Who Was Steve Jobs? (8 page)

Within a year, the iMac became the best-selling computer in the world. That same year, Steve and Laurene had another baby daughter, Eve. Steve’s eldest daughter, Lisa, was studying journalism at Harvard University. It was a happy time in Steve’s life.

Steve had planned to only stay at Apple for a few months. But in 2000, he became the permanent head. He had too many big plans to leave Apple now.

In May 2001, Apple opened its first stores. Just as Apple computers didn’t look like other computers, Apple stores were very different, too. Made with a lot of glass, they looked more like works of art.

Steve oversaw every step of the design of the stores from the floor tiles to the shelves. Every single detail was important to him.

At the store’s Genius Bar, people could ask questions about problems with their machines and get personal training on their computers.

Steve had put Apple on top of the personal computer market. As he had predicted, people used their computers for work and also for pleasure. Listening to music was something else people did for fun. In the 1990s, most people listened to music on compact discs (CDs). A CD was like a record album. People bought CDs by their favorite groups and played them on CD players. They were about the size of a butter plate and had better sound than a vinyl record album.

But Steve started thinking about something even better. He bought a software program that allowed people to take their favorite songs from a CD and put them on the computer as a digital file. It was called an MP3 file. Once it was on the computer, you didn’t need the CD anymore. Steve renamed the program iTunes. Using iTunes, a person could turn their computer into a personal jukebox.

Other companies created MP3 players. These were portable machines that hooked up to speakers or headphones and played music files. No CD or cassette tape was needed. Steve Jobs decided that Apple had to make its own player.

In October 2001, at a press event in California, Steve reached into his pocket. He pulled out a thin gadget that was smaller than a bar of Hershey’s chocolate. “We call it the iPod,” he said.

At first, the iPod only worked with Mac computers. But in 2002, Steve agreed to make it work with Microsoft’s Windows machines. Now that Windows users could also use the iPod, its sales skyrocketed.

Customers loved the iPod.

People in the music industry did not. Most people got the songs they played on their iPods off CDs. The CD didn’t have to be theirs. For instance, they could get songs for free from a friend’s CD. Songs could also be “shared” over the Internet.

Nobody in the music industry could figure out how to make people pay for music that they could get for free illegally.

Nobody except Steve. If people could buy music easily and cheaply, he thought they wouldn’t mind paying.

Because he could “think different,” Steve opened the iTunes Music Store in 2003. It was not a regular store; it wasn’t in a building. It was a program you downloaded onto a computer. Using his famous powers of persuasion, he made a deal with many record companies to sell their songs on iTunes for ninety-nine cents a piece.

In the first day it was open, the iTunes store sold two hundred seventy-five thousand songs. It was so easy to order songs. It didn’t cost much. Everyone began buying music over the Internet.