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Even when they realized that Steve was trying to use his hypnotic charm to manipulate them, the New York editors didn’t mind. They would have trumpeted his return even without his enticements. He always gave them the elements of a good story: youth, vitality, idealism, eloquence, showmanship, glamour, seductiveness, rivalry. In a field where the leading figures were important but uniformly dull, he was gloriously colorful.

Steve delivered a bravura three-hour performance at Davies Hall, and the press coverage was extraordinary. “Steve Jobs Comes Back” shouted the headline in Newsweek, which said that the Next computer “may be the most exciting machine in years.” Time wrote that the event was “one of the most widely ballyhooed product launches ever.”

• • •

THE MEDIA SENSATION masked the real situation: hardly anyone would buy Steve’s machine.

At the debut he announced that Next would only sell to colleges and universities. The company’s promotional T-shirt said “the next generation computer for higher education.” But the strategy was disastrous. The Next Cube, as it was known, just didn’t move at the campus bookstores, where the Macintosh had experienced its earliest success. It was far too expensive. The Cube retailed for $6,500, and with a laser printer and some necessary extras the total could exceed $10,000. The price was absurdly high, especially since students could buy basic personal computers for $1,500. Steve was trying to sell them Porsches when all they needed and all they could afford were Honda Civics.

The other possibility, selling to the research laboratories and computer centers of academia, was nearly as difficult. Silicon Valley companies like Sun Microsystems simply gave away their machines for free to universities or sold at below cost. The idea was that all those hacker geniuses on campus were the most influential advocates for new technology. Whatever was hot on campus would later become the new standard for the fabulously rich corporate customers. You lost millions giving freebies to Berkeley and MIT and then you made it back many times over by selling for high prices to AT&T and Exxon.

It turned out that Next’s strategy was astonishingly misguided.

Next’s salespeople and marketing executives began telling a new favorite joke:

Question: What’s the “higher education handshake?”

Answer: An outstretched hand with the palm turned open, waiting for a donation.

By the end of 1988, Next’s factory was making only 400 machines a month. It was a huge disappointment. Steve had designed his cherished state-of-the-art factory so it could turn out 10,000 machines a month. The Next Cube was the Edsel of computers. In Hollywood terms, it was the equivalent of Heaven’s Gate: a gifted artist producing a horrendously costly flop.

Steve needed to resort to Plan B.

In March 1989, he abandoned the policy of selling only to higher education, and he announced that Businessland, a national chain of retail stores, would offer the Next Cube for $9,995. Businessland projected that it would sell 10,000 to 15,000 Cubes a year to corporations and business people.

By the end of 1989, the chain had sold only 360.

The Next factory slowed down until it was producing only 100 machines a month. Even that speed was too fast, since many of the unsold Cubes languished in the stockpile.

Steve had envisioned his factory producing $1 billion worth of computers a year. A few Ph.D.s would watch from the sidelines while the machines would be fabricated without ever being touched by humans. But even at the rate of mere hundreds a year, not hundreds of thousands, the automation never worked very well, and human hands were everywhere.

• • •

TO THE ENRAPTURED MEDIA and the rest of Silicon Valley, Next seemed like a star, not a huge flop. It was a privately owned company, so it didn’t have to publish its quarterly results or give any other disclosures of its sales. Outsiders only saw what appeared to be positive signs. In 1989, Inc. magazine