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Jobs left his imprint particularly on the aesthetics of the project. He insisted, for example, that all 50 computer chips be rearranged on a printed circuit board to straighten the solder traces. He worked with the Belgian-born commercial artist Jean-Michel Folon to prepare advertisements for Mac. But the pair found working on different continents too cumbersome, and Jobs retained other artists. Even the publicity brochures accompanying Mac reflect Jobs and contain one of his pet phrases: "Insanely great."
As a boss, Jobs was often obdurate and capricious. When Mac's sound quality failed to meet his standards, he threatened to remove the feature unless engineers corrected the problem over a weekend. The sound, which is provided for games and computer music, stayed. When his group failed to make progress fast enough, he fired off irate memos and abrasively talked down middle managers. Halfway through the project he demoralized the designers by demanding that they produce an entirely new look. He also irritated engineers by refusing to let them show Macintosh to friends, even though he was giving special peeks to outsiders like his onetime crush, Folk Singer Joan Baez.
During 1981 and 1982, while engineers and programmers labored over the Lisa and the Mac, the competition that developed between the divisions sometimes verged on fratricide. At one point a pirate flag flapped above the Mac building as an expression of battle. The Mac team was often condescending about the quality of Lisa and thought the bureaucracy in the larger division resembled that at a large corporation like IBM. Until early last year, the two computers, though superficially similar, might have been developed by separate companies. Programs written for one would not run on the other, and the mice the two used were different. Mac engineers thought Lisa's slimline disc drive, code-named Twiggy, was so clumsy that they tried to design their own. Both disc drives turned out to be too expensive and were scrapped after a development cost of about $6 million. Lisa and Mac now have a drive made by Sony.
While he was developing Mac, Jobs, who became Apple's chairman in 1981, was looking for a new president to guide the company. He ultimately recruited John Sculley, 44, from PepsiCo with a salary and bonus package worth $2 million. Sculley soon began putting some order in the Apple crate. He started by easing out six of the firm's 15 senior executives. Two officials pictured in the company's annual report, which was mailed out only last month, no longer hold the same positions. Sculley, who often lapses into M.B.A.-speak, describes his pruning of the work force from 5,300 to 4,600 as "infrastructure phasedown."
Sculley has boosted Apple's advertising budget by about 30%, but the new promotion has not always been successful. Apple's pre-Christmas television ads, produced by Flashdance Director Adrian Lyne, were disliked by company directors and dismissed by one dealer as "nice foreign movies." Nonetheless, some of Apple's new ads are also unconventional. One early Mac spot features an Orwellian Big Brother and looks like a rock video.