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

Antennagate: Design versus Engineering
In many consumer product companies, there’s tension between the designers, who want to make a 
product look beautiful, and the engineers, who need to make sure it fulfills its functional 
requirements. At Apple, where Jobs pushed both design and engineering to the edge, that tension 
was even greater.
When he and design director Jony Ive became creative coconspirators back in 1997, they 
tended to view the qualms expressed by engineers as evidence of a can’t-do attitude that needed to 

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be overcome. Their faith that awesome design could force superhuman feats of engineering was 
reinforced by the success of the iMac and iPod. When engineers said something couldn’t be done, 
Ive and Jobs pushed them to try, and usually they succeeded. There were occasional small 
problems. The iPod Nano, for example, was prone to getting scratched because Ive believed that a 
clear coating would lessen the purity of his design. But that was not a crisis.
When it came to designing the iPhone, Ive’s design desires bumped into a fundamental law of 
physics that could not be changed even by a reality distortion field. Metal is not a great material to 
put near an antenna. As Michael Faraday showed, electromagnetic waves flow around the surface 
of metal, not through it. So a metal enclosure around a phone can create what is known as a 
Faraday cage, diminishing the signals that get in or out. The original iPhone started with a plastic 
band at the bottom, but Ive thought that would wreck the design integrity and asked that there be 
an aluminum rim all around. After that ended up working out, Ive designed the iPhone 4 with a 
steel rim. The steel would be the structural support, look really sleek, and serve as part of the 
phone’s antenna.
There were significant challenges. In order to serve as an antenna, the steel rim had to have a 
tiny gap. But if a person covered that gap with a finger or sweaty palm, there could be some signal 
loss. The engineers suggested a clear coating over the metal to help prevent this, but again Ive felt 
that this would detract from the brushed-metal look. The issue was presented to Jobs at various 
meetings, but he thought the engineers were crying wolf. You can make this work, he said. And so 
they did.
And it worked, almost perfectly. But not totally perfectly. When the iPhone 4 was released in 
June 2010, it looked awesome, but a problem soon became evident: If you held the phone a certain 
way, especially using your left hand so your palm covered the tiny gap, you could lose your 
connection. It occurred with perhaps one in a hundred calls. Because Jobs insisted on keeping his 
unreleased products secret (even the phone that Gizmodo scored in a bar had a fake case around 
it), the iPhone 4 did not go through the live testing that most electronic devices get. So the flaw 
was not caught before the massive rush to buy it began. “The question is whether the twin policies 
of putting design in front of engineering and having a policy of supersecrecy surrounding 
unreleased products helped Apple,” Tony Fadell said later. “On the whole, yes, but unchecked 
power is a bad thing, and that’s what happened.”
Had it not been the Apple iPhone 4, a product that had everyone transfixed, the issue of a few 
extra dropped calls would not have made news. But it became known as “Antennagate,” and it 
boiled to a head in early July, when 
Consumer Reports
did some rigorous tests and said that it 
could not recommend the iPhone 4 because of the antenna problem.
Jobs was in Kona Village, Hawaii, with his family when the issue arose. At first he was 
defensive. Art Levinson was in constant contact by phone, and Jobs insisted that the problem 
stemmed from Google and Motorola making mischief. “They want to shoot Apple down,” he said.
Levinson urged a little humility. “Let’s try to figure out if there’s something wrong,” he said. 
When he again mentioned the perception that Apple was arrogant, Jobs didn’t like it. It went 
against his black-white, right-wrong way of viewing the world. Apple was a company of principle, 
he felt. If others failed to see that, it was their fault, not a reason for Apple to play humble.
Jobs’s second reaction was to be hurt. He took the criticism personally and became emotionally 
anguished. “At his core, he doesn’t do things that he thinks are blatantly wrong, like some pure 
pragmatists in our business,” Levinson said. “So if he feels he’s right, he will just charge ahead 
rather than question himself.” Levinson urged him not to get depressed. But Jobs did. “Fuck this, 
it’s not worth it,” he told Levinson. Finally Tim Cook was able to shake him out of his lethargy. 
He quoted someone as saying that Apple was becoming the new Microsoft, complacent and 
arrogant. The next day Jobs changed his attitude. “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” he said.
When the data about dropped calls were assembled from AT&T, Jobs realized there was a 
problem, even if it was more minor than people were making it seem. So he flew back from 
Hawaii. But before he left, he made some phone calls. It was time to gather a couple of trusted old 
hands, wise men who had been with him during the original Macintosh days thirty years earlier.
His first call was to Regis McKenna, the public relations guru. “I’m coming back from Hawaii 
to deal with this antenna thing, and I need to bounce some stuff off of you,” Jobs told him. They 
agreed to meet at the Cupertino boardroom at 1:30 the next afternoon. The second call was to the 

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adman Lee Clow. He had tried to retire from the Apple account, but Jobs liked having him around. 
His colleague James Vincent was summoned as well.
Jobs also decided to bring his son Reed, then a high school senior, back with him from Hawaii. 
“I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I want you to be in every single one 
because you’ll learn more in those two days than you would in two years at business school,” he 
told him. “You’re going to be in the room with the best people in the world making really tough 
decisions and get to see how the sausage is made.” Jobs got a little misty-eyed when he recalled 
the experience. “I would go through that all again just for that opportunity to have him see me at 
work,” he said. “He got to see what his dad does.”
They were joined by Katie Cotton, the steady public relations chief at Apple, and seven other 
top executives. The meeting lasted all afternoon. “It was one of the greatest meetings of my life,” 
Jobs later said. He began by laying out all the data they had gathered. “Here are the facts. So what 
should we do about it?”
McKenna was the most calm and straightforward. “Just lay out the truth, the data,” he said. 
“Don’t appear arrogant, but appear firm and confident.” Others, including Vincent, pushed Jobs to 
be more apologetic, but McKenna said no. “Don’t go into the press conference with your tail 
between your legs,” he advised. “You should just say: ‘Phones aren’t perfect, and we’re not 
perfect. We’re human and doing the best we can, and here’s the data.’” That became the strategy. 
When the topic turned to the perception of arrogance, McKenna urged him not to worry too much. 
“I don’t think it would work to try to make Steve look humble,” McKenna explained later. “As 
Steve says about himself, ‘What you see is what you get.’”
At the press event that Friday, held in Apple’s auditorium, Jobs followed McKenna’s advice. 
He did not grovel or apologize, yet he was able to defuse the problem by showing that Apple 
understood it and would try to make it right. Then he changed the framework of the discussion, 
saying that all cell phones had some problems. Later he told me that he had sounded a bit “too 
annoyed” at the event, but in fact he was able to strike a tone that was unemotional and 
straightforward. He captured it in four short, declarative sentences: “We’re not perfect. Phones are 
not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.”
If anyone was unhappy, he said, they could return the phone (the return rate turned out to be 
1.7%, less than a third of the return rate for the iPhone 3GS or most other phones) or get a free 
bumper case from Apple. He went on to report data showing that other mobile phones had similar 
problems. That was not totally true. Apple’s antenna design made it slightly worse than most other 
phones, including earlier versions of the iPhone. But it was true that the media frenzy over the 
iPhone 4’s dropped calls was overblown. “This is blown so out of proportion that it’s incredible,” 
he said. Instead of being appalled that he didn’t grovel or order a recall, most customers realized 
that he was right.
The wait list for the phone, which was already sold out, went from two weeks to three. It 
remained the company’s fastest-selling product ever. The media debate shifted to the issue of 
whether Jobs was right to assert that other smartphones had the same antenna problems. Even if 
the answer was no, that was a better story to face than one about whether the iPhone 4 was a 
defective dud.
Some media observers were incredulous. “In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, 
righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny 
the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers,” 
Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote. “This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and 
crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they 
get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?” Wolff attributed it to Jobs’s 
mesmerizing effect as “the last charismatic individual.” Other CEOs would be offering abject 
apologies and swallowing massive recalls, but Jobs didn’t have to. “The grim, skeletal appearance, 
the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really 
works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful 
and what is trivial.”
Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon strip 
Dilbert
, was also incredulous, but far more 
admiring. He wrote a blog entry a few days later (which Jobs proudly emailed around) that 
marveled at how Jobs’s “high ground maneuver” was destined to be studied as a new public 

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relations standard. “Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations 
playbook, because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook,” Adams wrote. “If you want to know 
what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words.” By proclaiming up front that phones are not perfect, 
Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable assertion. “If Jobs had not changed 
the context from the iPhone 4 to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic 
strip about a product so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. 
But as soon as the context is changed to ‘all smartphones have problems,’ the humor opportunity 
is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.”