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were more central to the future of Apple. “Not to worry,” Steve told one customer who prefaced his message about the bleak state of Apple’s pro hardware by saying, “This is a sad e-mail for me to compose.” Greg Walker, a computer technician, inquired in April 2010 about whether Apple planned to emphasize mobile software over Mac OS X. “No,” Steve said. Matthias Gansrigler, an independent software developer, fretted over whether the Mac’s absence from Apple’s annual design awards was a sign of things to come. Steve assured him: “We are focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on iPhone OS this year. Maybe next year we will focus primarily on the Mac. Just the normal cycle of things. No hidden meaning here.” The next year, Apple did bring back the Mac showcase, though not as the centerpiece.

Following the developers conference where Apple gave out its iPhone-specific awards in 2010, podcaster Mike Gdovin wrote Steve to suggest that Apple should not sacrifice the Mac in favor of the iPhone and iPad. He signed off by saying that, while he likes mobile devices, he still prefers to use a computer at his desk. “Yep, we agree,” Steve replied. Two days later, Dennis Sellers wrote Steve to highlight a mock obituary for the Mac that had recently run in Newsweek. “Completely wrong. Just wait,” Steve said. A year later, Steve explained Apple’s new position on computers. Apple was demoting them, Steve said, to be just another device. All of this hardware would be linked via iCloud, but still, it was an admission that the computer would no longer be core to what Apple does.

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Steve Jobs explained at a conference in 2010, the first hard evidence that Mac lovers had reason to be concerned about a slowdown in computer development. “PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around. They’re still going to have a lot of value. … This transformation is going to make some people uneasy, people from the PC world, like you and me. It’s going to make us uneasy, because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. And we like to talk about the post-PC area, but when it really starts to happen, I think it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people, because it’s change. A lot of vested interests are going to change. It’s going to be different. And I think we’re embarked on that.”

Chapter 6

Undeliverable

Steve Jobs did not seem uncomfortable in controversies. With a smile on his face, he created trouble himself. One of his first business endeavors with Steve Wozniak in the 1970s was to build and sell “blue boxes,” which allowed users to illegally get free long-distance phone calls. Decades later, Steve used an Apple earnings call to fire a machine gun of insults at the company’s competitors, including BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd., Google and Nokia Corp. Strike first, and when struck, a nasty comment deserves a nastier one, as Steve demonstrated. When an employee asked Steve in a meeting at a campus auditorium about his thoughts on Michael Dell’s suggestion then that Apple should shut down the company and give the money back to the shareholders, Steve said, according to former Apple employee John Lilly: “Fuck Michael Dell.”

Steve was not known for being politically correct, but his ability to negotiate with opponents and his tight control over his public persona rivals that of any great politician. The e-mails became a tool of his “reality distortion field,” meaning he used the medium to shape the public narrative. Perhaps he should have been a politician. Indeed, Steve considered running for Alan Cranston’s seat in the U.S. Senate in the 1980s and even sought the advice of a big-time political consultant, the New York Times reported in 1987. At an annual Western Electronic Manufacturers convention in the early 1980s, Steve gave an impassioned 40-minute presentation on the dangers of nuclear warfare and left the audience dumbfounded about the choice of topic; he sat down without taking questions, as former Compaq Computer