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

Modern Times,
for pre-release orders. “Bob Dylan 
is one of the most respected poets and musicians of our time, and he is a personal hero of mine,” 
Jobs said at the announcement. The 773-track set included forty-two rarities, such as a 1961 tape 
of “Wade in the Water” made in a Minnesota hotel, a 1962 version of “Handsome Molly” from a 
live concert at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, the truly awesome rendition of “Mr. 
Tambourine Man” from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival (Jobs’s favorite), and an acoustic version 
of “Outlaw Blues” from 1965.
As part of the deal, Dylan appeared in a television ad for the iPod, featuring his new album, 
Modern Times
. This was one of the most astonishing cases of flipping the script since Tom 
Sawyer persuaded his friends to whitewash the fence. In the past, getting celebrities to do an ad 
required paying them a lot of money. But by 2006 the tables were turned. Major artists 
wanted
to 
appear in iPod ads; the exposure would guarantee success. James Vincent had predicted this a few 
years earlier, when Jobs said he had contacts with many musicians and could pay them to appear 
in ads. “No, things are going to soon change,” Vincent replied. “Apple is a different kind of brand, 
and it’s cooler than the brand of most artists. We should talk about the opportunity we offer the 
bands, not pay them.”
Lee Clow recalled that there was actually some resistance among the younger staffers at Apple 
and the ad agency to using Dylan. “They wondered whether he was still cool enough,” Clow said. 
Jobs would hear none of that. He was thrilled to have Dylan.
Jobs became obsessed by every detail of the Dylan commercial. Rosen flew to Cupertino so 
that they could go through the album and pick the song they wanted to use, which ended up being 
“Someday Baby.” Jobs approved a test video that Clow made using a stand-in for Dylan, which 
was then shot in Nashville with Dylan himself. But when it came back, Jobs hated it. It wasn’t 
distinctive enough. He wanted a new style. So Clow hired another director, and Rosen was able to 
convince Dylan to retape the entire commercial. This time it was done with a gently backlit 
cowboy-hatted Dylan sitting on a stool, strumming and singing, while a hip woman in a newsboy 
cap dances with her iPod. Jobs loved it.
The ad showed the halo effect of the iPod’s marketing: It helped Dylan win a younger 
audience, just as the iPod had done for Apple computers. Because of the ad, Dylan’s album was 
number one on the 
Billboard
chart its first week, topping hot-selling albums by Christina Aguilera 
and Outkast. It was the first time Dylan had reached the top spot since 
Desire
in 1976, thirty years 
earlier. 
Ad Age
headlined Apple’s role in propelling Dylan. “The iTunes spot wasn’t just a run-of-
the-mill celebrity-endorsement deal in which a big brand signs a big check to tap into the equity of 
a big star,” it reported. “This one flipped the formula, with the all-powerful Apple brand giving 
Mr. Dylan access to younger demographics and helping propel his sales to places they hadn’t been 
since the Ford administration.”
The Beatles
Among Jobs’s prized CDs was a bootleg that contained a dozen or so taped sessions of the Beatles 
revising “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It became the musical score to his philosophy of how to 
perfect a product. Andy Hertzfeld had found the CD and made a copy of it for Jobs in 1986, 
though Jobs sometimes told folks that it had come from Yoko Ono. Sitting in the living room of 
his Palo Alto home one day, Jobs rummaged around in some glass-enclosed bookcases to find it, 
then put it on while describing what it had taught him:

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It’s a complex song, and it’s fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and 
finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [He laughs as Lennon stops 
during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they 
took? It didn’t work, so they went back and started from where they were. It’s so raw in this version. It 
actually makes them sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to 
this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn’t stop. 
They were such perfectionists they kept it going and going. This made a big impression on me when I 
was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this.
They did a bundle of work between each of these recordings. They kept sending it back to make it 
closer to perfect. [As he listens to the third take, he points out how the instrumentation has gotten more 
complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we’d make of 
a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing 
detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It’s a lot of work, but in the 
end it just gets better, and soon it’s like, “Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?”
It was thus understandable that Jobs was driven to distraction by the fact that the Beatles were not 
on iTunes.
His struggle with Apple Corps, the Beatles’ business holding company, stretched more than 
three decades, causing too many journalists to use the phrase “long and winding road” in stories 
about the relationship. It began in 1978, when Apple Computers, soon after its launch, was sued 
by Apple Corps for trademark infringement, based on the fact that the Beatles’ former recording 
label was called Apple. The suit was settled three years later, when Apple Computers paid Apple 
Corps $80,000. The settlement had what seemed back then an innocuous stipulation: The Beatles 
would not produce any computer equipment and Apple would not market any music products.
The Beatles kept their end of the bargain; none of them ever produced any computers. But 
Apple ended up wandering into the music business. It got sued again in 1991, when the Mac 
incorporated the ability to play musical files, then again in 2003, when the iTunes Store was 
launched. The legal issues were finally resolved in 2007, when Apple made a deal to pay Apple 
Corps $500 million for all worldwide rights to the name, and then licensed back to the Beatles the 
right to use Apple Corps for their record and business holdings.
Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For that to happen, the 
Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of their songs, had to negotiate their own 
differences over how to handle the digital rights. “The Beatles all want to be on iTunes,” Jobs later 
recalled, “but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can’t get 
divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes was something I very 
much hoped I would live to resolve.” As it turned out, he would.
Bono
Bono, the lead singer of U2, deeply appreciated Apple’s marketing muscle. He was confident that 
his Dublin-based band was still the best in the world, but in 2004 it was trying, after almost thirty 
years together, to reinvigorate its image. It had produced an exciting new album with a song that 
the band’s lead guitarist, The Edge, declared to be “the mother of all rock tunes.” Bono knew he 
needed to find a way to get it some traction, so he placed a call to Jobs.
“I wanted something specific from Apple,” Bono recalled. “We had a song called ‘Vertigo’ that 
featured an aggressive guitar riff that I knew would be contagious, but only if people were 
exposed to it many, many times.” He was worried that the era of promoting a song through airplay 
on the radio was over. So Bono visited Jobs at home in Palo Alto, walked around the garden, and 
made an unusual pitch. Over the years U2 had spurned offers as high as $23 million to be in 
commercials. Now he wanted Jobs to use the band in an iPod commercial for free—or at least as 
part of a mutually beneficial package. “They had never done a commercial before,” Jobs later 
recalled. “But they were getting ripped off by free downloading, they liked what we were doing 
with iTunes, and they thought we could promote them to a younger audience.”
Any other CEO would have jumped into a mosh pit to have U2 in an ad, but Jobs pushed back a 
bit. Apple didn’t feature recognizable people in the iPod ads, just silhouettes. (The Dylan ad had 
not yet been made.) “You have silhouettes of fans,” Bono replied, “so couldn’t the next phase be 

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silhouettes of artists?” Jobs said it sounded like an idea worth exploring. Bono left a copy of the 
unreleased album,