At Apple, Steve still did everything he could to have people treat him as if he were not sick. “He was working his ass off till the end, in pain,” remembers Eddy Cue. “You could see it in the meetings, he was taking morphine and you could see he was in pain, but he was still interested.”
He did make some adjustments upon his return, most of which were simply extensions of the shifts in priority he’d made after his 2004 operation. He focused on the parts of the ongoing business he cared about most—marketing, design, and the product introductions—and he started to take active steps to ensure that he would leave Apple in good shape after his death. This was a process that had started earlier—Tim Cook says that Steve started thinking of succession and the post-Steve era of the company back in 2004—but everything accelerated now.
He spent some of his time working with Joel Podolny, a professor he had hired away from the Yale School of Management, to develop the curriculum for an executive education program he wanted to create called Apple University. Unlike Pixar University, where all employees can choose from a range of eclectic courses that instruct them in creative arts and skills employed by others at the studio, Apple U. is designed as a place where future leaders of the company can review and dissect momentous decisions in the company’s history. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer, and then bottle, Steve’s decision-making process, and to pass on his aesthetics and marketing methodologies to Apple’s next generation. “Steve cared deeply about the why,” says Cook. “The why of the decision. In the younger days I would see him just do something. But as the days went on he would spend more time with me and with other people explaining why he thought or did something, or why he looked at something in a certain way. This was why he came up with Apple U., so we could train and educate the next generation of leaders by teaching them all we had been through, and how we had made the terrible decisions we made and also how we made the really good ones.”
Steve also focused on Apple’s new headquarters, which are now being built on the grounds of the old Hewlett-Packard campus in another neighborhood of Cupertino. He was very actively involved in the design, working with Norman Foster Architects. The building will reflect many of the same thoughts that went into the creation of Pixar’s headquarters, albeit with an Apple spin. It will be one huge circular structure, four stories tall and housing up to thirteen thousand employees. Some people compare it to a space station. Its design is intended to promote interaction among employees. A common hallway stretches around the entire circle of each floor. A single café area will seat three thousand people. Some 80 percent of the grounds will be covered in shrubs, bushes, and trees, including a huge area in the middle of the circular structure. And the building will be its own technological marvel; its exterior won’t have a single pane of flat or rectilinear glass. Instead, the “walls” of the building will consist of enormous panels of perfectly curved glass. The cafeteria will have sliding, curved-glass doors four stories tall to open up when the weather is nice. “I think we have a shot,” Steve told the Cupertino City Council, “at building the best office building in the world.”
Steve’s approach to the creation of the campus was driven by the same principles as always. What kind of design would make the new headquarters complex the ideal place for Apple to create its own future? The closer you could get to that ideal, the better for Apple. He wanted to do everything he could to ensure that Apple would remain what he believed it had become—the most important, most vital, and most creative industrial company in the world. “Steve wanted people to love Apple,” says Cook, “not just work for Apple, but really love Apple, and really understand at a very deep level what Apple was about, about the values of the company. He didn’t write them on the walls and make posters out of them anymore, but he wanted people to understand them. He wanted people to work for a greater cause.”
This belief in Apple as a special place—as a company as magical, perhaps, as an iPad—was something Steve shared with Cook, and was certainly part of the reason he urged the board of directors to sign off on Cook as his successor. “This was a significant common thread we had,” says Cook. “I really love Apple, and I do think Apple is here for a bigger reason. There are very few companies like that on the face of the earth anymore.”
THE PAIN FROM the cancer was relentless, and Steve spent more and more time at home. Lee Clow visited him there, to work on the ad campaign for the iPad 2, which would be launched in the spring of 2011. “We had to go to his house when he was sick, because he wasn’t coming in,” says Clow. “But he had the same kind of laser-intense focus. He wanted to talk about the ad or the product or whatever we were doing.” With Clow, Steve didn’t spend much time looking back, or looking into dark corners of the future. “To the end, he tried to will that it [his death] wasn’t going to happen, that he was going to somehow keep going. He really didn’t want to dwell on that.”
They worked hard on that introductory iPad 2 ad. Its stentorian tone and poetic language would bear a striking resemblance to the “Think Different” campaign that signaled the beginning of Apple’s miraculous turnaround after Steve had returned to Cupertino. “This is what we believe, that technology alone is not enough,” were the words they settled on. “Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things. But when technology gets out of the way everything becomes more delightful, even magical. That’s when you leap forward, that’s when you end up with something like this.” The words accompanied a video showing a single finger manipulating iPad apps with casual ease. “It was the last thing that he blessed as the message that should go out for that particular product,” remembers Clow, “and it came off of Steve’s vision very clearly. It summed up his vision from day one that somehow technology should change people’s lives and make them better. It should be something that everyone uses.”
There was considerable doubt as to whether he’d be well enough to introduce the product himself, but when he did make it onto the stage to introduce the iPad 2 on March 2, 2011, his words echoed the themes of the ad: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he told the crowd. “We believe that it is technology married with the humanities that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.” The iPad 2 was a significant improvement over the first version. It was lighter, it had two digital cameras—one on the screen side to facilitate videoconferencing and taking selfies, and another with a higher-resolution camera and flash, on the back side, courtesy of that crew of camera engineers that had been brought on board after the first iPhone.
Still, the obvious improvements in quality of the product came second, at least for that day, to the bigger news that Steve Jobs was, clearly, dying. His appearance was such that the stock dropped immediately after he stiffly walked onto the stage. This time, he relied even more on other Apple executives to fill out the program and demonstrate key features.
Steve had been living with illness for so long, with the bad times coming in unpredictable waves, that neither he nor his colleagues nor his doctors had any sense of when the end would come. When Steve presented his plans for the ambitious new Apple corporate campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7, he was visibly hurting, and his voice was weak. Steve seemed to know that it was his last big contribution to the company, and to the community it had always called home. So he steeled himself to spend fifteen minutes walking the council members through the proposal for the building, and about five minutes answering questions. When one councilwoman tried to joke with him that perhaps the city should get free Wi-Fi in return for approving the move, Steve said, “Well, you know, I’m kind of old-fashioned. I believe that we pay taxes, and that the city then gives us services.”