Like the original Macintosh team, the iMac crew staggered to completion just in time for the big announcement. But not before Jobs had one last explosion. When it came time to rehearse for the launch presentation, Rubinstein cobbled together two working prototypes. Jobs had not seen the final product before, and when he looked at it onstage he saw a button on the front, under the display. He pushed it and the CD tray opened. “What the fuck is this?!?” he asked, though not as politely. “None of us said anything,” Schiller recalled, “because he obviously knew what a CD tray was.” So Jobs continued to rail. It was supposed to have a clean CD slot, he insisted, referring to the elegant slot drives that were already to be found in upscale cars. “Steve, this is exactly the drive I showed you when we talked about the components,” Rubinstein explained. “No, there was never a tray, just a slot,” Jobs insisted. Rubinstein didn’t back down. Jobs’s fury didn’t abate. “I almost started crying, because it was too late to do anything about it,” Jobs later recalled.
They suspended the rehearsal, and for a while it seemed as if Jobs might cancel the entire product launch. “Ruby looked at me as if to say, ‘Am I crazy?’” Schiller recalled. “It was my first product launch with Steve and the first time I saw his mind-set of ‘If it’s not right we’re not launching it.’” Finally, they agreed to replace the tray with a slot drive for the next version of the iMac. “I’m only going to go ahead with the launch if you promise we’re going to go to slot mode as soon as possible,” Jobs said tearfully.
There was also a problem with the video he planned to show. In it, Jony Ive is shown describing his design thinking and asking, “What computer would the Jetsons have had? It was like, the future yesterday.” At that moment there was a two-second snippet from the cartoon show, showing Jane Jetson looking at a video screen, followed by another two-second clip of the Jetsons giggling by a Christmas tree. At a rehearsal a production assistant told Jobs they would have to remove the clips because Hanna-Barbera had not given permission to use them. “Keep it in,” Jobs barked at him. The assistant explained that there were rules against that. “I don’t care,” Jobs said. “We’re using it.” The clip stayed in.
Lee Clow was preparing a series of colorful magazine ads, and when he sent Jobs the page proofs he got an outraged phone call in response. The blue in the ad, Jobs insisted, was different from that of the iMac. “You guys don’t know what you’re doing!” Jobs shouted. “I’m going to get someone else to do the ads, because this is fucked up.” Clow argued back. Compare them, he said. Jobs, who was not in the office, insisted he was right and continued to shout. Eventually Clow got him to sit down with the original photographs. “I finally proved to him that the blue was the blue was the blue.” Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs’s home: “I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I’m pretty sure I could make out, ‘Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!!’”
As always, Jobs was compulsive in preparing for the dramatic unveiling. Having stopped one rehearsal because he was angry about the CD drive tray, he stretched out the other rehearsals to make sure the show would be stellar. He repeatedly went over the climactic moment when he would walk across the stage and proclaim, “Say hello to the new iMac.” He wanted the lighting to be perfect so that the translucence of the new machine would be vivid. But after a few run-throughs he was still unsatisfied, an echo of his obsession with stage lighting that Sculley had witnessed at the rehearsals for the original 1984 Macintosh launch. He ordered the lights to be brighter and come on earlier, but that still didn’t please him. So he jogged down the auditorium aisle and slouched into a center seat, draping his legs over the seat in front. “Let’s keep doing it till we get it right, okay?” he said. They made another attempt. “No, no,” Jobs complained. “This isn’t working at all.” The next time, the lights were bright enough, but they came on too late. “I’m getting tired of asking about this,” Jobs growled. Finally, the iMac shone just right. “Oh! Right there! That’s great!” Jobs yelled.
A year earlier Jobs had ousted Mike Markkula, his early mentor and partner, from the board. But he was so proud of what he had wrought with the new iMac, and so sentimental about its connection to the original Macintosh, that he invited Markkula to Cupertino for a private preview. Markkula was impressed. His only objection was to the new mouse that Ive had designed. It looked like a hockey puck, Markkula said, and people would hate it. Jobs disagreed, but Markkula was right. Otherwise the machine had turned out to be, as had its predecessor, insanely great.
The Launch, May 6, 1998
With the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs had created a new kind of theater: the product debut as an epochal event, climaxed by a let-there-be-light moment in which the skies part, a light shines down, the angels sing, and a chorus of the chosen faithful sings “Hallelujah.” For the grand unveiling of the product that he hoped would save Apple and again transform personal computing, Jobs symbolically chose the Flint Auditorium of De Anza Community College in Cupertino, the same venue he had used in 1984. He would be pulling out all the stops in order to dispel doubts, rally the troops, enlist support in the developers’ community, and jump-start the marketing of the new machine. But he was also doing it because he enjoyed playing impresario. Putting on a great show piqued his passions in the same way as putting out a great product.
Displaying his sentimental side, he began with a graceful shout-out to three people he had invited to be up front in the audience. He had become estranged from all of them, but now he wanted them rejoined. “I started the company with Steve Wozniak in my parents’ garage, and Steve is here today,” he said, pointing him out and prompting applause. “We were joined by Mike Markkula and soon after that our first president, Mike Scott,” he continued. “Both of those folks are in the audience today. And none of us would be here without these three guys.” His eyes misted for a moment as the applause again built. Also in the audience were Andy Hertzfeld and most of the original Mac team. Jobs gave them a smile. He believed he was about to do them proud.