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Apple’s founders were presented with Apples of various sizes, fashioned from so many materials that they must have wondered why they hadn’t called the company Matrix Electronics. They were deluged with apples carved from koa, mahogany, cedar, and redwood, fired in porcelain and china, dried in papier-mâché, blown from crystal, melted in brass, and stamped in plastic. There was also a proliferation of memorabilia supplied by little companies that specialized in making corporate trinkets and icons. There were apple belt buckles and apple pens, apple doormats and apple goblets, apple notebooks and apple paper knives, apple calendars and apple paperweights, apple key chains and apple bumper stickers.

As Apple became a major computer company there were less convenient, more oblique compliments to the size of its success. There was, for a start, the irritating flattery of imitation. On the East Coast of the United States, Franklin Computer Corporation manufactured a machine very similar to the Apple, called it the ACE 100, and in advertisements shamelessly touted it by placing an apple in a prominent position and declaring that it was “sweeter than an apple.” (In federal court in 1983 Franklin admitted that it had copied Apple’s operating system.) A computer from Commodore was boosted with a series of commercials saying that it was “the worm that ate the apple.” In Taiwan and Hong Kong local knock-off artists made copies that were decorated with names such as Apolo II, Orange Computers, and Pineapple. A West German computer distributor manufactured still another look-alike, a small Italian firm designed a computer that bore a lemon logo, while a British firm decorated its machine with a rainbow-colored pear.

In California Apple was troubled by a local disease, becoming a carcass for headhunters to pick over. The more persistent got to be so well known that Apple’s telephone operators were ordered not to forward their calls. Undeterred, the cunning “executive recruiters” simply resorted to false names. Apple was not immune to job-hopping and in time people started to leave. It was by no means a mass exodus but the dribs and drabs were enough to be irritating. The lure of other start-ups, the sight of the flaws and frailties of Apple’s founders, and the fear of getting bogged down in a large company all helped to nudge the ambitious toward the door. Within two years of the public issue, four small companies had been started by one-time Apple employees, and even if the turnover was nowhere near as high as in some corners of Silicon Valley, it was also nowhere near as low as Apple’s managers liked to say.

So with all these accolades—some overt and some opaque—the people working in the creamy shadows of the Cali Brothers grain silos in Cupertino had ample reason for pride. They could be excused if they sometimes dreamed that the world was no longer round but had assumed the shape of their corporate logo. However, as they started to believe that Apple was a top dog, the company also became intrigued with the notion of empire, and an aggressive conceit threatened to unravel much of the earlier success.

Outsiders who had followed Apple’s progress spotted the danger signals. Hank Smith, the venture capitalist, began to warn the officers of other young companies about the penalites of success and he used Apple as his case study. Richard Melmon, who had worked on the Apple account for the Regis McKenna Agency and was later connected with a software company that sold programs for Apples, agreed: “Everybody at Apple sits around and says, ‘We’re the best. We know it.’ They have a culture that says it and it starts from Steve Jobs and works on down.” And Ed Faber, the president of Computerland, summed up Apple’s swaggering demeanor: “The word that keeps popping up is ‘arrogant.’” Arrogance seeped right through the company and came to affect every aspect of its business: the style with which it treated suppliers, software firms, and dealers, its attitude toward competitors, and the way it approached the development