Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs co-founded Apple at twenty-one, was pushed out of it at thirty, and came back at forty-two to turn a company months from collapse into the most valuable business in the world. He did not invent most of the technologies Apple sold. He decided what they should be, and what they should leave out.

Adopted

He was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco. His biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian-born graduate student, were unmarried, and her family opposed the relationship. He was adopted at birth by Paul and Clara Jobs. Paul was a machinist who repaired cars and taught his son to take care over parts nobody would see.

The family moved to Mountain View and then Los Altos, in what was becoming Silicon Valley. At a summer job at Hewlett-Packard and through a friend he met Steve Wozniak, five years older and a brilliant electronics engineer.

Reed and India

In 1972 he went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His parents struggled to pay the fees, and he dropped out after one term. He stayed on for a while, sleeping on friends’ floors and sitting in on classes that interested him, including calligraphy. He later said that class shaped the fonts on the Macintosh.

In 1974 he worked at the video game company Atari, then travelled to India in search of spiritual teaching. He came back a practising Buddhist, and the Zen idea of simplicity stayed with him.

The Garage

Wozniak had designed a computer circuit board. Jobs saw that people would buy it. On 1 April 1976 they founded Apple Computer, with a third partner, Ronald Wayne, who sold his stake within days. To fund the first boards, Jobs sold his van and Wozniak his calculator. They assembled the Apple I partly in the Jobs family home, including its garage.

The Apple II, launched in 1977 with a plastic case and colour graphics, was one of the first successful mass-produced personal computers. An investor, Mike Markkula, provided money and business experience. Apple went public in December 1980, and Jobs was worth more than $200 million at twenty-five.

The Macintosh

In 1979 Jobs visited Xerox’s research centre in Palo Alto and saw a computer controlled with a mouse and on-screen windows. He took the idea back to Apple. It became the Macintosh, launched on 24 January 1984 after a famous television advertisement shown during the Super Bowl.

The Mac was a landmark, but it was expensive and slow, and sales disappointed. Jobs had recruited John Sculley from PepsiCo in 1983, asking him whether he wanted to sell sugared water for the rest of his life or come and change the world. By 1985 the two were in open conflict. The board sided with Sculley, Jobs was stripped of his responsibilities, and he left the company.

NeXT and Pixar

He was thirty and, he later said, publicly humiliated. He started again. He founded NeXT, which built expensive, elegant computers for universities and businesses. They sold poorly, but the software NeXT developed was years ahead of its time.

In 1986 he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for about $10 million and called it Pixar. For years it lost money, and Jobs kept funding it personally. In 1995 Pixar released Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film. It was a huge success. Pixar went public a week later, and Jobs, who owned most of it, became a billionaire. In 2006 Disney bought Pixar, making Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder.

In 1991 he married Laurene Powell, whom he had met when he gave a talk at Stanford. They had three children, Reed, Erin and Eve. He also had a daughter, Lisa, from an earlier relationship with Chrisann Brennan; for years he denied being her father before accepting it.

The Return

By 1996 Apple was in deep trouble, losing money and market share, with no modern operating system. At the end of that year it bought NeXT for about $429 million, to use its software, and Jobs returned as an adviser. By September 1997 he was interim chief executive.

He moved fast. He cut Apple’s tangled product range to four computers. He made peace with Microsoft, which invested $150 million in Apple in August 1997 — a story told in the site’s Apple business profile. He launched the “Think Different” campaign, and in 1998 the colourful, translucent iMac, designed with Jony Ive. Apple returned to profit.

iPod, iPhone, iPad

The next decade produced a run of products rarely matched by any company. The iPod, in 2001, put a thousand songs in a pocket. The iTunes Store, in 2003, persuaded record companies to sell songs online for 99 cents.

On 9 January 2007 he introduced the iPhone as three products in one — a phone, an iPod and an internet device. It replaced physical keys with a touchscreen and made the smartphone a computer for everyone. The App Store followed in 2008, creating an industry of its own. The iPad came in 2010.

He was a demanding and often harsh boss, famous for his “reality distortion field” — an ability to convince people that the impossible could be done on an impossible timetable. It frequently worked.

Illness and Death

In 2003 he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He delayed surgery for months while trying alternative treatments, a decision he later regretted, and had an operation in 2004. In 2005 he gave a commencement speech at Stanford about death and doing work you love that became one of the most watched speeches ever. He had a liver transplant in 2009.

On 24 August 2011 he resigned as chief executive, handing over to Tim Cook. He died at home in Palo Alto on 5 October 2011, aged fifty-six. In 2022 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

How He Worked

Much of Apple’s later success was built on decisions made in those first years back. The software from NeXT became Mac OS X, released in 2001, and later the basis of the iPhone’s operating system. In the same year Apple opened its first retail stores, against the advice of many analysts, so that it could control how its products were shown and sold. They became among the most profitable shops in the world.

He worked closely with the designer Jony Ive, and involved himself in details most chief executives never see, from the packaging to the inside of a computer’s case. His product launches, delivered in a black polo-neck and jeans, became events watched around the world.

The People Around Him

Steve Wozniak stopped working at Apple full time in 1985, the same year Jobs left, and later taught school and funded technology education. The two remained friendly, though Wozniak often gently corrected the popular version of Apple’s story, in which Jobs did everything.

Jobs’s relationship with Bill Gates was a long rivalry mixed with respect. Microsoft wrote some of the first software for the Macintosh, fought Apple in court over Windows, and then saved it with its 1997 investment. The two appeared together on stage in 2007 and spoke warmly of each other. Shortly before his death, Jobs co-operated with the writer Walter Isaacson on an authorised biography, published weeks after he died.

The measure of him is taste, applied relentlessly. He decided what a computer, a music player and a phone should feel like in the hand, removed what he thought unnecessary, and made millions of people agree with him. His exile taught him how to do it; his return proved he could.

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