The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [33]
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, Steve’s on-and-off artistic muse, Susan Kare, had a ridiculously large bulge under her coat as she walked through Sausalito to the apartment of one of her favorite photographers. Steve had insisted on secrecy. No one from the outside was allowed to see the Next computer. But Susan needed to have some publicity stills taken so they’d be ready for the unveiling in September. So she covered the prototype with her coat, which made her look as though she were in an advanced stage of pregnancy. With twins.
Safely inside the apartment, she pulled away the garment to reveal an oddly beautiful box of the sleekest blackest magnesium. It was a perfect cube, exactly twelve inches long and wide and deep. It looked like abstract minimalist sculpture, but it housed the complex circuitry of the computer. The monitor was also black and starkly elegant. Steve had wanted the black Porsche of computers, and that’s what he finally got.
Susan didn’t like it. She thought it was too much. As the photographer planned the lighting and the camera angles, she treated him to a sarcastic critique of the design. It was the Terminator look, the clichéd boys-and-their-toys aesthetic. She despised how it shouted ne plus ultra, like a gadget from the Sharper Image catalog. It didn’t have any of the virtues of the Macintosh, which seemed so accessible, friendly, even cuddly and lovable. The Next machine was very elegant, yes, but it also looked intimidating, even forbidding. It was the Death Star of computers.
As the photographer readied to shoot, Susan took out a bunch of children’s toys, playful little dinosaurs in bright colors. She arranged the figurines on top of the austere black box. It was a whimsical gesture, her own subversive way of restoring the softer human element that she loved.
The camera clicked and clicked.
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THAT SUMMER, Steve would drive through the mountains to San Francisco and camp out at Susan Kare’s old Victorian house. They worked together preparing the graphics that he would show during his speech onstage for the Next unveiling. Susan’s husband, Jay, would work the espresso machine and bring them café lattes as Steve sat there, obsessed with finding the perfect shade of green for the background color of his slides. He looked at twenty-seven subtly different hues before determining the color that would be precisely right.
He put equal care into composing his text. “Every slide was written like a piece of poetry,” recalls Paul Vais, a Next executive who worked closely with Steve on the event. “We spent hours on what most people would consider low-level detail. Steve would labor over the presentation. We’d try to orchestrate and choreograph everything and make it more alive than it really is.” Steve wanted to achieve a powerful visual impact. So they paid $60,000 for the video projectors used at rock concerts. Steve wanted to show off the Next computer’s ability to play stereo-quality music, an astonishing capability at a time when most personal computers couldn’t honk out more than a few crude beeps. He wanted a setting with superb acoustics, so he rented the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. He even hired the symphony’s principal violinist to play a Bach duet with the computer.
As the launch approached, Steve was plagued by nervousness, and his scrutiny of fine details remained relentless and obsessive. He read all the copy for every advertisement that would go out for the computer. He approved the invitation list, vetting everyone who would get a coveted ticket for one of the three thousand seats. He even edited the menu for lunch.
The night before the event, he assembled his two hundred employees for a kind of locker-room inspirational speech. He began by closing his palms together in front of him, as if he were praying in church. They knew that gesture well. It was Steve’s signal that he was plotting something,