McKenna quickly saw that Steve was unusually articulate and driven. “He had what I’d call Silicon Valley street smarts,” says McKenna. “You know how certain kids who grow up in the inner city know where to go to get what, and how the power structure of the neighborhood works? Here, you’re likely to live next door to an electrical engineer or a software programmer, and a smart and curious kid can learn a lot just by wandering around and paying attention. From junior high on, Steve was out there figuring things out.”
The two spent many hours in the basement of McKenna’s ranchstyle Sunnyvale home, talking about Steve’s goals for Apple and its wondrous Apple II. Their conversations ranged widely, over design, marketing, product development, and strategy, and how these were intertwined in a healthy business. McKenna was expert at framing a company’s development in a narrative Steve could relate to. “We talked about how your financials are your best marketing tools,” says McKenna. “To get people to sit up and pay notice, especially in the computer business, you need to be a successful financial company.”
McKenna was absorbed and engaged by Steve. “He was very pleasant and enjoyable, and had a lot of depth intellectually. He could talk about a wide range of subjects. We could have real trivial conversations, and then we could talk about Apple and the business. I remember him once asking me if I thought Apple would ever be bigger than Intel. The answer, of course, is that Intel was a component manufacturer, and usually the equipment manufacturers get much bigger in revenue.”
McKenna and Jobs connected on so many levels that Regis got to know Steve as well as anyone during those early years. It helped that he didn’t tolerate any of Steve’s more obnoxious behavior. “He did have that quick, reactive temper, but I never had him shout at me; I never had him upset with me. Did we disagree? Yeah. Did we argue? Yes. But we also got along really, really well,” he remembers. “I had an assistant who told me that Steve called up wanting something, and had yelled and yelled at her, using a lot of four-letter words. Next time I saw Steve, I told him, ‘Hey, don’t ever do that again.’ She said the next time he came to the office, he walked in and said he was really embarrassed and apologized. I was trained in the semiconductor industry under Charlie Sporck and Don Valentine and those guys. If you weren’t strong, they’d just gobble you up. So it didn’t bother me to say, ‘Hey, Steve, shut up.’ He didn’t dominate you to be mean. But when people acted as minions, he let them be minions.”
McKenna and his team worked with Steve to craft a marketing pitch designed to make the Apple II stand out as the friendly computer for more than just computer geeks. The headline of the first promotional brochure McKenna created for the machine asserted, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” It was a concept that went against every industry trend, since most of the existing manufacturers, including Commodore and MITS and Vector Graphic, advertised in the hobbyist rags with endless gray type that alerted obsessive geeks to this or that great new feature. Friendly marketing would distinguish Apple from its competitors for decades.
McKenna also helped Steve understand the value of presenting this image across every platform the company touched. Early on, he convinced Steve that since there was nothing remotely quaint about Apple’s computers, the company would need an unmistakably modern visual identity, rather than Ronald Wayne’s archaic etching, which was more appropriate for a Berkeley head shop than a company that hoped to lead a global revolution in computing. The replacement was the now-famous apple with the bite taken out and five exuberant rainbow stripes—each fitting perfectly atop the other, as Steve insisted. It seemed sharp and modern, and seemed to promise that computing from Apple would be something much more fun and easy than those mainframes from IBM, with its sober, stratified, white initials against a deep blue palette—almost like a pin-striped suit laid sideways. As Steve explained at the time: “Our whole company is founded on the principle that there is something very different that happens with one person, one computer. It’s very different than having ten people to one computer. What we’re trying to do is remove the barrier of having to learn how to use a computer.”
Like McKenna, Steve had the gift of being able to explain profoundly complicated technology in simple, clear, and even rhapsodic terms. McKenna and Jobs knew this was a profound asset for Apple, especially given the company’s other nondescript leaders. There’s a long and wonderful extemporaneous quote from a New Yorker piece in late 1977 that offers rich proof of Steve’s fully formed verbal mastery. Written at a time when the average reader knew so little about computers that a writer could delight in titillating terminology like “naked computer” and get away with obvious puns using the words “byte” and “Apple,” the magazine’s reporter encountered Steve manning the Apple Computer booth at a computer fair. “I wish we’d had these personal machines when I was growing up,” Jobs tells him, before continuing on for a total of 224 words:
“People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.”
Before moving on to a booth where a bunch of kids were playing a computer game called Space Voyager, the reporter asks if Steve “would mind telling us his age. ‘Twenty-two,’ Mr. Jobs said.”
Speaking off-the-cuff to a passing journalist from a decidedly nontechie publication, Steve finds so many ways to demystify for the average person the insanely geeky device that he and Woz had created. He understands their fundamental fear that computers may take over too much of modern life (a fear he would capitalize on repeatedly, most notably in the Orwellian imagery of Apple’s famous “1984” commercial). He sympathizes with their ignorance. He offers several analogies to comforting examples they will understand: Chevys, typewriters, cameras. Indeed, he makes using a computer seem no more complicated than taking a photograph, going so far as to call the Apple II “domesticated.” And yet he elevates both his company and its computer into something aspirational. He links this machine made a few months ago by some disheveled California misfits to Rolls-Royce, the seventy-three-year-old paragon of sophisticated industrial manufacturing and elite consumer taste. He even calls Apple a world leader, an absolutely unprovable claim that rockets the little company into the same league as IBM and DEC and Burroughs, which were then the industry’s giants. He was an extraordinary extemporaneous speaker, and McKenna helped him wield that tool to great effect.