“In order to raise some cash one day, Jobs decided to sell his IBM Selectric typewriter. He walked into the room of the student who had offered to buy it only to discover that he was having sex with his girlfriend. Jobs started to leave, but the student invited him to take a seat and wait while they finished. “I thought, ‘This is kind of far out,'” Jobs later recalled. And thus began his relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few people in Jobs’s life who were able to mesmerize him. He adopted some of Friedland’s charismatic traits and for a few years treated him almost like a guru—until he began to see him as a charlatan.
Friedland was four years older than Jobs, but still an undergraduate. The son of an Auschwitz survivor who became a prosperous Chicago architect, he had originally gone to Bowdoin, a liberal arts college in Maine. But while a sophomore, he was arrested for possession of 24,000 tablets of LSD worth $125,000.”
O μακαρίτης αγαπούσε και αυτός τα ναρκωτικά, μάλιστα πολλές φορές έλεγε ότι χάρη σε αυτά είχε ανοίξει το μυαλό του. Ως προς την ταμπλέτα όμως:
At first he gave the project to the Apple group that was making the AirPort wireless base station, on the theory that it was a wireless product. But he soon realized that it was basically a consumer device, like the iPod, so he reassigned it to Fadell and his teammates.
Their initial approach was to modify the iPod. They tried to use the trackwheel as a way for a user to scroll through phone options and, without a keyboard, try to enter numbers. It was not a natural fit. “We were having a lot of problems using the wheel, especially in getting it to dial phone numbers,” Fadell recalled. “It was cumbersome.” It was fine for scrolling through an address book, but horrible at inputting anything. The team kept trying to convince themselves that users would mainly be calling people who were already in their address book, but they knew that it wouldn’t really work.
At that time there was a second project under way at Apple: a secret effort to build a tablet computer. In 2005 these narratives intersected, and the ideas for the tablet flowed into the planning for the phone. In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone.
Ως συνήθως είναι σχεδόν σχιζοφρενής ο τρόπος που χειρίστηκε το project:
“We have no plans to make a tablet,” Jobs declared in an interview with Walt Mossberg in May 2003. “It turns out people want keyboards. Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already.” Like his statement about having a “hormone imbalance,” that was misleading.
Και βέβαια κανείς δεν θέλει να παραδεχθεί ότι το iPad ουσιαστικά γεννήθηκε από την ανικανότητά του να κάνει netbook.
The tablet project got a boost in 2007 when Jobs was considering ideas for a low- cost netbook computer. At an executive team brainstorming session one Monday, Ive asked why it needed a keyboard hinged to the screen; that was expensive and bulky. Put the keyboard on the screen using a multi-touch interface, he suggested. Jobs agreed. So the resources were directed to revving up the tablet project rather than designing a netbook.
Όταν ήρθε η ώρα του λανσαρίσματος, συγκρινόταν μόνο με τον Μωησή:
The usual excitement that Jobs was able to gin up for a product launch paled in comparison to the frenzy that built for the iPad unveiling on January 27, 2010, in San Francisco. The Economist put him on its cover robed, haloed, and holding what was dubbed “the Jesus Tablet.” The Wall Street Journal struck a similarly exalted note: “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”
Και το αντίπαλο δέος ήταν και παραμένει το Android. Αυτοί οι αλήτες με τα ανοιχτά πρωτόκολλα!
Underlying the dispute was an even more fundamental issue, one that had unnerving historical resonance. Google presented Android as an “open” platform; its open- source code was freely available for multiple hardware makers to use on whatever phones or tablets they built. Jobs, of course, had a dogmatic belief that Apple should closely integrate its operating systems with its hardware. In the 1980s Apple had not licensed out its Macintosh operating system, and Microsoft eventually gained dominant market share by licensing its system to multiple hardware makers and, in Jobs’s mind, ripping off Apple’s interface.