Steve Jobs
The Man Who Thought Different
On January 9, 2007, a man in a black turtleneck and jeans walked onto a stage at Moscone Center in San Francisco and held up a small rectangle of glass and aluminum. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he said. The device was the iPhone. The man was Steve Jobs. Within a decade, that device would reshape commerce, communication, photography, journalism, politics, and the daily habits of more than a billion human beings. Jobs had already revolutionised personal computing, animated filmmaking, digital music, and retail design. He had been fired from the company he founded, built two more, and returned to save the first from bankruptcy. He was fifty-one years old, and he had fewer than five years to live.
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
1955–2011
Born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. Given up for adoption at birth and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs in Mountain View. Died on October 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, at the age of fifty-six, after an eight-year battle with pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.
$350B+
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was ninety days from bankruptcy. By the time of his death in October 2011, Apple’s market capitalisation exceeded $350 billion, making it the most valuable company in the world. He had turned a near-corpse into a colossus.
7 iconic
Macintosh (1984), iMac (1998), iPod (2001), iTunes Store (2003), iPhone (2007), App Store (2008), iPad (2010). Each one redefined or created an entire product category. No other executive in history has launched so many industry-transforming products.
15 before 2011
Jobs bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm in 1986 for $10 million and turned it into Pixar Animation Studios. By the time Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion, the studio had produced a string of masterpieces beginning with Toy Story — the first fully computer-animated feature film.
Co-founder of Apple, personal computer revolution, iPhone, Pixar, design-driven innovation
Defining Events
The Macintosh Launch
At Apple’s annual shareholders meeting in Cupertino, Jobs pulled the original Macintosh from a cloth bag and let it introduce itself — the computer said “Hello” in a synthesised voice, and the audience of two thousand erupted. Two days earlier, the 1984 Super Bowl commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, had announced the Mac to sixty million viewers as a hammer thrown through the screen of conformity. The Macintosh was the first mass-market personal computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse — the machine that made computing visual, intuitive, and personal. It sold below expectations at first, but the ideas it introduced became the foundation of every computer interface that followed.
The Return to Apple
Twelve years after being forced out of Apple by the board of directors and CEO John Sculley, Jobs stood before Apple employees as their interim CEO — a title he insisted on, refusing to drop the word “interim” for nearly three years. Apple was ninety days from insolvency. Within months, Jobs killed fifteen of the company’s twenty product lines, struck a stunning $150 million investment deal with rival Microsoft, and launched the Think Different advertising campaign — a love letter to the misfits, rebels, and troublemakers who change the world. The iMac followed in 1998. The resurrection had begun.
The iPhone Keynote
Jobs took the Macworld stage and announced that Apple was introducing three revolutionary products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. As the audience cheered each one, he repeated the list — then revealed they were all the same device. The iPhone combined a multi-touch screen, a full web browser, and an elegant operating system into a single slab of glass and metal. No stylus, no keyboard, no compromise. It went on sale in June at $499. Within six years, smartphones had become the most rapidly adopted technology in human history, and Apple had become the most valuable company on earth.
Timeline
Born and Adopted in San Francisco
Steven Paul Jobs is born on February 24, 1955, to Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian political science graduate student, and Joanne Schieble, an American speech therapist. The unmarried couple give him up for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California — a machinist and an accountant — adopt him and raise him in what would later become Silicon Valley. Paul teaches his son to work with his hands in the family garage, instilling a craftsman’s obsession with quality that will define his career.
Apple Founded in a Garage
On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple Computer Company in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, California. Wozniak has built the Apple I — a single-board computer that hobbyists can assemble themselves. Jobs, twenty-one years old, handles the business side. He sells his Volkswagen van to raise capital; Wozniak sells his HP calculator. Their first order — fifty units for the Byte Shop in Mountain View — brings in enough money to build more. The Apple II, released the following year, becomes one of the first mass-produced personal computers and makes both founders millionaires before they turn thirty.
The Macintosh
Jobs unveils the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, after years of obsessive development that drove his engineering team to exhaustion and brilliance in roughly equal measure. The Mac introduces the graphical user interface and the mouse to mainstream consumers — ideas borrowed from Xerox PARC but refined into something genuinely usable. The launch is a cultural event, preceded by the iconic Ridley Scott Super Bowl commercial. Sales disappoint after an initial burst, and internal battles with CEO John Sculley intensify. Within eighteen months, Jobs will be gone.
Fired from Apple
After a boardroom power struggle with CEO John Sculley — the man Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi with the famous line “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” — Jobs is stripped of all operational duties in May 1985. He resigns in September. He later calls the firing the best thing that ever happened to him, because it freed him from the weight of success and forced him to begin again as a beginner.
NeXT and Pixar
Jobs founds NeXT Computer, aiming to build the perfect workstation for higher education and business. The machines are elegant but too expensive to sell in volume. Meanwhile, he buys the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million and renames it Pixar. Both ventures bleed money for years. NeXT’s operating system, however, will prove to be a masterpiece of software engineering — and Pixar’s animators, led by John Lasseter, are quietly building the technology and storytelling talent that will produce Toy Story.
The Return to Apple
Apple acquires NeXT for $427 million in December 1996, bringing Jobs back as an advisor. By July 1997, he has manoeuvred himself into the role of interim CEO. The company is weeks from running out of cash. Jobs slashes product lines, secures a $150 million investment from Microsoft, and begins the cultural reinvention of Apple with the Think Different campaign. The translucent, candy-coloured iMac arrives in August 1998 and sells 800,000 units in its first five months. Apple is alive again.
The iPhone Changes Everything
On January 9, Jobs unveils the iPhone at Macworld San Francisco. The device combines a phone, a widescreen iPod, and a pocket internet communicator into a single multi-touch screen with no physical keyboard. Critics call it overpriced. Competitors dismiss it. Within six years, smartphones will account for more than half of all mobile phones sold worldwide, and the App Store — launched in 2008 — will create an entirely new software economy. The iPhone becomes the most profitable product in the history of consumer electronics.
Death and Legacy
Jobs resigns as Apple CEO on August 24, 2011, naming Tim Cook as his successor. He has been battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer since 2003, undergoing surgery in 2004 and a liver transplant in 2009. He dies at home in Palo Alto on October 5, surrounded by family. He is fifty-six. Apple’s website displays a single black-and-white photograph and the words “Steve Jobs, 1955–2011.” Flags fly at half-staff at Apple’s campus, and makeshift memorials appear at Apple Stores around the world.
Key Figures
Steve Wozniak
The self-taught electronics wizard who built the Apple I and Apple II virtually single-handed — the machines that launched the personal computer revolution. Where Jobs was vision, taste, and salesmanship, Wozniak was pure engineering brilliance: he designed hardware so elegant that other engineers studied his circuit boards like works of art. The two met as teenagers in 1971, introduced by a mutual friend, and bonded over a shared love of electronics and pranks. Wozniak left Apple’s day-to-day operations after a plane crash in 1981 but remained a lifelong employee and friend. Their partnership was the founding spark of Silicon Valley’s defining company.
Bill Gates
The co-founder of Microsoft and Jobs’s greatest rival in the technology industry. Their relationship was one of the defining dualities of the digital age: Gates the pragmatist who licensed software to every manufacturer and won the operating system war; Jobs the perfectionist who insisted on controlling hardware and software together and nearly went bankrupt for it. They sparred publicly for decades — Jobs accused Gates of stealing the Macintosh interface for Windows; Gates retorted that they had both borrowed from Xerox. Yet there was genuine mutual respect beneath the rivalry. In 1997, it was Gates who extended the $150 million lifeline that helped save Apple from collapse.
The Legacy of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs did not invent the personal computer, the smartphone, the tablet, the digital music player, or the animated feature film. What he did was something arguably harder: he made each of those things so intuitive, so beautifully designed, and so deeply integrated into daily life that hundreds of millions of people who had never cared about technology suddenly could not live without it. He understood that technology alone is not enough — that it must be married to liberal arts and humanities to produce results that make the human heart sing.
He was difficult, demanding, and often cruel to the people closest to him. He denied paternity of his first daughter for years. He drove engineers to tears and fired employees in elevator rides. But the products that emerged from that relentless, sometimes brutal insistence on perfection — the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad — reshaped the modern world. He died at fifty-six, far too young, with his greatest conviction intact: that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Read his story in his own words in the first-person ePub.
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