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

Blade Runner
. Just at the moment when 
Big Brother announces “We shall prevail!” the heroine’s hammer smashes the screen and it 
vaporizes in a flash of light and smoke.
When Jobs previewed the ad for the Apple sales force at the meeting in Hawaii, they were 
thrilled. So he screened it for the board at its December 1983 meeting. When the lights came back 
on in the boardroom, everyone was mute. Philip Schlein, the CEO of Macy’s California, had his 
head on the table. Mike Markkula stared silently; at first it seemed he was overwhelmed by the 
power of the ad. Then he spoke: “Who wants to move to find a new agency?” Sculley recalled, 
“Most of them thought it was the worst commercial they had ever seen.” Sculley himself got cold 
feet. He asked Chiat/Day to sell off the two commercial spots—one sixty seconds, the other 
thirty—that they had purchased.
Jobs was beside himself. One evening Wozniak, who had been floating into and out of Apple 
for the previous two years, wandered into the Macintosh building. Jobs grabbed him and said, 
“Come over here and look at this.” He pulled out a VCR and played the ad. “I was astounded,” 
Woz recalled. “I thought it was the most incredible thing.” When Jobs said the board had decided 
not to run it during the Super Bowl, Wozniak asked what the cost of the time slot was. Jobs told 
him $800,000. With his usual impulsive goodness, Wozniak immediately offered, “Well, I’ll pay 
half if you will.”
He ended up not needing to. The agency was able to sell off the thirty-second time slot, but in 
an act of passive defiance it didn’t sell the longer one. “We told them that we couldn’t sell the 
sixty-second slot, though in truth we didn’t try,” recalled Lee Clow. Sculley, perhaps to avoid a 
showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, 
figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. “I think 
we ought to go for it,” he told his team.
Early in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, the dominant Raiders scored a touchdown 
against the Redskins and, instead of an instant replay, television screens across the nation went 

---

black for an ominous two full seconds. Then an eerie black-and-white image of drones marching 
to spooky music began to fill the screen. More than ninety-six million people watched an ad that 
was unlike any they’d seen before. At its end, as the drones watched in horror the vaporizing of 
Big Brother, an announcer calmly intoned, “On January 24th, 
Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
It was a sensation. That evening all three networks and fifty local stations aired news stories 
about the ad, giving it a viral life unprecedented in the pre–YouTube era. It would eventually be 
selected by both 
TV Guide
and 
Advertising Age
as the greatest commercial of all time.
Publicity Blast
Over the years Steve Jobs would become the grand master of product launches. In the case of the 
Macintosh, the astonishing Ridley Scott ad was just one of the ingredients. Another part of the 
recipe was media coverage. Jobs found ways to ignite blasts of publicity that were so powerful the 
frenzy would feed on itself, like a chain reaction. It was a phenomenon that he would be able to 
replicate whenever there was a big product launch, from the Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad in 
2010. Like a conjurer, he could pull the trick off over and over again, even after journalists had 
seen it happen a dozen times and knew how it was done. Some of the moves he had learned from 
Regis McKenna, who was a pro at cultivating and stroking prideful reporters. But Jobs had his 
own intuitive sense of how to stoke the excitement, manipulate the competitive instincts of 
journalists, and trade exclusive access for lavish treatment.
In December 1983 he took his elfin engineering wizards, Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith, to 
New York to visit