One frigid winter day in the late 1970s, I ran into Steve at some meeting in midtown Manhattan, a time and event now long forgotten. What isn't forgotten is that when the meeting ended and we went outside into the freezing weather, I was reasonably comfortable in my wool overcoat, but Steve was freezing. No overcoat, not even a jacket.

I suggested that he buy a coat. He agreed. So off we went to Paul Stuart, my favorite men's store, just a few blocks away on Madison Avenue. After quickly trying on a few, he picked one. He then asked the salesman the price. Oops.

"That much for an overcoat? Too much. Besides, I'll never use it in California."

We left the store. I in my overcoat, warm. Steve coatless, freezing.

The Coat

Steve

Dino

Jobs had always been unapologetic about the incompatibility [between iPod and other music software than iTunes], insisting that Apple should not make iPods interoperable with competitors until its customer demand it. I once tried to get him to admit that the limitation was unfriendly to customers, but he would not bulge. He challenged me to provide an example where Apple's actions could harm a listener. Finally I came up with something.

"You love Bob Dylan, Steve," I said. "He records with Sony, your competitor in selling muisc. What if Sony sold a really great, previously unreleased Dylan song on its music store? None of your iTunes customers could download it and listen to it on their computers or iPods. Isn't that a disadvantage?"

"Bob Dylan loves us," said Jobs. "He's never do that."

I thought that was a fairly lame comeback. But a few months later, Dylan did okay the release of two fantastic outtakes from the legendary Blood on the Tracks sessions for online sale -on the iTunes store, not his own label Sony's store.

Everyone loves Dylan

When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a séance.

But then I asked him if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard. He burst out: "This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It's a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No." And with his car keys he pried it right off. "How about this F2 key?" Off they all went. "I'm changing the world, one keyboard at a time," he concluded in a calmer voice.

The Keyboard

Steve Jobs was a genius, but he knew his limits. "He was never a guy who tried to make believe he had expertise in something," said Barry Schuler, now a partner at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. That was clear to Schuler when he got a call from Jobs in early 1997 to come over to his old offices at NeXT Software in Redwood City, Calif. Jobs, at that point, hadn't yet agreed to run Apple on a permanent basis.

"What's this Internet thing?" Schuler recalled Jobs asking. "I don't get it. What are people doing on it? What do they like about it?"

Schuler, who was AOL's president of creative development at the time, remembered Jobs asking if the excitement was about reading magazines online.

"I don't get why anyone would want to read a magazine on a computer screen," he said. "That's a terrible experience."

(Scott Forstall, Adam Satariano, Peter Burrows and Brad Stone,  12 Oct 2011)

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