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

impute
. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the 
signals that it conveys. “People 
DO
judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best 
product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod 

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manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, 
we will 
impute
the desired qualities.”
For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand the needs and desires of customers better than 
any other business leader, he would focus on a handful of core products, and he would care, 
sometimes obsessively, about marketing and image and even the details of packaging. “When you 
open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you 
perceive the product,” he said. “Mike taught me that.”
Regis McKenna
The first step in this process was convincing the Valley’s premier publicist, Regis McKenna, to 
take on Apple as a client. McKenna was from a large working-class Pittsburgh family, and bred 
into his bones was a steeliness that he cloaked with charm. A college dropout, he had worked for 
Fairchild and National Semiconductor before starting his own PR and advertising firm. His two 
specialties were doling out exclusive interviews with his clients to journalists he had cultivated 
and coming up with memorable ad campaigns that created brand awareness for products such as 
microchips. One of these was a series of colorful magazine ads for Intel that featured racing cars 
and poker chips rather than the usual dull performance charts. These caught Jobs’s eye. He called 
Intel and asked who created them. “Regis McKenna,” he was told. “I asked them what Regis 
McKenna was,” Jobs recalled, “and they told me he was a person.” When Jobs phoned, he couldn’
t get through to McKenna. Instead he was transferred to Frank Burge, an account executive, who 
tried to put him off. Jobs called back almost every day.
Burge finally agreed to drive out to the Jobs garage. “Holy Christ, this guy is going to be 
something else,” he recalled thinking. “What’s the least amount of time I can spend with this 
clown without being rude.” Then, when he was confronted with the unwashed and shaggy Jobs, 
two things hit him: “First, he was an incredibly smart young man. Second, I didn’t understand a 
fiftieth of what he was talking about.”
So Jobs and Wozniak were invited to have a meeting with, as his impish business cards read, 
“Regis McKenna, himself.” This time it was the normally shy Wozniak who became prickly. 
McKenna glanced at an article Wozniak was writing about Apple and suggested that it was too 
technical and needed to be livened up. “I don’t want any PR man touching my copy,” Wozniak 
snapped. McKenna suggested it was time for them to leave his office. “But Steve called me back 
right away and said he wanted to meet again,” McKenna recalled. “This time he came without 
Woz, and we hit it off.”
McKenna had his team get to work on brochures for the Apple II. The first thing they did was 
to replace Ron Wayne’s ornate Victorian woodcut-style logo, which ran counter to McKenna’s 
colorful and playful advertising style. So an art director, Rob Janoff, was assigned to create a new 
one. “Don’t make it cute,” Jobs ordered. Janoff came up with a simple apple shape in two 
versions, one whole and the other with a bite taken out of it. The first looked too much like a 
cherry, so Jobs chose the one with a bite. He also picked a version that was striped in six colors, 
with psychedelic hues sandwiched between whole-earth green and sky blue, even though that 
made printing the logo significantly more expensive. Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, 
often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design 
philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”