Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography

by Karen Blumenthal

stacked the monitor on top of the computer and told Hertzfeld, “Come with me. I’m going to take you to your new desk.” The new desk turned out to be Raskin’s old one. Over the next three years, the small group in the project witnessed the best and worst of Jobs—his charm and his cutting criticisms, his exuberance and arrogance, and his vision, his ability to look at something very ordinary and intuitively see the potential for it to become something truly extraordinary. He didn’t want a good product, or even a great one. The Macintosh, he would say over and over, had to be “insanely great.” While driven to do better and better work, as defined by Jobs, the members of the team tried to adjust to their boss’s erratic ways. Jobs would take a look at someone’s work and declare it a pile of garbage, often using stronger language. Or he might say, “‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,’” Hertzfeld said. “The scary thing was that he’d say it about the same thing.” Bud Tribble, another member of the team, defined a unique Jobs trait that the Mac team—or any other team that Jobs worked with—could never figure out how to turn off. Tribble dubbed it Jobs’s “reality distortion field,” a term he took from the Star Trek television series. “In his presence, reality is malleable,” he explained. “He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around.” At various points, Jobs’s reality distortion field would lead him to act as if the rules of life didn’t ap...

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