• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 603 0

of the chiseled handsomeness of a sports hero or matinee idol, while Steve’s features hinted vaguely at the Middle Eastern heritage of his birth father. There was a visible sense of mutual admiration between the two men. As a child Steve didn’t take part in team sports, but he did try to compete in swimming, with its emphasis on individual performance. Dan’l was a swimming star in college. They also shared an interest in the music and life of Bob Dylan. For his senior-year thesis for the politics department at Princeton in 1976, Dan’l asked his faculty adviser if he could apply academic theories of charismatic leadership to Dylan’s exploits in the 1960s. (To his astonishment, the adviser not only encouraged the idea and agreed to sponsor it, but said that Dan’l could also study David Bowie if he liked.) That same year, Steve was playing Dylan tunes on his guitar in the backyard while he took breaks from assembling Apple I’s in the garage. Since Steve was a teenager he had idolized Dylan. For hours and hours he would listen to bootlegged Dylan recordings on his reel-to-reel tape player. Elizabeth Holmes believed that Steve became the lover of Joan Baez in large measure because Baez had been the lover of Dylan.

• • •

THE NAME OF THE COMPANY, NEXT, was intentionally vague. Steve had a notion of creating computers for students, but they had little idea of what exactly that meant. It would be foolish to commit to specific plans until they resolved the Apple lawsuit and knew where and how they would be free to compete with their old employer. While their product had to remain undefined. Steve turned his energy and his obsessiveness to the process of creating the perfect company.

With his seemingly unlimited money and the luxury of time, he could devote extraordinary attention to the most minute details. He paid $100,000 to Paul Rand, a septuagenarian Yale art professor and design guru, to create the Next logo. The price was astonishingly high, especially for a startup company with few employees and no products or revenues. Rand came up with the image of a black cube, tilted at an oblique twenty-eight-degree angle, with brightly colored letters in orange, yellow, green, and purple spelling “NeXT.” He presented his design to Steve along with a pamphlet explaining that the conspicuous lowercase e could stand for “education, excellence, expertise, exceptional, excitement, e=mc2.” It said that the logo “brims with the informality, friendliness, and spontaneity of a Christmas seal and the authority of a rubber stamp.” Steve read the explanation and was so enthused that he rushed to embrace the professor. News of the design was covered prominently in the national media. Such was the public fascination with Steve and the intense curiosity about his next move.

The office on Deer Park Road was costly and attractive to begin with, but he gutted it anyway and spent lavishly on the remodeling. How could they create truly great products unless first they created an ideal place where they could think and work? They needed inspiration! If they were going to design objects of the highest quality, they needed to be surrounded by objects of the highest quality! Steve put in a circular staircase in the lobby and beautiful hardwood floors throughout the two levels. He purchased large black-and-white Ansel Adams photographs to adorn the walls. He had couches and chairs made from the most supple and elegant black leather. There were walls of glass. Even the kitchen counters were made from fine granite. He achieved an environment of austere elegance, though it was subverted a bit when his colleagues set up a sunbathing deck on the roof, complete with a campy little inflatable children’s pool, and called it Silicon Beach.

The business press was anxious to learn what Steve was plotting. Never before had a technology startup incited such attention or anticipation. The national publications hardly noticed when Intel was created in 1968, even though its cofounder, Bob Noyce, was the inventor of the silicon chip, which was already a revolutionary product.