《Becoming Steve Jobs》
Authors’ Note
- For Becoming Steve Jobs, we spent three years researching, interviewing, reporting, writing, and editing together. That said, in the narrative you’re about to read, we decided, for convenience’s sake, to use the first-person singular throughout to refer to Brent. Brent is the one who had a relationship of almost a quarter century with Steve Jobs, so using the word I made it much easier to tell our story.
Prologue
Bureau lore had it that he had dressed down another Journal reporter by posing this straightforward question: “Do you understand anything at all, anything at all about what we’re discussing?”
风格非常乔布斯，哈哈哈“Nobody who writes for the major national publications knows shit about computers,” he added, shaking his head with a practiced air of condescension. “The last person who wrote about me for the Wall Street Journal didn’t even know the difference between machine memory and a floppy!”
As we talked, he drank steaming hot water from a pint beer glass. He explained that when he ran out of tea one day, it dawned on him that he liked plain old hot water, too. “It’s soothing in the very same way,” he said. Eventually he would steer the conversation back to his main pitch: higher education needed better computers, and only NeXT could deliver them. The company was working closely with both Stanford and Carnegie Mellon—universities with highly respected computer science departments. “They’ll be our first customers.”
卡耐基梅隆、斯坦佛，将是最早一批使用Mac的学校，非常精准先专注学校群体！The intensity of his self-confidence made me hang on his every word. He spoke in carefully constructed sentences, even when trying to answer an unexpected question.
Twenty-five years later, at his memorial service, Steve’s widow, Laurene, testified to the “fully formed aesthetic” he possessed from a very young age. That confidence in his own judgment and taste came through in his answers. It also came through in the fact, as I realized over the course of our conversation, that he really was interviewing me, testing me to see if I “grokked”—understood—what was special about what he had done and what he planned to do at NeXT. Later, I came to realize that this was because Steve wanted whatever was written about him and his work to measure up to his own high standard of quality. At this stage of his life, he thought he could probably do anybody’s job better than they could—it was an attitude that gnawed at his employees, of course.
自己有极高的审美和要求，也同对对别人的稿子、别人的工作有极高的要求For this pamphlet, and for a single, take-it-or-leave-it draft of a corporate logo, Jobs had happily parted with $100,000 of his money. That extravagance, albeit in the pursuit of perfection, was a quality that would not serve him well at NeXT.
As with most journalist/source relationships, there was one main reason Steve and I wanted to connect: we each had something the other needed. I could deliver the front page of the Wall Street Journal and, later, the cover of Fortune magazine; he had a story that my readers wanted, and that I wanted to tell better and earlier than any other journalist. He usually wanted me to write about a new product of his; my readers wanted to know about him as much as the product—if not more. He wanted to point out all the glories of the product and the genius and beauty of its creation; I wanted to get behind the scenes, and to cover the competitive ups and downs of his company. This was the subtext of most of our interactions: a transaction in which we each hoped to cajole the other into some sort of advantageous deal. With Steve, this could be like a card game where one day I’d feel we were partners playing bridge and the next I’d feel like a sucker holding eight-high in poker. More often than not, he made me feel like he had the edge—whether or not that was true.
Yet Steve and I, more than Bill, were true products of the antiwar, peace and love, tune in/turn on generation. We were music nuts and gaga for gadgets, and we weren’t afraid to experiment with outlandish new ideas or experiences.
反战，嬉皮，和平与爱意In those early years, Steve had an important reason to cultivate our relationship. In the ever-shifting computer world of the late 1980s, building breathless anticipation for his Next Big Thing was crucial to attracting potential customers and investors, and Steve would need plenty of the latter, given that NeXT would take nearly five years to produce a working computer. Throughout his life, Steve had a keen sense of the tactical value of press coverage; this was just one part of what Regis McKenna, perhaps his most important early mentor, calls “Steve’s natural gift for marketing. Even when he was twenty-two years old he had the intuition,” McKenna elaborated. “He understood what was great about Sony, about Intel. He wanted that kind of image for what he was going to create.”
不是每个年轻人，都能在22岁就有很好的直觉与TasteKnowing that Apple was also among the companies I covered for the Journal, and later for Fortune, Steve would call up at seemingly random moments over the coming years to offer me “intelligence” that he’d heard from former colleagues who were still there, or simply to share his opinions on the interminable executive soap opera at his old company in Cupertino. Over time I learned that he was a reliable source about the mess that Apple became in the early 1990s—and I also came to realize that there was nothing random about those calls. Steve always had an ulterior motive: sometimes he was hoping to glean something about a competitor; sometimes he had a product he wanted me to check out; sometimes he wanted to chastise me for something I’d written.
Ours was a long, complicated, and mostly rewarding relationship. When I would run into Steve at industry events, he would introduce me as his friend, which was flattering, odd, true, and yet not true all at the same time. During the brief time when he had an office in Palo Alto near Fortune’s bureau, I would run into him around town now and then, and we’d stop to chat about all kinds of things. Once, I helped him shop for his wife Laurene’s birthday present. I visited his home many times, always for one work reason or another, but with an informality that I’ve never encountered from another CEO. And yet there was never a minute where the basic terms of our relationship weren’t clear: I was the reporter, he was the source and subject. He enjoyed some of my stories—others, like the one that prompted that email, infuriated him. My independence and his hoarding of information created the borders of our relationship.
He told me some awful jokes about Bill Gates, and excoriated me for having continued to smoke cigarettes despite his admonitions over the years. Steve always did love to tell people how to conduct their personal lives.
这可能是他关怀的一种表现AFTER STEVE DIED, reams of armchair analysis unfurled: articles, books, movies, and television shows. Often they resurrected old myths about Steve, using stereotypes that had been created way back in the 1980s, when the press discovered the wunderkind from Cupertino. In those early years, Steve was susceptible to the flattery of the press, and he opened himself and his company to reporters. He was at his most undisciplined and most intemperate then. As much as he showed a genius for imagining breakthrough products, he also could display a disturbing meanness and indifference toward both employees and friends. So when he started limiting access, and cooperating with the press only when he needed to promote his products, the tales from those early days at Apple became the conventional wisdom about his personality and thinking. Perhaps that’s why the posthumous coverage reflected these stereotypes: Steve was a genius with a flair for design, a shaman whose storytelling power could generate something magical and maleficent called a “reality distortion field”; he was a pompous jerk who disregarded everyone else in his single-minded pursuit of perfection; he thought he was smarter than anyone else, never listened to advice, and was an unchanging half-genius, half-asshole from birth.
After rustling through these personal relics from the past for a few weeks, I decided that it wasn’t enough to grumble about the one-dimensional myths about Steve that were ossifying in the public mind; I wanted to offer a fuller picture and deeper understanding of the man I had covered so intensely, in a way that hadn’t been possible when he was alive. Covering Steve had been fascinating and dramatic. His was a truly Shakespearean tale, full of arrogance, intrigue, and pride, of perceived villains and ham-handed fools, of outrageous luck, good intentions, and unimagined consequences. There were so many ups and so many downs in so short a time that it had been impossible to draw the broad trajectory of his success while he was living. Now I wanted to take the long view of the man I’d covered for so many years, the man who had called himself my friend.
A real answer would have to show how he changed, who influenced those changes, and how he applied what he’d learned to the business of making great computing devices. As I pored over my old documents, I kept coming back to the time that many have described as his “wilderness” years, the dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return. That era, from 1985 to 1997, is easy to overlook. The lows aren’t as dramatic as the blowups of his first tenure at Apple, and the highs, of course, aren’t as thrilling as those he engineered in the first decade of the twenty-first century. These were muddled, complicated times, and not the stuff of easy headlines. But those years are in fact the critical ones of his career. That’s when he learned most everything that made his later success possible, and that’s when he started to temper and channel his behavior. To overlook those years is to fall into the trap of only celebrating success. We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve’s last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values—the whole Pandora’s box of immaturity—were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in later years.
非常认同，在NEXT的那几年，是乔布斯学习、转变最多的，关键期！By the end of that decade in the woods, despite his many missteps, Steve had, remarkably enough, salvaged both NeXT and Pixar. The legacy of the first secured his professional future, while the triumph of the second ensured his financial well-being. His experience at both companies taught him lessons that, in retrospect, determined the future of Apple and helped define the world we live in. Steve could be intransigent, and nothing was ever learned easily or superficially, but learn he did. Driven and curious even when things were tough, he was a learning machine during these years, and he took to heart all that he gleaned.
Steve was capable of extraordinary compartmentalization. It’s a talent that allowed him to master and keep track of the various pieces of an entity as complex as Apple upon his return. It allowed him to maintain his focus despite the cacophony of worries that came with knowing he had cancer. It also allowed him to maintain a deep and meaningful life outside the office, while revealing little of that to people who weren’t part of his close inner circle.
Of course, he could be a difficult man, even late in his life. For some people, he was hellish to work for. His belief in the value of his mission allowed him to rationalize behavior that many of us might well deplore. But he could also be a loyal friend, and an encouraging mentor. He was capable of great kindness and genuine compassion, and he was an attentive and loving father. He believed deeply in the value of what he chose to do with his life, and he hoped those close to him believed in the value of their work just as deeply. For a man who so thoroughly “deviated from the mean,” as his friend and colleague Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, puts it, he had deeply human feelings, strengths, and failings.
What I have always loved about business journalism, and what I have learned from the very best colleagues I’ve worked with, is that there is always a human side to the seemingly calculated world of industry. I knew this was true about Steve when he was alive—no one else I have ever covered was so passionate about the creations of his business. But only in writing this book have I come to understand just how much the personal life and the business life of Steve Jobs overlapped, and just how much the one informed the other. You can’t really understand how Steve became our generation’s Edison and Ford and Disney and Elvis, all rolled into one, until you understand this. It’s what makes his reinvention such a great tale.
He knew in his bones, as he would say, that he was about to do something great. In reality, of course, he had no idea what was ahead of him.
我也不知道自己眼前会有什么故事
Chapter 1 Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah
But the Bay Area was shrouded in mist and rain, so the top stayed up. Slick roads made the traffic stultifying, so much so that it took all the pleasure out of the drive in his brand-new Mercedes-Benz 450SL. Steve loved the car; he loved it the way he loved his Linn Sondek audiophile turntable and his Ansel Adams platinum prints. The car, in fact, was a model for what he thought computers should be: powerful, sleek, intuitive, and efficient, nothing wasted at all.
强大，时尚，直观，有效
MacBook ProIt was quite a collection of people: Hindus and Buddhists, rockers and doctors, all accomplished, all gathered in the United Church of Christ’s Garden of Allah. Clearly, this was not the place for your traditional corporate chieftain, but Steve should have fit right in. He meditated often. He understood the search for spiritual fulfillment—in fact, he had gone to India specifically to learn from Brilliant’s guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji, who had died just a few days before Steve arrived. Jobs felt a deep restlessness to change the world, not just build a mundane business. The iconoclasm, the intersections of different disciplines, the humanity present in that room, all were representative of what Steve aspired to. And yet for some reason he couldn’t settle in.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you this as someone who knows a thing or two about marketing. We’ve sold nearly a hundred thousand machines at Apple Computer, and when we started no one knew a thing about us. Seva is in the same position Apple was in a couple of years ago. The difference is you guys don’t know diddly about marketing. So if you want to really do something here, if you really want to make a difference in the world and not just putter along like every other nonprofit that people have never heard of, you need to hire this guy named Regis McKenna—he’s the king of marketing. I can get him in here if you’d like. You should have the best. Don’t settle for second best.”
Fifteen minutes later, Friedland slipped outside. He returned quickly, and discreetly crept over to Brilliant. “You should go see Steve,” he whispered in his ear. “He’s out in the parking lot crying.”
赤子之心THIS LITTLE ANECDOTE from the winter of 1979 is as good a place as any to start the story of how Steve Jobs turned around his life and became the greatest visionary leader of our time. The young man making a hash of his visit to the Garden of Allah that December evening was a mess of contradictions. He was a cofounder of one of the most successful startups ever, but he didn’t want to be seen as a businessman. He craved the advice of mentors, and yet resented those in power. He dropped acid, walked barefoot, wore scraggly jeans, and liked the idea of living in a commune, yet he also loved nothing more than speeding down the highway in a finely crafted German sports car. He had a vague desire to support good causes, but he hated the inefficiency of most charities. He was impatient as hell and knew that the only problems worth solving were ones that would take years to tackle. He was a practicing Buddhist and an unrepentant capitalist. He was an overbearing know-it-all berating people who were wiser and immensely more experienced, and yet he was absolutely right about their fundamental marketing naïveté. He could be aggressively rude and then truly contrite. He was intransigent, and yet eager to learn. He walked away, and he walked back in to apologize. At the Garden of Allah he displayed all the brash, ugly behavior that became an entrenched part of the Steve Jobs myth. And he showed a softer side that would go less recognized over the years. To truly understand Steve and the incredible journey he was about to undergo, the full transformation that he would experience over his rich life, you have to recognize, accept, and try to reconcile both sides of the man.
果然是写商业的记者，写的真好In the years ahead, however, Steve’s tight bundle of contradictions would unravel. His stubborn strengths would give rise to Apple’s signature computer, the Macintosh, which would debut in 1984. But his weaknesses would lead to chaos in his company and exile for him personally, just one year later. They would sabotage his efforts to create a second breakthrough computer at NeXT, the company he founded shortly after leaving Apple. They would lead him so far from the heart of the computer industry that he would become, in the damning words of one of his closest friends, “a has-been.” They became so ingrained in his business reputation that when he was improbably invited back to run Apple in 1997, commentators, and even industry peers, would call the company’s board of directors “crazy.”
产品随想：People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.That turnaround wasn’t a random miracle. While away from Apple, Steve Jobs had started to learn how to make the most of his strengths, and how to temper somewhat his perilous weaknesses. This reality runs counter to the common myths about Steve. In the popular imagination, he is a tyrant savant with a golden touch for picking products and equally a stubborn son of a bitch with no friends, no patience, and no morals; he lived and died as he was born—half genius and half asshole.
The unformed youth at the Garden of Allah could never have revived the moribund company he returned to in 1997, nor could he have engineered the slow and deeply complicated corporate evolution that led to the unimaginable success Apple enjoyed during the last decade of his life. His own personal growth was equally complicated. I can’t think of a businessman who grew and changed and matured more than Steve. Personal change is, of course, incremental. As all “grown-ups” come to understand, we wrestle with and learn how to manage our gifts and flaws over a lifetime. It’s an endless growth process. And yet it’s not as if we become wholly different people. Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths. His negative qualities didn’t go away, nor were they replaced by new good traits. But he learned how to manage himself, his own personal miasma of talents and rough edges. Most of them, anyway. To understand how that happened, and how that led to the confounding resurgence of Apple later in his career, you have to consider the full range of personal contradictions Steve brought to the Garden of Allah that December afternoon.
While some have trotted out Steve’s adoption as a primal “rejection” that explains the irascible behavior he often displayed, especially early in his career, Steve repeatedly told me that he had been loved and deeply indulged by Paul and Clara. “He felt he had been really blessed by having the two of them as parents,” says Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve’s widow.
感恩之心Paul and Clara may have let his sense of entitlement blossom, but they also nurtured his perfectionism, especially when it came to the rigor that underlies great craftsmanship.
In his later years, as Steve would show me a new iPod or a new laptop, he would remember how his father told him that you had to devote as much care to the underside of a cabinet as to the finish, or to the brake pads of a Chevy Impala as to the paint job. Steve had a deeply sentimental streak, and it came out when he told these stories about his father. They were made more poignant by the fact that Steve gave his father so much credit for instilling his own sense of aesthetic excellence in a medium—digital electronics—that Paul Jobs would never fully understand.
For precocious kids like Steve, the implicit promise in all this was that anything could be figured out—and since anything could be figured out, anything could be built. “It gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe,” he once told me. “These things were not mysteries anymore. You looked at a television set and you would think that, ‘I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build that.’ Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment and that one had no knowledge of their interiors.”
人能创造那些塑造自己工作、生活环境的东西He got them, in part, because he already could spin a good tale. In many ways, Steve was a prototypical adolescent geek. But he also was a curious student of the humanities, beguiled by the words of Shakespeare, Melville, and Bob Dylan. Glib and persuasive with his parents, he applied the same skills when dealing with friends, teachers, mentors, and eventually the rich and powerful; Steve innately understood from an early age that the right words and stories could help him win the attention he needed to get what he wanted.
正确的话语与故事，能够帮助乔布斯赢得他需要的关注Steve didn’t have Woz’s innate talent, but he did have a native hunger to put really cool stuff into the hands of as many people as possible. This unique trait fundamentally separated him from other hobbyists messing around with computers.
营销？分享美好创造的冲动？It didn’t take long before the headstrong freshman was only attending the classes that fascinated him, and after just one semester, he abruptly dropped out, without even telling his parents. He spent a second semester auditing classes, including one calligraphy course that he would cite in later years as the inspiration for the Macintosh’s ability to produce a diverse panoply of typographical fonts. He also delved more deeply into Asian philosophy and mysticism, and dropped acid with greater frequency, at times almost as a spiritual sacrament.
For the first time he read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that he would return to several times throughout his life, and that would be given to everyone who attended the reception following Steve’s memorial service at Stanford University’s Memorial Church on October 16, 2011.
乔布斯送给亲朋好友的最后一份礼物Early in his stay, according to Brilliant, “Steve had been flirting with the idea of being sadhu.” Most Indian sadhus live a monklike existence of deprivation as a way of focusing solely on the spiritual. But Steve was obviously too hungry, too driven, and too ambitious for that kind of life. “It was a romance,” says Brilliant, “with the idea of being a renunciate.” But that doesn’t mean he came back to the United States disillusioned, or that he dismissed Eastern spiritualism altogether. His interests migrated toward Buddhism, which allows for more engagement with the world than is permitted ascetic Hindus. It would enable him to blend a search for personal enlightenment with his ambition to create a company that delivered world-changing products. This appealed to a young man busy trying to invent himself, and it would continue to appeal to a man of infinite intellectual restlessness. Certain elements of Buddhism suited him so well that they would provide a philosophical underpinning for his career choices—as well as a basis for his aesthetic expectations. Among other things, Buddhism made him feel justified in constantly demanding nothing less than what he deemed to be “perfection” from others, from the products he would create, and from himself.
In Buddhist philosophy, life is often compared to an ever-changing river. There’s a sense that everything, and every individual, is ceaselessly in the process of becoming. In this view of the world, achieving perfection is also a continuous process, and a goal that can never be fully attained. That’s a vision that would come to suit Steve’s exacting nature. Looking ahead to the unmade product, to whatever was around the next corner, and the two or three after that one, came naturally to him. He would never see a limit to possibilities, a perfect endpoint at which his work would be done. And while Steve would eschew almost all self-analysis, the same was true of his own life: despite the fact that he could be almost unfathomably stubborn and opinionated at times, the man himself was constantly adapting, following his nose, learning, trying out new directions. He was constantly in the act of becoming.
写的真好啊！！！He meditated regularly until he and Laurene became parents, when the demands on his time grew in a way he hadn’t anticipated. He reread Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind several times, and made the intersection of elements of Asian spiritualism and his business and commercial life a regular subject of the conversations he and Brilliant enjoyed throughout his life. For years, he arranged for a Buddhist monk by the name of Kobun Chino Otogawa to meet with him once a week at his office to counsel him on how to balance his spiritual sense with his business goals. While nobody who knew him well during his later years would have called Steve a “devout” Buddhist, the spiritual discipline informed his life in both subtle and profound ways.
乔布斯书目来了：Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s MindAs it had been since the 1950s, the computer industry in 1975 was dominated by International Business Machines (IBM), which sold more mainframes than all of its other competitors put together. In the 1960s, those also-rans were called “the Seven Dwarfs,” but during the 1970s, both General Electric and RCA gave up, leaving a stubborn group of manufacturers referred to as the “BUNCH”—an acronym for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) dominated an upcoming segment of somewhat cheaper and less-powerful “minicomputers” used by smaller businesses, and by departments within larger corporations. There was one outlier at each end of the cost spectrum. At the high end, Cray Research, founded in 1972, sold so-called supercomputers used primarily for scientific research and mathematical modeling. These were the most expensive computers of all, costing well north of $3 million. On the cheap end of the scale was Wang, which was founded in the early 1970s and made a task-specific machine known as a “word processor.” It was the closest thing to a “personal” computer that existed, since it was designed for a single person to use in the preparation of written reports and correspondence. The computer industry then was primarily an eastern establishment. IBM was headquartered in the bucolic suburbs north of New York City; DEC and Wang were based in Boston. Burroughs was headquartered in Detroit, Univac in Philadelphia, NCR in Dayton, Ohio, and Cray, Honeywell, and Control Data all hailed from Minneapolis. The only notable early computer maker in Silicon Valley was Hewlett-Packard, but its primary business was making scientific test and measurement instruments and calculators.
好流畅，一个段落行云流水描述大型机时代This industry bore little resemblance to today’s entrepreneurial, innovative, and rapidly iterative tech world. It was a stodgy enterprise most similar to the capital equipment business. Its universe of potential customers could be counted in the hundreds, and these were companies with deep pockets whose demands focused more on performance and reliability than on price. No surprise, then, that the industry had become cloistered and a little complacent.
当时还是偏资本密集类型，并不是创新导向Out in California a significant number of the people who would have a hand in flipping that industry on its head started meeting regularly as a hobbyist group called the Homebrew Computer Club. Their first get-together occurred shortly after the publication of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured a cover story about the Altair 8800 “microcomputer.” Gordon French, a Silicon Valley engineer, hosted the gathering in his garage to show off an Altair unit that French and a buddy had assembled from the $495 kit sold by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS).
关键词，HomebrewWoz knew the MITS machine wasn’t all that much more advanced than the Cream Soda Computer he’d created four years earlier, in 1971, when he had to use much less sophisticated components. Spurred by a geek’s natural competitive instincts, he roughed out some new designs for what he knew would be a better microcomputer, one that would be easier to program, control, and manipulate. Flipping toggle switches and counting flashing lights was like using flag semaphore and Morse code, he thought. Why not input commands and data values more directly with a typewriter keyboard? And why not have the computer project your typing and results onto an attached television monitor? And for that matter, why not plug in a cassette tape recorder to store programs and data? The Altair had none of these features that would make computing far less intimidating and far more approachable. This was the challenge Woz decided to tackle. In the back of his mind he hoped that his employer, HP, might want to manufacture a version of his concept.
原来是这样的历史Steve persuaded Woz that they could make the club members their customers by selling them the schematics, and perhaps even printed circuit boards. Club members could then buy the chips and other components themselves, and assemble them into the guts of their very own working microcomputer. To raise the cash to pay a mutual friend to draw a “reference design” for the circuit boards, Steve sold his treasured Volkswagen minibus, and Woz unloaded his precious HP-65 programmable calculator. After spending $1,000 on designing the board and contracting to have a few dozen made, Jobs and Wozniak made their money back and then some by selling them to fellow Homebrew members for $50 apiece, netting them a nifty $30 for each circuit board.
“But we felt it for the wrong reasons. We felt that everybody was technical enough to really use it and write their own programs and solve their problems that way.” Steve decided that their new company should be called Apple. There are different tales about the origin of the name, but it was a brilliant decision. Years later, Lee Clow, Steve’s longtime collaborator on Apple’s distinctive brand of advertising, told me, “I honestly believe that his intuition was that they were going to change people’s lives by giving them technology they didn’t know they needed, that would be different from anything they knew. So they needed something friendly and approachable and likable. He took a page out of Sony’s book, because Sony was originally called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, and [cofounder] Akio Morita said they needed something much more approachable.”
深有体会，Apple真是一个平易近人的好名字Apple is not a word for geeks, unlike Asus, Compaq, Control Data, Data General, DEC, IBM, Sperry Rand, Texas Instruments, or Wipro, to mention some less felicitously named computer companies. It hints at a company that would bring, as it eventually did, humanism and creativity to the science and engineering of computers. As Clow suggests, settling on Apple was a great, intuitive decision. Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before.
Of course, Steve’s gut could also betray him, as it did when he fell in love with Apple’s first corporate logo. It was a pen-and-ink drawing, detailed in the way of an etching, of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree. It was the kind of overworked, precious image that a young calligraphy student might find enchanting, but far too esoteric for a company with big mainstream ambitions.
但不得不说，站在平面设计视角，第一个Logo真的挺不错的Woz had also written a version of BASIC, the simplest and most important hobbyist programming language, to run on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor that functioned as the brains of what he and Steve were starting to call the Apple 1. Woz didn’t fully appreciate it, but he had created the first truly personal computer. Steve, however, understood the magnitude of the achievement, and the power of the term personal computer in the context of an industry that had historically been anything but personal. So that was exactly the term he used whenever people asked him what it was that Woz had dreamed up.
The reaction from most club members, however, was tepid. Most were tinkerers who believed that half the fun of computing was in designing and building their own machines. That’s why they called it the Homebrew Computer Club, after all. With an Apple 1, however, all you had to do was set it up, connect it to a keyboard and a monitor, plug it in, and turn it on. Others beefed that Steve was flouting the club’s community spirit and its history of sharing ideas freely by asking them to pay for a prebuilt machine.
确实是这样的，高手会享受自己组装的乐趣，只有普通人才会喜欢送到手边的东西It was Steve’s nature to be out of synch with this kind of groupthink. He was a singular free-thinker whose ideas would often run against the conventional wisdom of any community in which he operated. He and the Homebrewers were cut from different cloth. Their spirited debates often bored him. While a few had broader business ambitions and eventually founded microcomputer companies of their own, most were obsessively focused on electronic intricacies, like determining the most efficient way to link memory chips to microprocessors, or imagining how you might use a cheap computer to play games like the ones they played on mainframes back in school. Steve liked knowing enough to be conversant about electronics and computer design, and later in his life he would boast about his own supposed skill as a programmer. But even in 1975, he didn’t fundamentally or passionately care about the intricacies of computers in and of themselves. Instead, he was obsessed by what might happen when this powerful technology got into the hands of many, many people.
Through the years, Steve would be the beneficiary of a fair amount of luck, some of it outrageously good, and of course some of it mortally bad. Pixar’s Ed Catmull likes to say that since you can’t control the luck itself, which is bound to come your way for better and for worse, what matters is your state of preparedness to deal with it. Steve had a kind of hyperawareness of his surroundings that allowed him to leap at opportunities that presented themselves. So when Paul Terrell, the owner of the Byte Shop computer store in nearby Mountain View, introduced himself to Steve and Woz after the presentation and let them know he was impressed enough to want to talk about doing some business together, Steve knew exactly what to do.
你不知道好运何时会降临，你能做的就是，多做好准备According to Woz, Steve only paid him $350, not the $2,850 he should have earned. Walter Isaacson, Steve’s official biographer, wrote that Jobs denied shortchanging Woz. But the accusation rings true, because it fits with a few other instances in which Steve took shortcuts with people who were close to him.
The two young men had created a nice little market for their “blue boxes,” but that was trivial compared with this. They had never manufactured multiple units of anything at such a significant scale. They had never formally financed a business. Nor had they ever really sold anything of any real value. None of this dissuaded Jobs. He set about taking care of the details of production. For a makeshift factory, he commandeered a bedroom in his parents’ house. He roped his adoptive sister, Patty, into fitting and soldering the semiconductors and other parts into their marked spaces on the circuit board. When Terrell ordered up another fifty, Steve moved the operation into his parents’ garage after his father cleared out the cars he was fixing up for resale. He hired Bill Fernandez, the very guy who back in high school had first introduced him to Woz. And he brought in other neighborhood kids to accelerate the process. He signed up an answering service and rented a post office box. He did, in other words, whatever it took.
用尽全力把握机会，去做Everyone worked nights and weekends. And Steve was more focused than anyone. He prodded the team ceaselessly. When things went wrong, he moved fast; after an old girlfriend failed to solder a few chips correctly, he made her the team’s bookkeeper. His temper was short and he never hesitated to belittle their work when something went wrong. As a child, Steve had rarely been given any reason to hold back his honest feelings. Now he began to learn one of his first management lessons, namely that his temper, properly targeted, could actually be a very effective motivational tool. It was a lesson that would prove hard to undo.
原来这个时候开始，脾气就已经不好了，哈哈哈，真实Sure enough, under Steve’s gimlet eye, his motley team delivered all the circuit boards Terrell ever ordered. The product didn’t exactly fly off the shelf—fewer than two hundred Apple 1’s were ever sold. Even so, that summer in the legendary garage represented the first time Steve rallied a group of people to dig down deep and deliver something that was innovative and miraculous, and that they weren’t even sure they could create. It wouldn’t be the last time he would pull off such a trick. After an aborted stint at college, a picaresque pilgrimage to India, some revelatory travels on LSD, and an internship of sorts at Atari, Steve had discovered his true mission. And now he was totally locked in.
令人振奋的开端！