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

The Whiteness of the Whale
Jony Ive had been playing with the foam model of the iPod and trying to conceive what the 
finished product should look like when an idea occurred to him on a morning drive from his San 
Francisco home to Cupertino. Its face should be pure white, he told his colleague in the car, and it 
should connect seamlessly to a polished stainless steel back. “Most small consumer products have 
this disposable feel to them,” said Ive. “There is no cultural gravity to them. The thing I’m 
proudest of about the iPod is that there is something about it that makes it feel significant, not 
disposable.”
The white would be not just white, but 
pure
white. “Not only the device, but the headphones 
and the wires and even the power block,” he recalled. “
Pure
white.” Others kept arguing that the 
headphones, of course, should be black, like all headphones. “But Steve got it immediately, and 
embraced white,” said Ive. “There would be a purity to it.” The sinuous flow of the white earbud 
wires helped make the iPod an icon. As Ive described it:
There was something very significant and nondisposable about it, yet there was also something very 
quiet and very restrained. It wasn’t wagging its tail in your face. It was restrained, but it was also crazy, 
with those flowing headphones. That’s why I like white. White isn’t just a neutral color. It is so pure 
and quiet. Bold and conspicuous and yet so inconspicuous as well.
Lee Clow’s advertising team at TBWA\Chiat\Day wanted to celebrate the iconic nature of the 
iPod and its whiteness rather than create more traditional product-introduction ads that showed off 
the device’s features. James Vincent, a lanky young Brit who had played in a band and worked as 
a DJ, had recently joined the agency, and he was a natural to help focus Apple’s advertising on hip 
millennial-generation music lovers rather than rebel baby boomers. With the help of the art 
director Susan Alinsangan, they created a series of billboards and posters for the iPod, and they 
spread the options on Jobs’s conference room table for his inspection.
At the far right end they placed the most traditional options, which featured straightforward 
photos of the iPod on a white background. At the far left end they placed the most graphic and 
iconic treatments, which showed just a silhouette of someone dancing while listening to an iPod, 
its white earphone wires waving with the music. “It understood your emotional and intensely 
personal relationship with the music,” Vincent said. He suggested to Duncan Milner, the creative 
director, that they all stand firmly at the far left end, to see if they could get Jobs to gravitate there. 
When he walked in, he went immediately to the right, looking at the stark product pictures. “This 
looks great,” he said. “Let’s talk about these.” Vincent, Milner, and Clow did not budge from the 
other end. Finally, Jobs looked up, glanced at the iconic treatments, and said, “Oh, I guess you like 
this stuff.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t show the product. It doesn’t say what it is.” Vincent 
proposed that they use the iconic images but add the tagline, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” That 
would say it all. Jobs glanced back toward the right end of the table, then finally agreed. Not 
surprisingly he was soon claiming that it was his idea to push for the more iconic ads. “There were 
some skeptics around who asked, ‘How’s this going to actually sell an iPod?’” Jobs recalled. 
“That’s when it came in handy to be the CEO, so I could push the idea through.”
Jobs realized that there was yet another advantage to the fact that Apple had an integrated 
system of computer, software, and device. It meant that sales of the iPod would drive sales of the 
iMac. That, in turn, meant that he could take money that Apple was spending on iMac advertising 
and shift it to spending on iPod ads—getting a double bang for the buck. A triple bang, actually, 
because the ads would lend luster and youthfulness to the whole Apple brand. He recalled:
I had this crazy idea that we could sell just as many Macs by advertising the iPod. In addition, the iPod 
would position Apple as evoking innovation and youth. So I moved $75 million of advertising money to 
the iPod, even though the category didn’t justify one hundredth of that. That meant that we completely 
dominated the market for music players. We outspent everybody by a factor of about a hundred.

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The television ads showed the iconic silhouettes dancing to songs picked by Jobs, Clow, and 
Vincent. “Finding the music became our main fun at our weekly marketing meetings,” said Clow. 
“We’d play some edgy cut, Steve would say, ‘I hate that,’ and James would have to talk him into 
it.” The ads helped popularize many new bands, most notably the Black Eyed Peas; the ad with 
“Hey Mama” is the classic of the silhouettes genre. When a new ad was about to go into 
production, Jobs would often have second thoughts, call up Vincent, and insist that he cancel it. “It 
sounds a bit poppy” or “It sounds a bit trivial,” he would say. “Let’s call it off.” James would get 
flustered and try to talk him around. “Hold on, it’s going to be great,” he would argue. Invariably 
Jobs would relent, the ad would be made, and he would love it.
Jobs unveiled the iPod on October 23, 2001, at one of his signature product launch events. “Hint: 
It’s not a Mac,” the invitation teased. When it came time to reveal the product, after he described 
its technical capabilities, Jobs did not do his usual trick of walking over to a table and pulling off a 
velvet cloth. Instead he said, “I happen to have one right here in my pocket.” He reached into his 
jeans and pulled out the gleaming white device. “This amazing little device holds a thousand 
songs, and it goes right in my pocket.” He slipped it back in and ambled offstage to applause.
Initially there was some skepticism among tech geeks, especially about the $399 price. In the 
blogosphere, the joke was that iPod stood for “idiots price our devices.” However, consumers 
soon made it a hit. More than that, the iPod became the essence of everything Apple was destined 
to be: poetry connected to engineering, arts and creativity intersecting with technology, design 
that’s bold and simple. It had an ease of use that came from being an integrated end-to-end 
system, from computer to FireWire to device to software to content management. When you took 
an iPod out of the box, it was so beautiful that it seemed to glow, and it made all other music 
players look as if they had been designed and manufactured in Uzbekistan.
Not since the original Mac had a clarity of product vision so propelled a company into the 
future. “If anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good 
example,” Jobs told 
Newsweek
’s Steve Levy at the time. Wozniak, who had long been skeptical of 
integrated systems, began to revise his philosophy. “Wow, it makes sense that Apple was the one 
to come up with it,” Wozniak enthused after the iPod came out. “After all, Apple’s whole history 
is making both the hardware and the software, with the result that the two work better together.”
The day that Levy got his press preview of the iPod, he happened to be meeting Bill Gates at a 
dinner, and he showed it to him. “Have you seen this yet?” Levy asked. Levy noted, “Gates went 
into a zone that recalls those science fiction films where a space alien, confronted with a novel 
object, creates some sort of force tunnel between him and the object, allowing him to suck directly 
into his brain all possible information about it.” Gates played with the scroll wheel and pushed 
every button combination, while his eyes stared fixedly at the screen. “It looks like a great 
product,” he finally said. Then he paused and looked puzzled. “It’s only for Macintosh?” he asked.

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