Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER THIRTY
THE DIGITAL HUB
From iTunes to the iPod
The original iPod, 2001
Connecting the Dots
Once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees on a retreat, which he called “The Top 100.” 
They were picked based on a simple guideline: the people you would bring if you could take only 
a hundred people with you on a lifeboat to your next company. At the end of each retreat, Jobs 
would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards because they gave him complete 
control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the ten things we should be 
doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down, 
and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up 
with a list of ten. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”
By 2001 Apple had revived its personal computer offerings. It was now time to think different. 
A set of new possibilities topped the what-next list on his whiteboard that year.
At the time, a pall had descended on the digital realm. The dot-com bubble had burst, and the 
NASDAQ had fallen more than 50% from its peak. Only three tech companies had ads during the 
January 2001 Super Bowl, compared to seventeen the year before. But the sense of deflation went 
deeper. For the twenty-five years since Jobs and Wozniak had founded Apple, the personal 
computer had been the centerpiece of the digital revolution. Now experts were predicting that its 
central role was ending. It had “matured into something boring,” wrote the 
Wall Street Journal
’s 
Walt Mossberg. Jeff Weitzen, the CEO of Gateway, proclaimed, “We’re clearly migrating away 
from the PC as the centerpiece.”
It was at that moment that Jobs launched a new grand strategy that would transform Apple—
and with it the entire technology industry. The personal computer, instead of edging toward the 
sidelines, would become a “digital hub” that coordinated a variety of devices, from music players 
to video recorders to cameras. You’d link and sync all these devices with your computer, and it 
would manage your music, pictures, video, text, and all aspects of what Jobs dubbed your “digital 
lifestyle.” Apple would no longer be just a computer company—indeed it would drop that word 

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from its name—but the Macintosh would be reinvigorated by becoming the hub for an astounding 
array of new gadgets, including the iPod and iPhone and iPad.
When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was musing 
about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative. “People 
get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them,” he said. 
At age forty-five, Jobs was now about to get out of his groove.
FireWire
Jobs’s vision that your computer could become your digital hub went back to a technology called 
FireWire, which Apple developed in the early 1990s. It was a high-speed serial port that moved 
digital files such as video from one device to another. Japanese camcorder makers adopted it, and 
Jobs decided to include it on the updated versions of the iMac that came out in October 1999. He 
began to see that FireWire could be part of a system that moved video from cameras onto a 
computer, where it could be edited and distributed.
To make this work, the iMac needed to have great video editing software. So Jobs went to his 
old friends at Adobe, the digital graphics company, and asked them to make a new Mac version of 
Adobe Premiere, which was popular on Windows computers. Adobe’s executives stunned Jobs by 
flatly turning him down. The Macintosh, they said, had too few users to make it worthwhile. Jobs 
was furious and felt betrayed. “I put Adobe on the map, and they screwed me,” he later claimed. 
Adobe made matters even worse when it also didn’t write its other popular programs, such as 
Photoshop, for the Mac OSX, even though the Macintosh was popular among designers and other 
creative people who used those applications.
Jobs never forgave Adobe, and a decade later he got into a public war with the company by not 
permitting Adobe Flash to run on the iPad. He took away a valuable lesson that reinforced his 
desire for end-to-end control of all key elements of a system: “My primary insight when we were 
screwed by Adobe in 1999 was that we shouldn’t get into any business where we didn’t control 
both the hardware and the software, otherwise we’d get our head handed to us.”
So starting in 1999 Apple began to produce application software for the Mac, with a focus on 
people at the intersection of art and technology. These included Final Cut Pro, for editing digital 
video; iMovie, which was a simpler consumer version; iDVD, for burning video or music onto a 
disc; iPhoto, to compete with Adobe Photoshop; GarageBand, for creating and mixing music; 
iTunes, for managing your songs; and the iTunes Store, for buying songs.
The idea of the digital hub quickly came into focus. “I first understood this with the 
camcorder,” Jobs said. “Using iMovie makes your camcorder ten times more valuable.” Instead of 
having hundreds of hours of raw footage you would never really sit through, you could edit it on 
your computer, make elegant dissolves, add music, and roll credits, listing yourself as executive 
producer. It allowed people to be creative, to express themselves, to make something emotional. 
“That’s when it hit me that the personal computer was going to morph into something else.”
Jobs had another insight: If the computer served as the hub, it would allow the portable devices 
to become simpler. A lot of the functions that the devices tried to do, such as editing the video or 
pictures, they did poorly because they had small screens and could not easily accommodate menus 
filled with lots of functions. Computers could handle that more easily.
And one more thing . . . What Jobs also saw was that this worked best when everything—the 
device, computer, software, applications, FireWire—was all tightly integrated. “I became even 
more of a believer in providing end-to-end solutions,” he recalled.
The beauty of this realization was that there was only one company that was well-positioned to 
provide such an integrated approach. Microsoft wrote software, Dell and Compaq made hardware, 
Sony produced a lot of digital devices, Adobe developed a lot of applications. But only Apple did 
all of these things. “We’re the only company that owns the whole widget—the hardware, the 
software and the operating system,” he explained to 
Time.
“We can take full responsibility for the 
user experience. We can do things that the other guys can’t do.”
Apple’s first integrated foray into the digital hub strategy was video. With FireWire, you could 
get your video onto your Mac, and with iMovie you could edit it into a masterpiece. Then what? 
You’d want to burn some DVDs so you and your friends could watch it on a TV. “So we spent a 

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lot of time working with the drive manufacturers to get a consumer drive that could burn a DVD,” 
he said. “We were the first to ever ship that.” As usual Jobs focused on making the product as 
simple as possible for the user, and this was the key to its success. Mike Evangelist, who worked 
at Apple on software design, recalled demonstrating to Jobs an early version of the interface. After 
looking at a bunch of screenshots, Jobs jumped up, grabbed a marker, and drew a simple rectangle 
on a whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your 
video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re 
going to make.” Evangelist was dumbfounded, but it led to the simplicity of what became iDVD. 
Jobs even helped design the “Burn” button icon.
Jobs knew digital photography was also about to explode, so Apple developed ways to make 
the computer the hub of your photos. But for the first year at least, he took his eye off one really 
big opportunity. HP and a few others were producing a drive that burned music CDs, but Jobs 
decreed that Apple should focus on video rather than music. In addition, his angry insistence that 
the iMac get rid of its tray disk drive and use instead a more elegant slot drive meant that it could 
not include the first CD burners, which were initially made for the tray format. “We kind of 
missed the boat on that,” he recalled. “So we needed to catch up real fast.”
The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also 
that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.
iTunes
It didn’t take Jobs long to realize that music was going to be huge. By 2000 people were ripping 
music onto their computers from CDs, or downloading it from file-sharing services such as 
Napster, and burning playlists onto their own blank disks. That year the number of blank CDs sold 
in the United States was 320 million. There were only 281 million people in the country. That 
meant some people were