Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on 24 February 1955¹. In a 1995 oral history interview he introduced himself by birthplace and date: San Francisco, California, on 24 February 1955². His biological mother, a young, unwed college graduate student, decided to put him up for adoption³. He was adopted in infancy and grew up in Cupertino, California¹.

When he was about five or six, his father sectioned off part of his garage workbench for him, gave him some of his smaller tools and showed him how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things². He dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but stayed around as a drop-in for about another eighteen months³. Because he did not have to take the normal classes, he took a calligraphy class — the course that later shaped computer typography³. After college he went to work for Atari, designing video games¹.

After dropping out of college he made a long pilgrimage through India seeking enlightenment⁴. It was mainly the Japanese path of Zen Buddhism, however, that stirred his sensibilities⁴. His love of simplicity in design was honed when he became a practitioner of Buddhism⁴.

Jobs and Wozniak met in 1971, creating and selling Blue Boxes — devices for making free long-distance calls⁵. After stints at Hewlett Packard and Atari they reunited, formed Apple, and demonstrated the Apple I to the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club⁵. He and Woz, as he told Stanford much later, started Apple in his parents' garage when he was twenty³. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976, with the Jobs family garage as corporate headquarters⁵.

They funded the venture from what they owned: Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his HP-65 calculator, and with personal loans and vendor credit they could afford parts for their first order from Palo Alto's Byte Shop — 50 Apple-1 computers at $500 each⁵. Their co-founder Ronald Wayne, briefly a 10% owner of Apple, drew its short-lived logo featuring Isaac Newton⁵. The first Apple computer, created when Jobs was only 21, changed the public's idea of a computer from a huge machine for scientific use to a home appliance that could be used by anyone¹.

It was the more fully developed Apple II that established Apple: Wozniak designed it in 1977 as a self-contained unit with a TV serving as the display⁵. Going on sale in June 1977, it became Apple's first big seller and is best known as one of the first machines to run a spreadsheet⁶. A floppy disk drive in 1978 and the spreadsheet program VisiCalc in 1979 made it a blockbuster⁵. The company had been incorporated in 1977¹.

In 1980 Apple became a public corporation, and Jobs became the company's chairman¹. The intermediate machine was the Apple Lisa: released in 1983, it was a very expensive machine that did not succeed in the marketplace, but it pioneered many of the ideas that were later made cost effective in the Macintosh⁶.

In 1984 the Macintosh introduced the graphical user interface to the world, allowing users to open files and programs by clicking icons or menu choices with a mouse⁶. Its original selling price was $2,495⁶. The graphical interface and mouse technology it brought became the standard for application interfaces¹.

Within ten years Apple had grown from the two of them in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees³. The Macintosh had been released a year earlier, and he had just turned thirty — and then he got fired³.

After his vision for the future diverged from that of the executive he had hired to help run Apple, the board of directors sided with the executive³. Smithsonian magazine records the outcome plainly: after battling with CEO John Sculley for control of the company in 1985, Jobs left Apple, returning again only in 1997⁶. His own verdict on the episode, delivered years later at Stanford, was that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to him — the heaviness of being successful replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again³.

Management conflicts led him to leave Apple in 1985 and to form NeXT Computer¹. He bought the computer graphics group from George Lucas and incorporated it as Pixar, setting about revolutionizing high-end computer graphics². At Stanford he compressed those years into a sentence: he had started a company named NeXT, another named Pixar, and fallen in love with an amazing woman who would become his wife³.

During his absence, in 1993, Apple launched the Newton, its first handheld device, which retailed for $700⁶. In the 1995 oral history he remembered being at Xerox in 1979 as one of those apocalyptic moments². Within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, he knew that every computer would work that way some day².

He had seen the pattern before: the Macintosh was made by a core group of fewer than a hundred people, and yet Apple shipped over ten million of them². Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and became the most successful animation studio in the world, he said at Stanford³. Starting with Toy Story in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form⁷.

Apple announced on 20 December 1996 its intention to purchase NeXT in a friendly acquisition for approximately $400 million⁸. The acquisition completed on 7 February 1997 after all necessary regulatory approvals, and Apple said NeXT technology would form the basis for its next-generation operating system, Rhapsody⁸. Jobs, chairman and CEO of NeXT Software at the time, was to serve as an advisor to Apple's chairman and CEO Gilbert Amelio⁸. Apple's fiscal 1997 Form 10-K reported that cash used to acquire NeXT totaled $384 million⁹.

Britannica records that he returned to Apple in 1996 and became its CEO in 1997¹. At Macworld Boston on 6 August 1997, Jobs and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced a broad product and technology development agreement between Apple and Microsoft¹⁰. Under it, Microsoft agreed to invest $150 million in non-voting Apple stock, and Apple agreed to bundle Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser with the Mac OS as the default browser in future releases¹⁰.

The striking new iMac of 1998 revived the company's flagging fortunes¹. The technology developed at NeXT stood at the heart of Apple's renaissance³. The New York Times framed the whole second act as a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive John Sculley, ending with his return in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad⁷.

The product line runs from the garage-built Apple I — first sold as an order of 50 computers at $500 each — to the iPad announced in January 2010⁵¹¹. Between them stand the Apple II, Apple's first big seller from June 1977⁶; the Macintosh of 1984 at an original selling price of $2,495⁶; the iMac of 1998, which revived Apple's flagging fortunes¹; the iPod of October 2001, up to 1,000 songs for $399¹²; the iTunes Music Store of April 2003, songs at 99 cents each¹³; and the iPhone announced on 9 January 2007¹⁴. The table below keeps each product's introduction date and its documented details, every figure traceable to the record that carries it¹¹.

In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he subsequently took several medical leaves of absence¹. He underwent surgery in 2004 and received a liver transplant in 2009⁷. On 12 June 2005, while serving as CEO of both Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, he delivered a commencement address at Stanford University in which he told the graduates that death is very likely the single best invention of Life, and that time is limited³.

In his resignation letter of 24 August 2011, he wrote that he had always said that if there ever came a day when he could no longer meet his duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, he would be the first to let the board know¹⁵. That day, the letter said, had unfortunately come¹⁵. He asked to serve as chairman of the board, director and Apple employee if the board saw fit, and strongly recommended naming Tim Cook as CEO of Apple¹⁵.

Apple's Form 8-K records that on 24 August 2011 Jobs resigned as Chief Executive Officer but would continue to serve as an employee of Apple¹⁶. The board appointed him Chairman of the Board and promoted Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook to Chief Executive Officer¹⁶.

He died on 5 October 2011 in Palo Alto, California, at age 56, weeks after stepping down as chief executive of Apple¹⁷. A friend of the family said he died of complications from pancreatic cancer, with which he had waged a long and public struggle while remaining the face of the company even during treatment⁷. Apple's board of directors issued a statement that day saying it was deeply saddened to announce that he had passed away¹⁸.

The New York Times observed that he was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, and did not think of himself as a manager: he considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design⁷. The same account records that over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007⁷. In his early years his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating — but he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty⁷.

The aesthetic was deliberate from early on: the headline of Apple's first marketing brochure, in 1977, proclaimed that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication⁴. He said it takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions⁴. His partnerships with Hartmut Esslinger in the 1980s and Jony Ive starting in 1997 created an engineering and design aesthetic that set Apple apart from other technology companies and ultimately helped make it the most valuable company in the world⁴.

After 1997 the guiding tenet, in Isaacson's account, was simplicity — not the shallow simplicity of an uncluttered look and feel, but the deep simplicity that comes from knowing the essence of every product, the complexities of its engineering and the function of every component⁴. The division of labor went back to the beginning: they built the company with Jobs focusing on promotion and creating a distinct Apple identity, and Wozniak as the designer⁵.

The Stanford quotations come from the commencement address delivered on 12 June 2005, when he was CEO of both Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios³. The closing line comes from the letter of 24 August 2011 in which he resigned as Apple's CEO¹⁵. Both are primary documents: a published commencement text, and a letter preserved in Apple's public statements and its regulatory record¹⁶.

For Reuters he was the heart and soul of a company that rivals Exxon Mobil as the most valuable in America, and was counted among the greatest American CEOs of his generation¹⁹. The Associated Press credited him with inventing and master-marketing ever-sleeker gadgets that transformed everyday technology¹⁷. David Allison, a curator at the Smithsonian, called him one of the iconic innovators of our lifetime, whose success lay in mixing business savvy with design sensibility⁶.

By the time of his death he had become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion⁷. The death was announced by Apple, the company he and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak had started in 1976 in a suburban California garage⁷. Reuters called him the Silicon Valley icon who gave the world the iPod and the iPhone¹⁹.

On 24 January 2006 Disney announced that it had agreed to acquire Pixar, the computer animation house, in an all-stock transaction expected to close that summer²⁰. The terms issued 2.3 Disney shares for each Pixar share, putting the transaction value at $7.4 billion²⁰. Pixar chairman and CEO Steve Jobs was to be appointed to Disney's board of directors as a non-independent member²⁰.