled together, and Jobs’s demand for excellence had been so great that Ive said he had never unpacked his own bags after checking into a hotel. Instead, he would sit on the bed and wait for Jobs to call and say, Hey, Jony. This hotel sucks. Let’s go!

The crowd laughed, then grew quiet again as they listened to Ive describe what it had been like to develop a new creation with Jobs, how he would push for months to do what many said was impossible.

He constantly questioned: Is this good enough? Is this right? Ive said. And despite all his successes, all his achievements, he never presumed, he never assumed that we would get there in the end.

As Ive scooped up his notes, he told the crowd that Apple had arranged for a special performance in memory of Jobs. Will you please help me welcome our friends Coldplay, he said. He turned from the lectern and stalked back to his seat beneath a nearby white tent as the British band that had been featured in one of Apple’s iPod commercials began to play their first hit, Yellow.

As lead singer Chris Martin wailed into the microphone, Ive and the executive team looked on, their blank faces concealing their grief and all the anxieties roiling within them. The single most important figure in their professional life was gone. How could Apple go forward without him?

The answer would depend largely on Cook and Ive.

Chapter 2

The Artist

Staff called it the holy of holies. Located in building number 2 at Infinite Loop, the design studio was the most revered space on campus. It was where the products of the future were born and the artifacts of the past were reimagined. Tinted windows and a locked door protected Jony Ive and his team from inquisitive mortals. Inside was a reception desk in a glass booth where assistants vetted visitors. Beyond them, twenty designers, a few model makers, and several experts in paint, metal, and plastic appraised materials. Admittance was so tightly controlled that gaining badge access was considered one of the company’s highest honors.

After Steve Jobs’s death, Apple’s high priest, Jony Ive, shuffled past the reception desk with a heaviness that added to his stocky frame. His hair, shaved to a speckled stubble, and two-day beard framed a faraway look. In years past, Ive had been known for his easy smile and courteous impulse to hold doors open for others. Now grief had given way to scruffy melancholy.

The studio felt haunted. Jobs had visited it almost daily over the past decade, eager to see what the design team was working on and offer suggestions for improvement. The CEO had approached the space with reverence, never lifting the black sheets the design team used to conceal their work, waiting instead for a designer to do so for him. His respect for their aesthetic sensibilities, the obsessive precision they brought to defining curves, imagining custom colors, and selecting materials, had planted design securely atop Apple’s hierarchy. Jobs had had a designer’s eye. He had once walked past a prototype of a forthcoming iPhone and barked, What is this shit? The curvature and polish of the prototype had been changed only slightly during manufacturing, but he had caught the differences with a glance and been repulsed. He had demanded that it be fixed. Without him, the team lost the feedback that fueled their work.

Ive, who felt Jobs’s absence deeply, spent many of his days huddled at an oversize pale oak table at the edge of the studio, talking quietly with one of the team’s few female designers. To his colleagues, it looked like endless therapy sessions, as though Ive was lost in a wilderness of grief.

JONY IVE GREW UP wanting to be like his father.

Born in 1967 in a suburb of London, Jonathan Paul Ive was the first of two children brought into the world by Michael John Ive and Pamela Mary Walford. His parents had grown up in Chingford, a quiet community of Tudor-style row houses, and met through Sewardstone Evangelical Church, a small congregation of about fifty parishioners. They had shared a commitment to the church and had both become teachers. Pam, described by friends as bright and intellectual, had taught theology and later become a therapist. Mike, regarded as a hard worker and lifelong learner, had become a high school teacher of design and technology.

Mike’s interest in those fields sprouted from the community around him. Chingford sat atop a forested hill overlooking a series of blue-water reservoirs used to cool nearby manufacturing plants, copper mills, and a power station. Beyond the water rose the buildings of London, a city that sprawled outward into Essex, where Chingford is located. Many people who lived in the community were engineers who labored at local factories, including Jony Ive’s grandfather, who worked on machine-tooling equipment at the nearby Royal Small Arms Factory. They raised children and grandchildren who were predisposed to becoming engineers, mechanics, and craftsmen.

Mike took up woodworking and metalwork in his teens and later attended Shoreditch Training College, a training school for future instructors of craftsmanship and technical skills. At Shoreditch, Mike blended the old with the new, specializing in the ancient craft of silversmithing while also expressing an interest in the engineering of modern-day machines.

After school, he began teaching craft, design, and technology to sixteen-to-nineteen-year-old boys at a school in East London. He taught students how to cut metal and cast aluminum and inspired them by sharing some of his own work, including a chair with joints at compound angles and a solid silver coffeepot. He often brought his son to the shop to see how the students worked. Jony Ive was about four years old when his father teamed with a local Christian group to build a hovercraft in the shop to transport medical supplies across Lake Chad in Africa. He and Tim Longley, an engineer, spent three years leading the project, defining the design and directing students as they assembled the machine.

Just a child, Jony Ive often followed his father quietly around the craft and listened as Mike explained how to cast aluminum, sculpt fiberglass, or mold the propeller into a spinner. Afterward, Jony would stand silently as he observed students tinkering with wood or installing rivets. They said he was as engrossed as a child watching Saturday-morning cartoons.

Nearly fifty years later, Jony Ive said he could remember the hovercraft being built with shocking clarity.

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, Mike Ive encouraged his son as the boy began to disassemble radios, alarm clocks, and whatever he could find, analyzing their parts for clues about what made them work. For Christmas, his favorite gift included one day of his father’s undivided attention in the workshop at Middlesex Polytechnic, a nearby college where Mike had taken a job instructing design teachers. Jony could make whatever he could imagine—a go-cart, furniture, a treehouse—on one condition: first, he had to draw it by hand. The practice of sketching before making made him realize how much care people put into products.

As Jony got older, he joined his father for weekend drives around the country to visit stores and peruse their shelves. Side by side, they would pick up an item such as a toaster and discuss how it had been made. Why did they use rivets instead of screws? Jony would ask. He listened as his father provided answers drawn from years of experience teaching and designing. Fellow teachers considered it a tedious way to pass a Saturday but admired how father engaged with son, knowing it was one of the most significant factors in a child’s future achievement.

In 1979, Mike joined the Education Ministry as Her Majesty’s Inspector, a national government position with oversight for design instruction across southern England and responsibility for modernizing the nation’s design curriculum. The family relocated from Chingford to Stafford. Overnight, Jony was transplanted from the familiarity of suburban London to the countryside two hours north of the city. His parents bought a home in Brocton in a new development of redbrick ranch houses with white-trimmed windows. The village had a post office and golf course but no pub. The Ives’ neighborhood backed up to Cannock Chase, a rolling grassland flanked by forests of pine and birch trees where local legend claimed that werewolves roamed.

Jony enrolled at nearby Walton High School, where he made an immediate impression on his fifteen hundred classmates. Heavyset, independent, and sensitive, he possessed a maturity and self-assuredness rare among teenagers. He spoke with teachers as an equal and took a progressive interest in issues of the day such as feminism and antiracism. He was comfortable with his strengths—art and design—and untroubled by his relative weakness in traditional academics. While many classmates wrestled with who they were and what they wanted to do, he planned to go to a technical college to study design. I’ll probably get C’s on tests, but that’s all I need, he told Rob Chatfield, a classmate.

Still, he had a fierce determination and a perfectionist’s impulse. He played on the school rugby team and used his stocky frame to push in scrums. During a game of rugby one day, he took a boot to the nose, and blood started streaming down his face. Without a word, he wiped it away and jumped back into the scrum, his chest heaving and his face flushed with frustration. Worried that he was hurt—or might hurt someone else—a physical education teacher pulled him out of the game before play resumed. On another occasion, he brought his drum kit in for a show-and-tell event. A fan of Pink Floyd, he banged through a rock classic as classmates tapped their feet. They loved it, but he returned to his seat with a look of disappointment. He had exacting standards and was convinced that somewhere he had missed a beat.

Though no one at school feared him, few were willing to cross him. Students split into teams to play soccer during one PE class, and Ive watched as one of the school’s bullies demanded that Chatfield, a self-professed nerd, play goalie. Chatfield refused. The bully persisted. Get in there, he said.

No, Chatfield said.

Get in there, the bully said.

Ive stepped forward and said the bully’s name. He glared as the bully swiveled toward him before deciding better of it and dropping the issue. Watching, Chatfield admired that Ive had inserted himself not for attention but because he