← All distillations
book·one-page markdown

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson

Working rules for making a product that has a point of view, taken from Isaacson's account of the Apple I through the iTunes Store years, including what the conviction cost the people around him.

Chat with the guideChat with this corpus

This governs the decisions that make a product feel like it was made by someone rather than assembled by a committee: what you refuse to ship, who owns the design, how far the integration runs, and what you are willing to be unreasonable about. Isaacson's account is not a case for unreasonableness in general; it is a record of a specific man whose standard and whose cruelty ran on the same current, and who lost the people who built his best work. Both halves are below, because the corpus does not let you take one without the other.

Do

  • Finish the parts nobody will ever see. His father taught him to properly finish the backs of cabinets and fences on the argument that you know it is there. Jobs applied it to the Macintosh's internal circuit-board layout, which no consumer would open the case to look at, and had the whole team's signatures engraved inside every machine shipped. [Source: "The Design"]
  • Ship the whole package, not the good part. At the 1976 Atlantic City computer festival the bare-board Apple I looked scruffy next to a cased competitor, and Jobs took the lesson immediately: the Apple II arrived with a molded plastic case from Jerry Manock, Rod Holt's fanless switching power supply, and Regis McKenna's bitten-apple mark. The engineering had barely changed; the product had. [Source: "The Apple II"]
  • Treat simplicity as removal you earned by understanding, not as a visual style. Jony Ive's definition, which Jobs shared, is that you have to dig through the depth of the complexity and understand the essence of a thing well enough to identify what is not essential. Jobs's own gloss was that the first Apple brochure had already said it: simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Minimal-looking is the output, not the method. [Source: "Design Principles"]
  • Put the constraint on the user's path, then move the complexity somewhere else. His standing rule for the iPod was that any song or function had to be reachable in three clicks and each click had to be intuitive; he also insisted the device have no on/off switch at all. The complexity that had to exist was pushed into iTunes on the computer so the object in the hand stayed simple. [Source: "The iTunes Store"]
  • Build the full-scale prototype, then be willing to throw it out late. Ron Johnson and Jobs built and rebuilt an entire mock Apple Store in a Cupertino warehouse for six months. Weeks before opening, Johnson realized the layout was organized around Apple's four product lines rather than around what people came in wanting to do; Jobs erupted, agreed within minutes, and delayed the rollout three or four months. His stated reason was that there was one chance to get it right. [Source: "Apple Stores and the Digital Hub"]
  • Reverse the order so design leads and engineering serves it. Before Jobs returned, Apple's process ran engineering-first: build the guts, hand them to designers to put in a box. He inverted that and gave Ive a reporting line directly to himself, outside the normal hierarchy. The studio ran on daily physical foam models rather than presentations, because Jobs wanted to handle a thing rather than read a drawing of it. [Source: "Design Principles"]
  • Fix who you are before you fix the products. In mid-1997, with nothing new to sell, he commissioned the Think Different campaign aimed as much at demoralized employees as at customers, on the argument that Apple had forgotten who it was and that you remember that by remembering your heroes. He recorded his own voice-over for the television spot and then shipped Richard Dreyfuss's instead, specifically so it would not become about him. [Source: "Think Different"]
  • Beat the free alternative by being better than it, not by fighting it. His read on music piracy was that most people stealing did not want to be, they simply had no legal option. He used Apple's roughly 5 percent Mac share as the low-risk pitch to the record labels, insisted on 99 cents and on selling songs individually, and the store sold a million songs in six days against a six-month projection. [Source: "The iTunes Store"]
  • Hand a domain to the person who is better at it and confine yourself to what you actually add. At Pixar the tone was set by John Lasseter, not by Jobs, who restrained his need for creative control and put his intensity into deal-making, where it was an asset. In 1988, mid-cost-cutting, he funded Lasseter's next short with a single instruction, to make it great; it was Tin Toy, and it won the Academy Award. [Source: "Pixar's Friends"]

Don't

  • Don't let the price get set by adding costs on top of a target. The Macintosh was conceived as a $1,000 machine, drifted to a planned $1,995 on cost, and went to $2,495 once Sculley insisted marketing be loaded in. Jobs fought and lost, and twenty-five years later still named that number as the main reason Mac sales slowed and Microsoft took the market. [Source: "Enter Sculley"]
  • Don't run taste without a cost constraint attached to it. NeXT gave him no restraint: a magnesium cube with no draft angles requiring $650,000 molds, a $150,000 sanding machine, plating on screws nobody would see. The result was a beautiful $6,500 machine that shipped two years late into a factory built for ten thousand units a month and sold about four hundred. [Source: "NeXT"]
  • Don't close the system so hard that the market routes around you. The Mac had no expansion slots, a case a normal screwdriver could not open, and no cursor arrow keys. When Mike Murray proposed licensing the OS to Tandy to build an industry standard, Jobs killed it, and the Mac OS never got the share that clones gave Microsoft. [Source: "Building the Mac"]
  • Don't ship your philosophy as a specification. The shipped Mac had 128K of RAM against the Lisa's 1,000K, one floppy drive and no hard disk, and no cooling fan, which caused component failures. Sales collapsed in the second half of 1984 and the machine picked up the nickname "the beige toaster." The dogma was defensible in the abstract and was wrong as a bill of materials. [Source: "Icarus"]
  • Don't tell the people who built the last thing that they are B players. He merged the Lisa and Macintosh divisions, told the combined room they had failed and were a B team, and laid off a quarter of the Lisa staff. Within the year Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith and Bruce Horn had all resigned and Wozniak had quietly left the Apple II division. The next product had to be built without the people who had built the last one. [Source: "Icarus"]
  • Don't withhold what somebody earned because the classification lets you. Daniel Kottke, his closest friend from Reed and India through the garage years, got no options at the 1980 IPO because he was on the books as an hourly technician; Rod Holt offered to personally match anything Jobs put in, and Jobs answered that he would give him zero. The same pattern is on the record from 1975, when Wozniak did the Breakout design over four sleepless nights and Jobs paid him half the base fee without disclosing the chip-reduction bonus, which Wozniak learned about a decade later. [Source: "Xerox and Lisa, and Going Public"]
  • Don't point the reality distortion field at facts about your own life. He fought a paternity suit over his daughter Lisa, and after a UCLA test put his probability of paternity at 94.41 percent he told a reporter that a large share of American men could statistically have been the father. Courts ordered support, an admission of paternity, and reimbursement of the county's welfare payments to Chrisann Brennan. He later told Isaacson directly that he wished he had handled it differently, one of the few admissions of regret in the book. [Source: "Chrisann and Lisa"]
  • Don't mistake the cruelty for the mechanism. The Mac team ran an annual award for whoever best stood up to him and Joanna Hoffman won it twice; Bill Atkinson's read was that pushing back successfully earned his respect rather than his anger; and when Bob Belleville admitted he had defied a direct order and secretly kept the Sony disk-drive work alive after the in-house Twiggy drive failed more than half the time, Jobs swore at him with a grin and thanked him. What produced the work was the standard plus people willing to hold ground against it. Wozniak's own verdict was that the terrorizing was unnecessary and burned people out. [Source: "The Reality Distortion Field"]

The one line

Own the whole thing end to end, define simplicity as what you understood well enough to remove, and never confuse the standard that made the work good with the cruelty that drove out the people who did it.