Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs by Daniel Lyons Read Free Book Online Page A

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    But Ja’Red is right. There’s a disturbance in the force. I do some breathing exercises and try to get clear, but it’s no use. The lawyers are messing us up.
    I go down the hall to see them. They’ve turned the Crosby into their own little war room, with a coffee machine and a tray of unhealthy pastries and a gaggle of paralegals and other assistants from Sampson’s law firm who are whizzing around with carts full of folders. Sampson’s lawyers are sitting around the conference table, slurping coffee and snooping through folders and booting up their Windows PCs. On that point, I’m sorry, but this is utter provocation. That little stupid sound they make when they boot up. And they are always rebooting. Dammit! How can anyone work in this building when this poison is wafting through our hallways? Are they trying to make me crazy?
    Nevertheless, for sport, I smile and say hello and introduce myself to all of them. I tell them how welcome they are. I ask if they need anything, like maybe some real computers, ha ha, and then I shift into Messiah mode and go to the whiteboard and start telling them about some new products, drawing lots of scientific looking lines and arrows and acronyms.
    Meanwhile I’m using all sorts of neuro-linguistic programming trigger words, and within seconds I can see that one of Sampson’s team members, a lawyer named Chip, has gone under. His eyes have rolled back up into his head, and the tip of his tongue is sticking out of his mouth. In five minutes I’ll have the whole room hypnotized. They’ll forget all about these options. I’ll have them skipping out of the building and shrieking because they imagine the guy in the UPS truck is Britney Spears jumping out of a limo.
    But Charlie Sampson is on to me straight away, and he knows exactly how to break the trance. He claps his hands down on the table. His boy snaps awake. “Steve,” Sampson says, “great seeing you. Thanks for visiting.”
    It’s Monday, so the rest of the morning is devoted to Pilates and yoga, then a working lunch (miso soup, apple slices) with Lars Aki, our industrial designer. Lars has a Danish mother and a Japanese father, and he grew up in England. He’s thirty-five years old and looks like a male model. He’s totally lean and ripped, but not muscle-bound. He’s also one hundred percent gay, and spends huge amounts of time cruising bath houses and leather bars, picking up trashy dudes and getting arrested for smoking crystal meth. Our PR people are constantly trying to cover up some mess he’s created. We all wish he’d settle down and find a nice guy and maybe adopt some Chinese kids or something. But what can we do? He’s universally recognized as the world’s most talented industrial designer.
    We’re meeting to discuss his proposal to reduce the length of the next iPod by half a millimeter. I think losing half a millimeter throws off the balance of the design, and suggest a quarter of a millimeter instead. As usual, Lars is blown away by the way I take his idea and improve on it.
    “You know,” he says, “I may have been first in my class at the Royal Academy, but I am always amazed by how much better you are at design than I am. Amazing.”
    Next we go over some iPhone FPPs (Fake Product Prototypes) that we’ll be distributing around Apple and to some of our suppliers to keep people confused about what the actual product is going to look like. Even with our fake products I insist on the highest standards and so I give him my usual critique: “These are total shit,” I say.
    He just shrugs and gives me his usual weary smile, the one that says, “Steve, you’re the toughest boss I’ve ever had, but I love you because you push me to bring out the best in myself. And if I ever find you asleep and there’s no one around, I am going to kill you.”
    We finish up with twenty minutes of hanging upside down in gravity boots, doing some brainstorming. No big ideas emerge.
    I have the