At the start of this book, we looked at how Jobs enthusiastically embraced his role as an outsider. We have also seen how Apple invokes in its fans a sense of ‘us’ (the Apple family) and ‘them’ (those outside the family). Such relationships are based on oppositions. For every ‘outsider’ there is an ‘insider’; for each ‘us’ a ‘them’. Jobs was a subtle and skilled master at identifying an ‘other’, usually a faceless giant, against whom to kick. How did he do it?

 In Apple’s early days, it was easy. The company was a minnow, comprising just a few young, enthusiastic, clever guys trying to make it from their offices in a family garage. At this stage, there was an easily identifiable enemy in IBM. It was simple for the new kids on the block to depict it as a lumbering old giant, building fusty machines for fusty men in suits. IBM, the implicit message said, was about propping up corporate America. Apple, by contrast, was ushering free thinkers into a brave new world.

 This approach reached its apotheosis in 1981 when Apple took out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal to ‘celebrate’ the arrival of IBM’s first PC: ‘Welcome IBM. Seriously. Welcome to the most exciting and important marketplace since the computer revolution began 35 years ago …’ It is difficult to imagine how Apple could more successfully have made IBM look behind the times and off the pace.

 By that stage, Apple could no longer claim to be the free-rolling organization it had been five years earlier. In 1982 it would enter the Fortune 500 list, that bastion of corporate giants. Yet Jobs persisted, with considerable success, at portraying IBM as the monolithic enemy. In 1984, the year of Apple’s famous Super Bowl advert, Jobs even asserted that IBM wanted to wipe Apple off the face of the Earth. In its wildest dreams, maybe, but it was scarcely a credible claim. Yet that didn’t matter because it preserved the ‘them and us’ paradigm.

 Jobs kept up the theme of Apple – or at least his Mac team – as mavericks, outlaws, sailing against the tide with soundbites such as ‘It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.’

 Jobs’ focus on IBM for a long while was sensible. While Apple picked up plaudits and great sales, IBM nonetheless remained a powerful beast and by the mid-1980s was winning the sales battle. But there was another major player to deal with, too: Microsoft. As the dominant force in the software market, Jobs had himself a second dragon to slay.

 Today, each of the companies remains huge but Apple is the biggest of them all – yet it still manages to maintain its image as the company most likely to run a Jolly Roger up the flagpole.