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

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But for the next few months they were too busy to bicker. Jobs wanted the iPod out by 
Christmas, and this meant having it ready to unveil in October. They looked around for other 
companies that were designing MP3 players that could serve as the foundation for Apple’s work 
and settled on a small company named PortalPlayer. Fadell told the team there, “This is the project 
that’s going to remold Apple, and ten years from now, it’s going to be a music business, not a 
computer business.” He convinced them to sign an exclusive deal, and his group began to modify 
PortalPlayer’s deficiencies, such as its complex interfaces, short battery life, and inability to make 
a playlist longer than ten songs.
That’s It!
There are certain meetings that are memorable both because they mark a historic moment and 
because they illuminate the way a leader operates. Such was the case with the gathering in Apple’s 
fourth-floor conference room in April 2001, where Jobs decided on the fundamentals of the iPod. 
There to hear Fadell present his proposals to Jobs were Rubinstein, Schiller, Ive, Jeff Robbin, and 
marketing director Stan Ng. Fadell didn’t know Jobs, and he was understandably intimidated. 
“When he walked into the conference room, I sat up and thought, ‘Whoa, there’s Steve!’ I was 
really on guard, because I’d heard how brutal he could be.”
The meeting started with a presentation of the potential market and what other companies were 
doing. Jobs, as usual, had no patience. “He won’t pay attention to a slide deck for more than a 
minute,” Fadell said. When a slide showed other possible players in the market, he waved it away. 
“Don’t worry about Sony,” he said. “We know what we’re doing, and they don’t.” After that, they 
quit showing slides, and instead Jobs peppered the group with questions. Fadell took away a 
lesson: “Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through. He once told me, ‘If you need 
slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
Instead Jobs liked to be shown physical objects that he could feel, inspect, and fondle. So 
Fadell brought three different models to the conference room; Rubinstein had coached him on how 
to reveal them sequentially so that his preferred choice would be the pièce de résistance. They hid 
the mockup of that option under a wooden bowl at the center of the table.
Fadell began his show-and-tell by taking the various parts they were using out of a box and 
spreading them on the table. There were the 1.8-inch drive, LCD screen, boards, and batteries, all 
labeled with their cost and weight. As he displayed them, they discussed how the prices or sizes 

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might come down over the next year or so. Some of the pieces could be put together, like Lego 
blocks, to show the options.
Then Fadell began unveiling his models, which were made of Styrofoam with fishing leads 
inserted to give them the proper weight. The first had a slot for a removable memory card for 
music. Jobs dismissed it as complicated. The second had dynamic RAM memory, which was 
cheap but would lose all of the songs if the battery ran out. Jobs was not pleased. Next Fadell put a 
few of the pieces together to show what a device with the 1.8-inch hard drive would be like. Jobs 
seemed intrigued. The show climaxed with Fadell lifting the bowl and revealing a fully assembled 
model of that alternative. “I was hoping to be able to play more with the Lego parts, but Steve 
settled right on the hard-drive option just the way we had modeled it,” Fadell recalled. He was 
rather stunned by the process. “I was used to being at Philips, where decisions like this would take 
meeting after meeting, with a lot of PowerPoint presentations and going back for more study.”
Next it was Phil Schiller’s turn. “Can I bring out my idea now?” he asked. He left the room and 
returned with a handful of iPod models, all of which had the same device on the front: the soon-to-
be-famous trackwheel. “I had been thinking of how you go through a playlist,” he recalled. “You 
can’t press a button hundreds of times. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a wheel?” By 
turning the wheel with your thumb, you could scroll through songs. The longer you kept turning, 
the faster the scrolling got, so you could zip through hundreds easily. Jobs shouted, “That’s it!” He 
got Fadell and the engineers working on it.
Once the project was launched, Jobs immersed himself in it daily. His main demand was 
“Simplify!” He would go over each screen of the user interface and apply a rigid test: If he wanted 
a song or a function, he should be able to get there in three clicks. And the click should be 
intuitive. If he couldn’t figure out how to navigate to something, or if it took more than three 
clicks, he would be brutal. “There would be times when we’d rack our brains on a user interface 
problem, and think we’d considered every option, and he would go, ‘Did you think of this?’” said 
Fadell. “And then we’d all go, ‘Holy shit.’ He’d redefine the problem or approach, and our little 
problem would go away.”
Every night Jobs would be on the phone with ideas. Fadell and the others would call each other 
up, discuss Jobs’s latest suggestion, and conspire on how to nudge him to where they wanted him 
to go, which worked about half the time. “We would have this swirling thing of Steve’s latest idea, 
and we would all try to stay ahead of it,” said Fadell. “Every day there was something like that, 
whether it was a switch here, or a button color, or a pricing strategy issue. With his style, you 
needed to work with your peers, watch each other’s back.”
One key insight Jobs had was that as many functions as possible should be performed using 
iTunes on your computer rather than on the iPod. As he later recalled:
In order to make the iPod really easy to use—and this took a lot of arguing on my part—we needed to 
limit what the device itself would do. Instead we put that functionality in iTunes on the computer. For 
example, we made it so you couldn’t make playlists using the device. You made playlists on iTunes, 
and then you synced with the device. That was controversial. But what made the Rio and other devices 
so brain-dead was that they were complicated. They had to do things like make playlists, because they 
weren’t integrated with the jukebox software on your computer. So by owning the iTunes software and 
the iPod device, that allowed us to make the computer and the device work together, and it allowed us to 
put the complexity in the right place.
The most Zen of all simplicities was Jobs’s decree, which astonished his colleagues, that the 
iPod would not have an on-off switch. It became true of most Apple devices. There was no need 
for one. Apple’s devices would go dormant if they were not being used, and they would wake up 
when you touched any key. But there was no need for a switch that would go “Click—you’re off. 
Good-bye.”
Suddenly everything had fallen into place: a drive that would hold a thousand songs; an 
interface and scroll wheel that would let you navigate a thousand songs; a FireWire connection 
that could sync a thousand songs in under ten minutes; and a battery that would last through a 
thousand songs. “We suddenly were looking at one another and saying, ‘This is going to be so 
cool,’” Jobs recalled. “We knew how cool it was, because we knew how badly we each wanted 
one personally. And the concept became so beautifully simple: a thousand songs in your pocket.” 

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One of the copywriters suggested they call it a “Pod.” Jobs was the one who, borrowing from the 
iMac and iTunes names, modified that to iPod.