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

Through the Looking Glass.
After Alice laments that no 
matter how hard she tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why, 
sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Especially from the 
front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.
All of the good cheer served to sugarcoat, or distract attention from, the bad news. When it 
came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product 
demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being “worth thousands and thousands of 
dollars,” and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced 
what he hoped would seem like a low price: “We’re going to be charging higher education a 
single price of $6,500.” From the faithful, there was scattered applause. But his panel of academic 
advisors had long pushed to keep the price to between $2,000 and $3,000, and they thought that 
Jobs had promised to do so. Some of them were appalled. This was especially true once they 
discovered that the optional printer would cost another $2,000, and the slowness of the optical 
disk would make the purchase of a $2,500 external hard disk advisable.
There was another disappointment that he tried to downplay: “Early next year, we will have our 
0.9 release, which is for software developers and aggressive end users.” There was a bit of 
nervous laughter. What he was saying was that the real release of the machine and its software, 
known as the 1.0 release, would not actually be happening in early 1989. In fact he didn’t set a 
hard date. He merely suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the 
first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman’s pushback, 
from his commitment to have the machine finished in early 1987. Now it was clear it would be 
more than two years later.
The event ended on a more upbeat note, literally. Jobs brought onstage a violinist from the San 
Francisco Symphony who played Bach’s A Minor Violin Concerto in a duet with the NeXT 

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computer onstage. People erupted in jubilant applause. The price and the delayed release were 
forgotten in the frenzy. When one reporter asked him immediately 
afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years 
ahead of its time.”
As would become his standard practice, Jobs offered to provide “exclusive” interviews to 
anointed publications in return for their promising to put the story on the cover. This time he went 
one “exclusive” too far, though it didn’t really hurt. He agreed to a request from 
Business Week
’s 
Katie Hafner for exclusive access to him before the launch, but he also made a similar deal with 
Newsweek
and then with 
Fortune.
What he didn’t consider was that one of 
Fortune
’s top editors, 
Susan Fraker, was married to 
Newsweek
’s editor Maynard Parker. At the 
Fortune
story 
conference, when they were talking excitedly about their exclusive, Fraker mentioned that she 
happened to know that 
Newsweek
had also been promised an exclusive, and it would be coming 
out a few days before 
Fortune.
So Jobs ended up that week on only two magazine covers. 
Newsweek
used the cover line “Mr. Chips” and showed him leaning on a beautiful NeXT, which it 
proclaimed to be “the most exciting machine in years.” 
Business Week
showed him looking 
angelic in a dark suit, fingertips pressed together like a preacher or professor. But Hafner 
pointedly reported on the manipulation that surrounded her exclusive. “NeXT carefully parceled 
out interviews with its staff and suppliers, monitoring them with a censor’s eye,” she wrote. “That 
strategy worked, but at a price: Such maneuvering—self-serving and relentless—displayed the 
side of Steve Jobs that so hurt him at Apple. The trait that most stands out is Jobs’s need to control 
events.”
When the hype died down, the reaction to the NeXT computer was muted, especially since it 
was not yet commercially available. Bill Joy, the brilliant and wry chief scientist at rival Sun 
Microsystems, called it “the first Yuppie workstation,” which was not an unalloyed compliment. 
Bill Gates, as might be expected, continued to be publicly dismissive. “Frankly, I’m 
disappointed,” he told the 
Wall Street Journal.
“Back in 1981, we were truly excited by the 
Macintosh when Steve showed it to us, because when you put it side-by-side with another 
computer, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen before.” The NeXT machine was not like 
that. “In the grand scope of things, most of these features are truly trivial.” He said that Microsoft 
would continue its plans not to write software for the NeXT. Right after the 
announcement event, Gates wrote a parody email to his staff. “All reality has been completely 
suspended,” it began. Looking back at it, Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I ever 
wrote.”
When the NeXT computer finally went on sale in mid-1989, the factory was primed to churn 
out ten thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were about four hundred a month. The 
beautiful factory robots, so nicely painted, remained mostly idle, and NeXT continued to 
hemorrhage cash.

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